Ask yourself each of these questions counting yes and no’s.  The more time you answered yes, the more likely your site is showing its age.

• Has the main message of my business evolved?
• Has my content strategy changed? (I’m now doing more publishing, events, promotions, etc.)
• Has my industry evolved? Are people in my business talking about things differently these days?
• Am I in a design- or technology-related industry? Times change faster for these businesses
• Is my site keeping up with design trends? Modern sites tend to be streamlined into a single column layout. They present less information at each scroll depth, with larger images that often fill the screen. The trend is toward more video and more prominent calls to action.
• Does my site look great on phones and tablets? If your last redesign was 6 years ago, it’s possible that most of your visitors are using completely different devices today
• Is my site hard to update? Content management systems have improved. We should have higher expectations for easy updates. These days, it should be fast, free and easy to make most changes to the content on our websites.
• Have my rankings and search traffic declined? Unless you are actively promoting your website, rankings tend to decline over time. A redesign can reverse the trend of declining search traffic through a new keyphrase-focused sitemap, with new pages targeting new phrases.
• Is my conversion rate declining? Visitors’ expectations keep increasing, so unless your website keeps improving, conversion rates tend to decline. A redesign can reverse the aging process through a new, conversion optimized design that exceeds visitors expectations.
• Have my competitors recently redesigned? This is the big question: What are your competitors doing? Let’s take a look…

Age is relative …to your competitors

Try this: pretend you are a potential lead or customer. Search for your product or services. 

Seriously, go take a look! What did you see?

• Who is ranking?
• Are their sites newer than yours?

Your potential customers see those rankings and those websites many times every day. While you are reading this, at this very moment, someone is looking at those search results and those websites.  Old and new in that context. It’s all relative.