When is the last time you visited or made a purchase from a new business without doing some online research first?

Odds are, at the very least you did a quick Google search and visited their website to make sure they were legit.

When a potential customer visits your website, you have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression. That means in less than the time it takes to snap your fingers, your website needs to be able to convince someone to take action, or at least stick around to learn more about you and your business.

Having a user-friendly, responsive, and visually attractive website is a critical part of making a great first impression on your potential customers. When done correctly, your website can start and finish a sale before you even come into contact with the customer.

A lot of business owners know that having a great website is important, but aren’t sure when to make the leap into a complete website redesign. Assuming your website isn’t breaking every other week, it can be hard to evaluate whether your website is just a little outdated or if it’s truly costing you valuable business.

While a full website redesign can take a lot of hard work and cold hard cash, it can also make or break your business. The good news is that if your website has serious issues that warrant completely redesigning it, the new website should quickly earn a substantial ROI just by getting back the business you didn’t even know you were losing.

Here are 8 signs that it’s time to invest in a new website design for your business:

1. Visually unappealing or outdated

This is by far the most common reason businesses redesign their websites. It doesn’t take web design experience or Google Analytics to tell you that your website hasn’t been updated since Flash was a thing. If you notice it, odds are your customers are noticing it, too. Where the untrained eye sees an outdated website, a trained website developer will usually find a whole host of other issues that are costing you sales. Clunky, outdated websites often have high bounce rates, are difficult to navigate, and aren’t responsive. An old school or just plain ugly website is usually a sign that you need to take a further look at whether or not your website is still effective for your business.

2. Not Responsive Across Devices

The days of having a desktop only website are long gone. In 2017, over 50% of all web traffic was from mobile devices. That’s a 400% increase from just five years ago! Your website absolutely has to be optimized for mobile devices. It needs to offer a seamless, responsive experience across all devices in order to make sure you’re not losing valuable business from mobile users.

3. Search Rankings are Low

Have you checked your search engine results lately? Google algorithms are constantly changing, and your website content needs to be optimized in order for your customers to find you. According to the Brightedge 2017 SEO Report, 51% of website traffic starts with a search engine. Over 91% of that traffic is generated by listings on the first page of Google. Long story short: if your website isn’t on the first page of Google, it’s time for a redesign.

4. Difficult to Navigate

What are your customers doing after they land on your homepage? Your website needs to have a detailed user journey map that takes your website visitors from prospect, to lead, to customer, to raving fan. Effective website user experience design is the key to converting traffic into paying customers. If your website is difficult to navigate and doesn’t funnel traffic where you want it, then your business is essentially flushing money down the toilet.

5. No Longer an Accurate Representation of Your Business

If you’ve recently gone through the rebranding process or your business has substantially changed, then your website needs to be redesigned. Your business’s online presence needs to be an accurate representation of the one-of-a-kind experience that you offer your customers.

Similarly, if your customer base has changed, then your website needs to change along with it. Developing buyer personas is a big part of the website design process, so a change in your target market can quickly result in an outdated website. You always want to make sure that your website content is speaking directly to your ideal customer.

6. Slow Load Times

Have you tested your site speed lately? If not, head over to Pingdom and enter your site’s URL. What was the page load time.

40% of internet users will abandon a website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. Additionally, a 1 second delay in page load time can cost you up to a 7% decrease in conversions. For reference, if you have an eCommerce site making $10,000 per day, that’s $255,500 in sales that you could be losing out on every year!

There are a lot of different factors that contribute to a slow (or fast) page load speed, and they should all be taken into consideration when developing your website.

7. Not In Line with Marketing Goals

If you’ve gone a new direction with your marketing strategy or set new goals for your business lately, your website needs to reflect that. While simple changes to your strategy can mean website edits as small as a change in copy or new landing page, completely new marketing directions or goals call for a complete redesign. Your website is a huge part of your overall marketing strategy and sales process, so it needs to accurately reflect the vision and goals of your business.

8. Content Management System is Non-Existent

Repeat after me: content is king. Specifically, content marketing. If your business hasn’t started posting regular, valuable content on your website and social media profiles, now yesterday is the time to start. However, this means that your website needs to have a user-friendly content management system, like WordPress, that allows you to update and post new content to your website on a regular basis.

Additionally, you should be able to change basic website copy when needed. Does your copy say “in business for over 10 years” when you were founded in 1990? If you don’t have a content management system in place, that change is a lot more complicated than just signing in and changing a number.

Moral of the story: if you need to call your big fancy web developer to create a blog post or change a few words in your website copy, it’s time to redesign your website. This will save you loads of time and money in the long run.

Take a good hard look at your business’s website and evaluate how many of the signs you see. Does your website design need a complete overhaul?