We have put together a short list, to check if your website is working for your business. 

Let's frame why we think it is vital for you to investigate or assess if your website works for you or has become a white elephant or a liability to your business. We believe that you invested in a website for a reason, that reason may have been you wanted an online presence because everyone said you need one. Maybe the reason was that you wanted to attract more clients. If you have an e-commerce store you wanted to trade online and sell to a wider audience.

Whatever your reason, it has become increasingly clear that most businesses do not get the best out of their websites. Here we list 5-signs that indicate your website is not working.

  1.You have not had an enquiry or sale from it in the last 30 to 90 days.

For those who invested a lot of money in getting their website developed this is a bigger problem than the ones who went for the cheaper alternative of building it themselves. Or getting a cheaper price on development. Why? Because you haven't seen any significant return on investment. With a website that works, you should be receiving at least 1- enquiry per week as a bare minimum. If you have an e-commerce website your sales should be at least 2-sales per week. In both these instances, it means your website is working albeit not good enough. But it means that you can work on it to get more traffic engagement and conversions.

  2. You do not know how many visitors you had to your website in the last 30-90 days (even yesterday)

This sign is an indicator of how well your website is performing in terms of its ranking. Including the efforts that you are placing on directing traffic from your other channels to your website, like Facebook. This brings us to sign 2.1, you don't know where your traffic is coming from. This is important because it allows you to optimize for those sources of traffic. For instance, if most of your website traffic is coming from Instagram, it means that you can increase your activity to steer more traffic to your website and you might be able to adapt it for other channels to do the same. Your website service provider should be able to give you a report on this.

 3. You don't have a lead magnet that captures leads on your website

Whatever the intention you had for your website, as a business we are sure that you intended for it to help your business grow. Whether it may be in terms of awareness, reputation or sales. At this stage your lead magnet is a tool to help you deliver value upfront, it allows your potential customers to see the value that your business can deliver. And in turn, you get potential clients details to build and nurture a relationship. So, your lead magnet allows you to create awareness of your services, by delivering value upfront builds your reputation and when you use the information you get from it to build and nurture relationships, it will ultimately improve your sales.

 4. Making changes is time-consuming or costly

If you cannot adapt your website to changes in your business environment simply and cost-effectively, your website is not working. If all of sudden you have to change the pricing, colour scheme or any wording to reflect changes in your business and this takes time or money, you need to get another website. Change is the only constant in life, your business needs to be able to change as well. If you offered your product or service at a discount for a limited time to increase sales and cash flow, can your website reflect that? Are you able to create landing pages for special occasions/moments or promotions? If the answer is no, your website is not working.

 5. Your website is on page 2 or higher of Googles search results

If you cannot be discovered online by someone who is looking for the service or product that you are selling. What is the point of having a website? Most buyers will search for a particular product or service online for research purposes before making a buying decision. And will only look at the first page of results before refining their search criteria to match their intent. So if your website does not appear on the first page, it is unlikely you will get visitors from organic search. Rendering your website useless to any of your business objectives

Several other factors determine if you are getting the best out of your website. We will leave you to ponder these 5-signs listed. Work on getting these in line with your business objectives, sure to get more business online.