7 Signs Your HVAC Website Is Embarrassingly Outdated

We’ve all seen businesses in buildings that look as though they are allergic to fresh paint or landscape maintenance. They’re establishments you usually try to avoid.

An outdated website can have the same effect on your HVAC business, causing customers to call your competitor instead.

We don’t want that to happen to you so we’ve compiled a list of 7 signs your HVAC website is out of date and in need of a redesign or refresh.

Many HVAC websites have rotating banners on their home page. But we don’t recommend them.

Why? Well, the biggest problem with rotating banners is what’s known as banner blindness. Basically, this is the tendency of website visitors to ignore anything that looks like an advertisement.

So even if your banners are huge and prominent, your visitors probably aren’t reading them. And if they’re not reading them, why waste so much space with them?

Read more in our article Why You Shouldn’t Be Using Rotating Banners on Your HVAC Website

Imagine you’re driving down the road and every stop sign you come across is a different font, shape and color.

You’d have to really concentrate to know what the sign was trying to tell you. And that would likely lead to accidents as people take longer to understand the signs.

Well, that’s what happens on HVAC websites with inconsistent font and color uses. Your visitors have to concentrate really hard to understand where they can go and what they should do on your website.

Worse, many will just choose to go elsewhere instead of taking this effort.

Old HVAC websites have been built with outdated code that causes them to load very slowly.

Your site may also be slow because you have bad hosting or your site was never correctly optimized for speed. In any case, slow load times can cause visitors to bounce and go elsewhere rather than waiting for your website to load.

Nielsen Norman Group (a company devoted to studying what makes websites better) has found that increasing a website’s speed even by as little as 0.1 seconds can increase the number of conversions.

Read more in their article Website Response Times

Fonts appear smaller on newer, high-resolution monitors. For example, a 10-point font on a new monitor will appear smaller than the same font on an old, lower-resolution monitor.

And small fonts are difficult to read.

So newer HVAC websites should have larger font sizes. We usually recommend a minimum of 12 to 14-point fonts for the body text and larger sizes for headlines and important buttons.

Mobile traffic to websites is exploding. Most of our HVAC clients see at least 40% of their traffic coming from smartphones and tablets.

Yet many HVAC websites don’t work well on small screens because:

• The website is large and fixed so users have to pinch to zoom in when on mobile devices
• There’s a separate mobile site that doesn’t have the same content as the main website

Both of these problems are why we recommend responsive HVAC websites. Responsive sites serve the same content to every device, but adjust the design based on the size of the screen.

(Read more about responsive design in our article, Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Responsive Website Design.)

Of course, even if your designer has told you your website is responsive, it may not be working well.

For example, this site looks pretty good on a large screen:

But check out what happens on a smartphone:

The site is technically responsive: it adjusts its design so you can see all the content on any device. But it’s still not very usable. And that’s likely hurting their mobile conversions.

Sometimes HVAC companies get so busy that they forget about their website. Your website visitors usually notice this when they see:

• Expired coupons/specials
• Neglected blog (no recent articles)

Depending on how long your site has been neglected, this may cause visitors to think that your site is no longer being maintained because the company is no longer in business.

If you’re not going to regularly update things like coupons and blogs, your best option is to keep them off your website.

As your website grows, it’s natural for you to close pages and create new ones. But if you don’t fix links on your site and set up the correct redirects, you visitors may often end up at your 404 page.

And that screams to your visitors that you’ve neglected your website.

Here are a few tips:

• Talk about price
• Write truly helpful content
• Invest in good design (Nielsen Norman)
• Make sure it’s responsive

If you don’t have time to do all that yourself, we can help. Contact Rocket Media for more information.