With a living room full of boxes after our recent move across the country, moving house is still on my mind.

The long drives back and forth between the east Midlands and the north-west coast. The heavy boxes that remind me how out of shape I am. The traffic and roadworks along the motorways, slowing everything down to a snail’s pace.

All of this to be met with walls whiter than my basement tan, rooms devoid of furniture, and a list of problems, all of which need fixing as soon as possible.

Moving house is never an easy task, but you know it’s a necessity. My spouse and I outgrew our old house not too long after we moved into it. It was only ever meant to be a temporary home until we gathered the funds, and then found the perfect place… a temporary place that ended up lasting three years. 

But what does moving home have to do with websites? And why does your business need to start looking at whether it’s time to start packing boxes, and talking to a digital estate agent?

Does your website have good access to local amenities?

When you think about the perfect house, you may think about access to amenities, whether that’s the local shops, if there are fun things to do close by, or if there’s a school that your children will be able to walk to one day. 

For your website, these things would be an easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS), fast load times, or the ability to integrate with other systems you use, such as HubSpot or Salesforce.

Much like how you’ll end up popping to the shops regularly, in an ideal world, you (or whoever manages the content on your website) will be popping into the admin panel of your website regularly. Whether it’s to add new content or edit existing pages, you want this experience to be as smooth as possible, as the easier your CMS is to handle, and the faster the website loads, the quicker the content can be added or amended.

Is traffic in your area becoming a problem?

Do you currently live, or have you ever had the misfortune of living, just off of a main road? That’s where we lived before, and turning right onto that road was always a hassle; just as cars stop coming from one direction, 10 more appear from the other. It almost always seemed easier to turn left and turn around at the next roundabout, rather than wait for what felt like hours just to be able to turn right every time we left the house. 

This is how your users feel about your website loading. They click a link on your website and it loads. And it loads some more. It’s still loading. By now, a second may have passed, but that second will have felt like an hour. 

If your website is still loading at this point, and nothing has been shown to a user yet, you better hope you have managed to lure in the most patient person on earth. Otherwise, they’ll be hitting that back button and searching for a different business instead. 

Your entire page doesn’t need to have loaded, but the user wants to be able to interact with the site in less than a second.  You had best hope that the entire page is visible in three seconds, otherwise you could be losing a third of your potential clients.

Does your website have any major structural damage?

While looking for our perfect house, finding something that wouldn’t need any major renovations wasn’t always the easiest thing. Whether it was wood in the walls that was massively rotten, garages that looked like English Heritage was protecting them, or interiors that looked like they came straight out of a newspaper article from the early 40s and showing the damage from the previous night’s air raid.

It’s no wonder these properties were on the market for the price they were, as the owners wanted to escape the issues of the one they were selling (or escape the project that was too big to complete in some cases). 

But sometimes, moving away because the problem isn’t a quick fix isn’t necessary, and the same is true for your website. Your homepage may look dated, or the formatting on the blog was designed for Internet Explorer and hasn’t held up well on modern browsers. But if the content is good, the images don’t look old-fashioned, and the website isn’t performing slowly, then it may just be time to get a few tins of paint and set about redecorating rather than moving.

However, if your website is running slow, parts of your website don’t show correctly, or large amounts of content and the design on your website seem a little archaic, it may be time to start “house hunting”. 

That might mean buying something that’s already built, where you just move your content into it, or buying a plot of land and having builders assemble your dream home. Either way, it can sound like a daunting task, but one that experts in web design and development can make easier.

Is your website future-proof?

We wanted our house to become a “forever home”. We wanted something where we could not only raise a family, but also where, when our child(ren) have flown the nest, we would be able to enjoy a slower pace of life.

For your website, you won’t be looking 20+ years into the future, but you will want to look at maintainability and scalability. For example, if you are currently the only financial planner at the business, and you are the only person with a bio on the website, how easy is it for you to add more team members should the company grow? Or what about the opposite and a few team members leave? Is it a simple, two-minute job to remove them?

How much clutter do you have laying around?

We’re not hoarders, but you would have thought differently with how much stuff we ended up throwing away when we moved. Everyone has something; the probably dead batteries you keep in a drawer just in case you need them, a novelty hat that you bought 10 years ago and haven’t worn once, clothes you haven’t worn in five years but swear you’ll be able to fit into again. The list goes on and on, from the smallest of things that you can fit in your pockets to bulky items such as furniture. 

As humans, we are all pretty bad at throwing certain things away, and in a digital space we’re no better. Maybe you installed a social media sharing plugin on your website, and it stopped working with Facebook. So, instead of finding a new plugin, you ended up installing a Facebook-specific one, and keeping the old one too.

These small bits of code clutter add up and, in the best-case scenario, don’t impact the user but just make your admin dashboard look messy. But usually, these will affect the user experience, whether that’s slower load times, multiple popups that they need to close, broken sections of the website, and so on.

We can help you with your website “house move”

Moving home is extremely stressful. But luckily, a website house move doesn’t have to be. If you feel you should start looking for a new digital abode for your business, why not talk to a member of our team today?

Email hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk or call 0115 896 5300 to find out more.