9 signs you need to redesign your store

The world of online shopping is competitive. It is difficult to stand out in the crowd and keep up with competitors if your store doesn’t look and function well.

Redesigning your store can give it a new lease on life and increase your revenue. A redesign could entail anything from basic cosmetic changes to more serious structural changes, or even a complete overhaul of the site. You’ll need to plan it properly, form a budget, create a checklist of what the site needs, and develop a timeline for the redesign process.

But before you get wrapped up in a redesign, how do you determine if that is what your store actually needs? If you answer ‘yes’ to any of the questions below, then it might be time to give your store some extra attention.

1. Does your store have high bounce and low conversion rates?

High traffic on your store doesn’t mean anything if those visitors don’t make purchases. Evaluate your conversion rate, the number of abandoned carts your store experiences, and your average order value. Redesigning your store can help if you are experiencing a drop in sales, a high bounce rate or low conversion rates.

These problems could be caused by poor navigation on your site, customers lacking trust in your store, problems with your payment process, or poor mobile optimization.

Several tools, such as Google and Shopify analytics, heat maps, and A/B tests, can be used to identify where the problems lie on your site.

2. Is your store difficult to navigate?

How your customers experience your site is directly linked to how likely they are to purchase something and to return to your store.

Is your store easy and intuitive to navigate? Are your products organized in a straightforward way? Does your store look modern and uncluttered? Do you have a search bar with automatically generated questions? If you answered ‘no’ to these, a redesign of your store may be on the cards.

Analyze where on your site your customers are dropping off and what issues they are experiencing. Carefully consider the users’ experience of your store when planning your new site’s structure, flow and messaging.

3. Do your pages load slowly?

We live in a fast-paced society and the longer a site takes to load, the less likely a customer is going to hang around to see what’s on offer. In fact, Google recommends that ecommerce stores take no longer than two seconds to fully load on both desktop and mobile devices.

As much as 40% of shoppers will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. That is a lot of potential customers lost. A whopping 79% of shoppers won’t buy on your site again if they experienced a poor performance from it. Load speeds also affect SEO and stores with poor load speeds will rank poorly on Google.

If your store loads slowly, it may be afflicted by poor coding, unoptimized image sizes, too many plugins or banners, and no browser caching. These issues can be fixed during a redesign.

4. Does your store look bad and function poorly on mobile devices?

Nearly 50% of e-commerce sales in the US in 2020 were made on mobile devices. The number of people shopping on mobile devices is likely to increase and if you want your business to survive and thrive it’s vital you cater for these shoppers.

Does your store have a responsive design that displays properly on mobile devices? Is it easy to navigate your store on these devices? Is your branding and functionality consistent across all devices? If not, then you will need to update your store to remedy this.

5. Are there security issues with your store’s payment portal?

There are several things that influence how a user experiences the payment process of your store.

Shoppers are understandably concerned about protecting their payment and personal information. If your store is glitchy or slow, especially when trying to pay, they might not return.

Is it difficult for your customers to make a payment and are there enough payment options? If your store doesn’t offer the payment method they prefer, they may choose to shop elsewhere.

If you do a store redesign, be sure to prioritize security. Include various payment options such as debit and credit cards, internet banking, PayPal, and cash on delivery.

Consider offering financing options if you sell expensive items so that shoppers can buy something immediately and pay it off over time. If many of your customers come from other countries, include payment options from those countries.

6. Is your SEO ranking bad?

Google is most people’s go-to when searching for products and services. You are probably losing out on potential customers if your store doesn’t rank in the first page of search results.

Old stores often have many keywords crammed on key pages because this is how sites were optimized for SEO in the past. This practice is now penalized by Google.

During a store redesign, you can optimize your store for certain keywords and products to rank high in online searches.

7. Are your apps well-built and up to date?

Unnecessary or out of date apps and plugins can slow down your store’s loading speed and cause other problems.

Developers of apps and plugins update their features, speed, and security regularly. It may become difficult to update your apps if you haven’t done so in a long time. Very large updates can break old features, cause data to be lost, and impair the way your store functions.

An audit of your apps will reveal which ones are outdated and which are still essential for your store. If you find you have many apps and plugins that are out of date or unnecessary, then it’s probably worth considering a complete overhaul of your store. During the redesign of your store, you can replace these apps with better, more modern ones and ensure that you only include features that you actually need.

8. Do you have space for modern features?

Does your website contain modern features that shoppers expect from a store? If not, is there room on your site to add these?

Shoppers have come to expect certain features such as product reviews, brand or loyalty programs, and integrated social media content. However, you don’t want your store to look cluttered when you add these and you also don’t want to slap a few modern features onto an old-looking store.

A redesign of your store’s layout could solve this problem for you and make room for modern features.

9. Does your site use low quality images and outdated branding?

Your website has 50 milliseconds (0,05 seconds) to make a good first impression on a user. They may leave and never return if they don’t like the look of your store.

Are you using high quality photos, videos, and graphics on your site? The way your site looks affects the way that a shopper feels about a brand. Do they trust it or does your site make them feel uncertain about whether they want to continue shopping there? Are adverts, like banners, and any other information displayed on the site, outdated? If so, the credibility of your website will be negatively impacted.

Also consider whether your website includes any changes in your branding such as a new logo or color schemes. Or perhaps your target audience shifted as your business changed from a start-up to an established entity. Does your website appeal to your new audience or does it still cater to your former target market?

Evaluate your website to see if there’s a cohesive feel between it and other business materials, such as newsletters or the branding contained in customer service emails. You don’t want your customers to have a disjointed experience when shopping with you. Your brand must have a strong identity across all platforms, that customers trust and can relate to.

Options for redesigning your store

The type of redesign your store needs could range from changing basic details like colors, banners and menus to something a lot more advanced. Whether you want to change to a different theme, integrate new features, or completely redesign your store from the ground up, it’s worth asking expert Shopify developers to work with you. The outcome will hopefully be a robust and unique site that is easy to manage, looks wonderful, functions fantastically, and ultimately boosts your sales!

ShopCreatify client, Foldabox, was very pleased with the redesign of its store. The business opted for a redesign to make information more easily available for customers, free the team up to do other work, and make the site more intuitive. It included moving over to a new theme, making important product details more prominent, and making the design cleaner and more visually appealing. Read about the Foldabox store redesign here.

If you want to discuss how to redesign your store, please contact us.