Do You Really Need to Hire a Web Development Consultant?

 

Have you ever wondered, "Does my business really need to hire a web development consulting firm?" Many owners realize their website and online presence need work but are hesitant about the costs of bringing in outside help.

The reality is, struggling to maintain your digital assets with an in-house team can cost you far more in missed opportunities. 

Faulty webpages, dated designs, poor conversions, and other issues quietly siphon away visitors and revenue.

We'll cover 6 telltale signs it's time to add web consulting talent to your roster.

Recognizing these red flags early allows you to course correct before losing more ground against digitally savvy competitors.

Your website doesn't represent your brand

Your website is often the first touchpoint between prospects and your company. If it feels disjointed from your brand identity, you’re leaving money on the table.

Without guidance from web consultants keyed into your specific audience, it's tempting for internal teams to inadvertently:

● Use off-brand colors, fonts, imagery

● Emphasize generic web design trends over your unique value proposition

● Neglect personalized content tailored to different customer segments

The result? A discordant customer experience that fails to resonate.

Bringing on a digital consulting partner realigns site design and messaging with your core branding.

This presents a consistent, compelling vision of why prospects should do business with you.

You're not keeping pace with competitors

Regularly comparing your website and digital activities to competitors highlights areas requiring attention.

If they continually outpace you by:

● Launching innovative web features

● Tightening site speed and performance

● Creating more relevant, engaging content

● Driving more qualified traffic through superior SEO

...it may indicate their web consultants and developers are more in touch with current best practices.

Waiting to catch up until you start bleeding customers isn’t a winning strategy. Instead, letting an outside specialist pore over your web analytics identifies specific weaknesses against rivals.

They rapidly diagnose issues through the lens of deep industry experience you may lack internally.

Conversions and sales from your site are lackluster

Monthly website visitors mean little if they aren’t converting into measurable business outcomes.

Warning signs your site isn’t closing sales include:

● Bounce rates over 55%: Visitors leave without viewing additional pages

● Pages per session under 2: Minimal exploration beyond landing pages

● Long load times: Over 3 seconds leads many to abandon

● High exit rates before key pages: Dropping at checkout, pricing, contact, etc.

For many, these point clearly to UX problems limiting lead generation and sales. But without a conversion optimization expert's input, internal teams often struggle to pinpoint friction points.

Web consultants adept at funnel analysis uncover why visitors fail to convert. Solutions backed by data may require:

● Simplifying and personalizing on-site messaging

● Prioritizing key pages within navigation

● Crafting responsive lead gen forms

● Optimizing site architecture around buyer journeys

● Building trust and social proof elements

Your technical capabilities are limited

Redeveloping a website every few years is typically unavoidable. At some point, legacy systems can no longer efficiently meet evolving internal needs and customer expectations.

Signs your web platform requires a more agile replacement include:

● Built on outdated frameworks unable to support modern features

● Not designed responsively for mobile devices

● Difficult to update pages, products, and content

● Can’t integrate newer martech tools like chatbots

● Provides scant analytics on visitor behavior

Rather than settle for an outdated site, web consultants make replacing creaky infrastructure a smooth transition. Specialists can:

● Future-proof sites around versatile headless CMS platforms

● Build PWAs focused on performance first

● Integrate voice and IoT emerging capabilities

● Establish smarter analytics for constant optimization

Your development team juggles too many tasks

Expanding digital initiatives easily overwhelm in-house resources spread thin across priorities. When website upkeep competes with:

● App development

● Security and compliance

● Support and maintenance

● IT infrastructure projects

● Ecommerce buildouts

● Customer service system overhauls

Important web tasks slip through the cracks:

Unfortunately, failing to maintain your online presence invites declines. Visitors grow frustrated with outdated information, broken links, feature bugs, and unreliability.

Bringing aboard a dedicated web consulting team shelters your in-house talent from overload. Specialists laser focused on extending site capabilities also do so faster.

They also deliver with the polish and performance expected from such focused expertise.

You lack specialized digital marketing skills

As platforms like SEO shift from art toward science, executing effective strategies relies on mastering many nuances tech evolves quickly.

Standing out increasingly means moving beyond table stakes to embrace:

● Technical SEO enhancing site architecture

● Advancing past keyboard-based searches

● Voice search optimization

● Exploiting online video and visual content

● Harnessing intent data emerging from machine learning

For many marketing teams, sparing resources to develop new, truly differentiated competencies proves challenging. Specialists often concentrate on campaign tactics bringing surer, faster results.

Here web consultants help cross the chasm to higher maturity digital marketing. Credentialed experts pilot innovative but unfamiliar waters on your behalf, then transfer knowledge.

Should You Hire a Web Development Consultant?

Not all websites require outside help to meet business objectives, especially if goals are modest.

But if any of the scenarios above resonate, a web development consultant brings experience key to transforming digital performance. 

Their holistic view of technology, design, and marketing moves the needle where piecemeal internal efforts cannot.

Most importantly, they inject objective insights and constructive feedback useful for driving continual optimization. And in competitive categories, standing still means falling behind.