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Signs Your Financial Advisor Website is Outdated

When you first launched your financial advisor website it might have represented the cutting edge of technology and design. But in today’s fast-paced digital landscape, it could be showing its age in as little as 3 to 5 years. 

An outdated website could potentially be driving away potential clients, depending on how badly it stacks up against modern trends and standards. This isn’t ideal in any way and completely goes against the primary goals of any business website. 

Your website is basically your digital storefront and your digital business card. It’s the first point of contact for many of your potential clients, which means it has a huge role in establishing the relationship and creating a good first impression. 

You only have a moment to impress your audience. According to a university study, it takes your website visitors about 2.6 seconds to focus on something that will most influence their first impression. Once they’ve focused on something, it only takes two-tenths to create the first impression. 

Being a financial advisor, you might not put much weight onto seemingly minor things like web design and branding. But your target audience is likely going to pay attention to these details. And if you want your website to be an effective marketing tool, you need to make sure your website is up to par and is not lagging behind your competitors’ digital presence.

Here are 5 signs that your website looks old and outdated that you may not have noticed.

Poor Navigation and User Interface (UI)

In the early days of the Internet, a lot of websites used the same basic layout. Most homepages had navigation options on the left-hand side with lots of drop-down options. But you will hardly see any modern website still using this design.

Most navigation menus nowadays are on the top of the page and drop-down menus are fairly limited. This is partly due to the prevalence of smartphones and tablets that use portrait mode instead of landscape. 

There’s just not much horizontal real estate available when a website is viewed in portrait mode. It’s also much more difficult to click on drop-down menus when using a touchscreen since it’s not as precise as a mouse or trackpad. 

It’s Not Very Mobile-Friendly

If it’s been more than 5 years since your last website redesign, you’ve might have missed getting on the mobile bandwagon. Nowadays, you can expect that at least 50% of your website visitors are going to be using their smartphones to view your pages. If it doesn’t show up properly on mobile devices with smaller screens, you’re ignoring a huge chunk of your audience. 

People simply won’t bother switching to their laptop or desktop just to check out what you have to offer. They’d much just hit the back button and click on one of your competitors’ pages. This type of traffic also increases your bounce rate, which will negatively affect your search ranking. 

Information Overload

Nowadays, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a website that displays more than a couple of short sentences or phrases on their homepage when it first loads up. 

Modern websites use a lot of whitespace (or empty space) in their layout so that people can better focus on the main message. 

There’s also a lot of focus on the above-the-fold content, or the section of the page that is first visible when the homepage loads. All the content that’s visible has to be clear and to the point to be able to catch people’s attention. If done correctly, the user will be compelled to scroll down further to find out more about your company.

No Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)

When people visit your page, you can’t expect them to dig through different menus and click on different pages just to set up an appointment or find your contact information. 

You need to have clear call-to-action buttons on your homepage and landing pages to make sure you don’t frustrate your visitors and make them feel like they’re wasting their time. 

Most people want to get things done quickly and don’t really want to spend much time reading through information that really doesn’t matter to them. If you can reduce the number of clicks and steps they need to go through to accomplish common tasks, you’ll significantly improve your conversion rates. 

Slow Page Loading Times

If your pages take more than a couple of seconds to load, people will think that there’s something wrong with it. As mentioned earlier, they won’t wait around to figure out what the problem is, they’ll just move on to the next search result or the next financial advisor on their list. 

Even users who do bother to stick around will get the impression that your website is clunky and poorly designed, which again, will negatively affect their impression of your brand.

You need to make sure your images and videos are properly optimized so that you can provide the best user experience possible. Another common cause of long page load times is the underlying code or buggy scripts that simply aren’t working properly.

Final Thoughts

You can’t really expect too much from an outdated website. If you’re not really paying too much attention to your website because it hasn’t really been effective at generating leads and converting clients, it might be due for a major overhaul. A modern and properly optimized website might just be the thing you need that’ll give your business the boost that it needs. 

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