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8 Ways to Convince Your Boss That It’s Time for a Website Redesign

If you want your boss to invest more in your digital presence, then you need to make a sound business case for a new website design for your real estate firm.

Although your current website might be poor and create challenges for your marketing/sales efforts, your boss might not see the benefit of a redesign.

So how can you convince upper management that a new website is a good investment?

Here are 8 ways to convince your boss it’s time for a website redesign for your commercial real estate firm.

1. Show Your Competitors

The most powerful and convincing way to illustrate why you need a new website is simply to compare your company website to other CRE players in the market.

Put together a list of a few of your direct competitor sites, both local and national, and show your boss what you’re competing against.

If you need a place to start, you can see some examples of the best real estate websites to get an idea of what the leading sites in the industry look like.

2. Review Current Performance

It’s highly likely that your current website is not producing any relevant business for your company. Or perhaps you’re not even tracking the current performance to be able to determine whether it is producing any business.

Your website should be a valuable resource for your marketing and sales efforts and help 1) generate visibility in front of your target audience 2) create new prospects.

Show your boss your current results (or lack of) and how a well-built website can help measure the impact of your marketing efforts.

Some KPIs to consider would be:

  • Evolution of visits
  • Bounce rate
  • Average time on site
  • Leads generated

3. Check if Content is Updated

There’s nothing worse than having outdated content lingering on your company website. Are you property listings up-to-date? How about your team members? When was the last time a news item was published?

These are all signals that speak to the professionalism of your company so make sure it’s not neglected. If your current website makes you cringe, then it’s likely others (potential partners and prospects) also cringe when they browse through your site.

Give your boss a few examples of dated content that is ready for a refresh.

4. Explain Challenges to Make Edits

In commercial real estate, speed is everything. Your time is valuable and the last thing you need is friction and frustration to make updates to your own website.

If your Content Management System doesn’t allow you to make updates (property listings, news items, etc.) on the fly, then your process is broken and you’re wasting valuable time that you could be spending on high-value activities.

Explain to your boss how a solid Content Management System will save you time and frustration so you can move faster.

5. Show What’s Not Working

Nearly 40% of people say they will leave a website if it is unattractive, difficult to navigate, or takes too long to load (source: Hubspot).

It’s important to assess your current site for functionality issues that could be creating a negative experience for your users.

This could mean a lot of things and usual culprits include:

  • Unresponsive design
  • Broken links
  • Graphics that don’t load properly
  • Error messages (or missing pages)
  • Lack of browser compatibility

6. Check for Slow Loading Times

The speed of how quickly your website pages load will have a direct impact on user engagement.

In fact, 39% of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long to load. (Source: Adobe)

Check out Google’s PageSpeed Insights to assess the loading performance of your current website.

7. Bring Up Search Engine Rankings

Do your competitors have more visibility in Google results than you?

If you’re getting outranked by other real estate firms for keywords that are relevant to your business, then you are behind the game and missing big opportunities.

It’s worth mentioning that a new website that is optimized for SEO (search engine optimization) can have substantial positive impact on your company’s visibility in search engines to increase brand awareness.

8. Emphasize CRE Industry Changes

If your boss says “Our customers are offline, not online” then he might be in for a big surprise.

In just the last few years, there has been a rapid rise of online usage in the commercial real estate industry and consumer behavior is changing quickly. Results of a recent study showed that almost 86% of tenants and investors use the internet for finding information about commercial real estate and make lease and purchase decisions (source: Loopnet/Google).

So make sure to reiterate how your online presence is not just important but critical if you want to stay ahead of the curve.



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