How to Tell If Your Business Website Needs a Redesign

In the age of AI, gauging the effectiveness of customer touchpoints is trickier than it has ever been in the history of digital marketing. Nearly 252,000 new websites go live every single day. That breaks down to roughly 10,500 sites launching every hour. This means you are competing against companies armed with AI tools that probably play out the same strategies, if not better ones.

What you need to do is update your website design playbook. With nearly 60% of searches ending up as zero-click searches now, it’s only natural to question if traditional websites even make sense anymore. Let’s look at this from another angle. Despite the towering rise of AI search, traditional search engines still dominate the market.

Google processes over 5 trillion search queries each year. That works out to about 9.5 million searches happening every minute. Moreover, 80% of boomers still rely on traditional search engines for queries.

So if your website doesn’t meet current standards, you are simply positioning yourself as a business that doesn’t care about how it appears, leading to a terrible first impression.

Now, the million-dollar question is how to tell if your website is just doing fine or needs a revamp from top to bottom. Here are the red flags to watch out for:

Outdated Visual Identity

If your website still looks like it was designed a decade ago, visitors will assume your business is outdated, too. Typography, colors, and layouts that no longer reflect modern design standards create an immediate trust gap. Like it or not, people make snap judgments online.

A recent poll revealed that 66% of people avoid businesses with ugly websites. Two-thirds of surveyed Americans have never purchased goods or services from a business with an outdated or poorly designed website.

Visual identity matters more than most business owners want to admit. A fresh design signals that you are current, active, and invested in how you present yourself. An outdated one suggests the opposite.

Look at your homepage critically. Does the font feel stuck in 2010? Are the colors clashing or overly muted? Does the layout feel cluttered or awkward? These details compound quickly. They form an impression before anyone reads a single word of your copy.

Here are some quick fixes to consider:

• Update your typography: Switch to modern, web-safe fonts that improve readability across devices.
• Refresh your color palette: Align colors with current design trends while maintaining brand consistency.
• Simplify your layout: Remove clutter and create more white space for better visual breathing room.
• Upgrade imagery: Replace stock photos from 2015 with high-quality, authentic visuals.
• Modernize buttons and CTAs: Update shapes, sizes, and colors to match contemporary design patterns.

Sometimes these adjustments alone make the difference. But if the foundation feels wrong, a deeper redesign becomes necessary.

Poor Mobile Performance

Many website designers share a common hubris. They design primarily for desktop, completely forgetting that mobile accounts for approximately half of web traffic worldwide. In the last quarter of 2024, mobile devices accounted for 62.54% of global website traffic. That’s more than six out of ten visitors accessing sites through their phones.

If you are redesigning your website all by yourself due to a lack of resources and wondering how to manage everything, relax. No-code, AI-powered website builders exist now.

According to Hocoos, all you need is 5 minutes of your time to get a fully functional website up and running. These tools have all the essentials built right into them: website builder, SEO analysis tools, keyword researcher, content writer, and editor. Just follow the intuitive prompts and apply a little common sense to the recommendations they offer.

AI-powered redesigned websites load quickly across all devices, including mobile and tablets. When they do, visitors stay longer and explore more pages. When they don’t, bounce rates can spike within seconds.

Test your current site on multiple devices. If images appear distorted, text becomes unreadable, or buttons refuse to respond properly on smaller screens, you have a problem that needs immediate attention.

See also: 5 Fonts Every Designer Should Know About

Poor Conversion Performance

A site can look attractive and still fail to deliver results. If analytics show visitors arrive but leave without subscribing, buying, or contacting you, the design isn’t working as intended.

This usually points to broken funnels, cluttered CTAs, or outdated UX patterns. Rebranding forces you to rethink user flow with clarity, minimal friction, and modern conversion strategies.

• Start by examining where people drop off. Heat maps and session recordings can reveal exactly where users lose interest or get confused. Your contact form might ask for too much information up front.
• Your pricing page could be burying the most important details three scrolls down. Visitors might struggle to find the checkout button because it blends into the background. These problems accumulate silently until conversion rates stagnate.
• Pay close attention to your call-to-action buttons. They need to be prominent and use action-oriented language. When you present five different CTAs on a single page, decision paralysis sets in. Visitors need clear direction, not competing options. They end up choosing none when overwhelmed.
• Navigation is another critical element. Users who can’t figure out how to move through your site within seconds won’t stick around to learn. Simplify menu structures and reduce the number of clicks needed to reach key pages. Every page should have a logical next step.

A redesign gives you the opportunity to strip away complexity and build pathways that guide people toward conversion instead of confusing them along the way.

Low Search Visibility

Ranking poorly on Google means customers are discovering competitors instead of you. The numbers tell a harsh story: 96.55% of all pages get zero traffic from Google, and only 1.94% receive between one and ten monthly visits.

There can be multiple reasons why this happens, including the ones we already mentioned. The introduction of Google AI Overviews and the rise of AI-powered searches are also adding fuel to the wildfire.

If you are not optimizing your content for generative search engines, you risk becoming invisible to an entire generation of searchers.

You must have come across terms like Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) replacing traditional SEO tactics. This shift is a step in the right direction because generative search is indeed the future of how people find information online.

Here are a few ways to improve your search visibility:

• Structure content for featured snippets: Answer questions directly in the first 50 words of relevant sections.
• Optimize for conversational queries: People ask AI search engines questions differently than they type into Google.
• Use schema markup: Help search engines understand your content context and display it more effectively.
• Focus on E-E-A-T signals: Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness matter more now than ever.
• Build topical authority: Cover subjects comprehensively instead of creating isolated blog posts.
• Improve page speed and core web vitals: Technical performance affects how both traditional and AI search engines rank you.

A rebrand that includes technical SEO improvements positions you better for whatever search evolution comes next.

Don’t Let Your Website Work Against You

Your website is more than a digital placeholder. It’s working for you or against you every single day. If any of these red flags sound familiar, don’t wait for traffic to drop further or competitors to pull ahead. A thoughtful rebrand might be exactly what your business needs to reconnect with the people you’re trying to reach.