An effective website is essential to your marketing team and directly affects the team's performance. You need a website that functions correctly and provides an overall positive user experience if you're going to provide content and communicate effectively with your target market. We know how frustrating it can be to invest significant time and money into your website and still experience issues and complications. Your website should feel like a tool, not an obstacle that prevents you from achieving your goals. We’re here to help you understand the main website issues you might face, where they come from, and how to fix them. Ultimately, we’re here to tell you how a digital agency can make a difference for your website and help you overcome these common issues.
When Your Website is Not Working the Way It Should
Website issues are inevitable. But before you jump into fixing or preventing the issues, you have to understand where these issues might be coming from. So, here are the three most common challenges you might encounter.
Your platform/website is not scalable
How often do you feel like your website does not support the new needs of your company? It’s all about ensuring you have a platform that can grow with your company without compromising the performance and functionality of your site, also known as a scalable site. Your website traffic and needs will increase with your company's growth. You’ll likely encounter issues such as error pages due to too many requests, slower loading times, or lack of functionality in general on your website. This means your visitors won’t be able to get what they need out of your website. If your platform or website is not scalable, you’ll feel stuck and unable to evolve and effectively manage your site’s traffic.
Making changes on your website/platform is time-consuming
We see this all the time; admin tasks and website maintenance are sucking up your valuable time. You don’t want to get stuck in a situation where you’re spending too much time and money on fixes that maintain the status quo of your website. When it comes to maintenance, it’s important to remember to focus on evolution, not costly temporary solutions! Evolving your website doesn’t have to be a large, expensive project either. We’ve previously discussed how to evolve your website for less by focusing on prolonging the lifetime of your website and concentrating on ROI.
You are too dependent on your IT department or your agency
In this case, the issue is that your website is so complicated that you need to rely on your IT department or your agency to fix any problems, even the small ones. This can become an issue when things can’t get done in the timeline you expect because your IT team or agency is stuck with a backlog of requests from you. If your website is developed well from the start or has a strong but straightforward infrastructure and CMS, it should be easy for your marketing team to make these changes and do these tasks without having to wait and rely on other teams.
Why Does a Website/Platform Fail to Perform Well? What is the Solution?
1. Your website/platform is outdated
So, let’s consider if you have a website that was initially built ten years ago. Considering how much technology has advanced in the last ten years, having a website this old can quickly become a problem. It will only end up holding your business back, not helping you move forward.
The solution: Redesign or Re-platform
The best solution, in this case, is to redesign or re-platform. Unfortunately, this isn’t an issue that temporary upgrades can easily solve. Redesigning can help bring your website out of those outdated “ancient” times and up to speed with your competitors' newer websites. Re-platforming is necessary when your current platform can’t keep up with your expectations, and it starts to impact your site’s overall performance or user experience.
2. Your website was poorly built
If you’re constantly running into issues, there’s a chance that your website may have been poorly built at the start. You can’t expect to build a great house without a solid foundation. If your website was built in a hurry, the developers might have missed some of those smaller but important details, and you’ll no doubt run into issues when you try to make changes on your site. How it was created, the technology used, and how it has been maintained can make or break your site.
The solution: Audit & analyze before fixing
If your site has a weak foundation, there are many technical methods you can use to fix the main issues. But, before trying to fix the problems, you want to ensure that you’re not making the same mistakes that were made when you first built your website. This is where an audit and analysis of your existing website can save the day. This will help you identify the biggest issues so you can approach fixing them more efficiently. A website audit is essential for figuring out what to do with your website, especially when determining whether you need a redesign.
3. You don’t have a long-term roadmap
When your website starts encountering a lot of issues, it can be tempting to jump in and fix it with the simplest temporary fix. You might be fixing the problem for now, but constantly patching isn’t a good long-term solution. It hides the issue and costs you more time and money to patch issues constantly, hurting your business in the long run.
The solution: Be strategic
If your first instinct is to fix everything with temporary solutions. You need to pause, rewind, and look at the big picture. It’s essential to be strategic in resolving these issues and have a roadmap for your website and its maintenance. Being strategic can save you and your business time, energy, and money.
4. You are incurring a technical debt by not regularly updating
You likely have accumulated technical debt if you’re not regularly updating and maintaining your website. Whenever you have a problem with your website, it loses security and doesn’t run how it should, ultimately leading to more problems in the end. Not keeping up with your website maintenance creates a snowball effect where one issue leads to another, leading to three more problems you have to fix. Luckily, we’ve created a guide to help you understand why you need to update your Drupal website regularly.
The solution: Prioritize the updates based on ROI
Accumulating technical debt can take a lot of work to get under control. If your website hasn’t been cared for throughout the years, you’re facing many things you need to fix all at once. When prioritizing these issues, focus on what problems directly impact your business and are valuable upgrades to your website that deliver the highest ROI. If your website is performing differently than you expected but still doesn’t need a complete redesign, understanding the four ways to refresh your website will help you improve it without taking on a full redesign project.
How Can a Digital Agency Help You Overcome These Challenges?
Evaluate the platform before offering solutions
A good digital agency will be strategic and analytical when finding solutions for your website or platform. At Symetris, we take a step back to see the whole picture. We'll audit your website, take over your platform’s maintenance, focus on the best ROI, and offer the best solutions for your business, not just for today but also for the future.
Get to know each other first!
For an agency to fully dive into helping you deliver value to your business, they need to be able to collaborate. And to do that effectively, you need to get to know each other. The agency needs to know your visions, objectives, and overall business. You need to determine if the agency is the right agency that fits your culture. Observe how they work, communicate, assess their expertise, and decide whether they have the right skills.
Symetris lets our clients validate that the relationship is good and ensure they’re comfortable before they jump into this, invest financially, and start doing the big projects. This lets us get to know each other without pushing anything on our clients or trying to convince them. Our work speaks for itself!
Thinkers and THEN doers
A good digital agency will analyze and evaluate before making any decisions. It’s not about just jumping in and getting it done ASAP. The best way to overcome your challenges is to think before you do. Symetris works to help you leverage what you already have by performing an audit on the current state of your platform and making recommendations to bridge that gap.
The most important thing to take away from this article is to take action. Find a solution if your website doesn’t feel like a useful tool and instead feels like an obstacle! Take the time to assess your website. Perform an audit and analysis, identify the issues, and create a strategic plan of action to improve your website. Putting in the effort will benefit your visitors' by enhancing their experience and, in turn, your results.
We at Symetris want to work with you to create the best website experience for you and your users. Your website and platform shouldn’t be a source of major headaches and stress; it doesn’t have to be that way! We can help you work towards viewing your website as a tool for success rather than an obstacle to get over. Ready to work with us? Let’s chat.
