A new B2B website design and rebuild project is a huge undertaking. Oftentimes, years go by between complete rebuilds due to various reasons: people come and go, timing is an issue, the cost/benefit analysis isn’t clear, the rebrand isn’t complete, or you can’t get executive buy-in.
For enterprise software companies, lots of preparation needs to happen for the project to be a success. That’s usually the fear. How do you keep moving the project forward when there are 10 stakeholders with different ideas of how the website should look and function?
So how do you know when it’s time to pull the trigger? In no particular order, here are 6 signals it is time to rebuild your marketing website. Some signals carry more weight than others.
1. Your costs are exuberant every time you add to the website.
This is often a sign of a poorly built website. It’s worth it to weigh the price of a complete B2B website redesign compared to the costs you’ll incur continuing to execute your roadmap on the existing website.
2. The website has been added onto over the years by employees that no longer work for the company.
The problem with this? Marketing teams have a roadmap of initiatives that include new website updates. This creates a huge list of pages, links, and forms that aren’t accounted for or tracked. The more hands that touch a website, the more bloated it gets.
3. Several different agencies have come in and added to the website.
Each agency has their own approach to website development and without a way to audit the quality, the codebase turns into a leaning tower ready to break anytime.
4. You have a rebrand project in the works.
When completing a B2B website redesign, it’s important that all branded company assets are in alignment with one another. Website users get confused about a brand when all design elements are not consistent. A visually cohesive story should be told throughout the website.
5. The initial website wasn’t built with scalability in mind.
Custom websites with flexible components are industry standard. If you’re using a pre-built theme, the HubSpot CMS, or a page builder, you’ll loose the ability for the website to grow over time without maintaining consistency in the codebase. A flexible component system is designed and developed during a website rebuild. You’ll have the ability to define components you’ll need now and in the future so that building pages is an easy process down the road. Flexible components are designed and developed once with the advantage being design consistency and clean code as the website scales.
6. Your website is contributing less than 30% towards pipeline numbers.
It’s marketing’s job to generate demand for the brand so that people want to buy the software product. What prevents this from happening is focusing our marketing success on sales. The content in your B2B website redesign should be educational. Websites that contribute 30%+ to the pipeline are ones that take user flows seriously with a focus on expert content.
Ignoring the need for a B2B website redesign and continuing to grow the leaning tower will ultimately hurt marketing efforts over time. Choosing the right agency for design and development that will strive to maintain site health long term can make the process significantly easier.
