Introduction
Most eCommerce businesses do not wake up one day and decide to redesign their website. It happens gradually. Sales slow down a little, people leave your website quickly. A customer mentions that your website feels clunky on their phone. Each signal on its own feels minor but together they are telling you something important about your eCommerce website.
The problem is that your website performance deteriorates so gradually that it is easy to miss. You are too close to your eCommerce website. You stop seeing what first-time visitors see when they arrive.
These five signs are the ones that matter most. They are the ones that are actively costing your eCommerce website sales now, whether you have noticed them or not. Go through each one honestly. By the end you will know where your eCommerce website stands — and whether it is showing signs you need a new website before the damage compounds further.
What Is In-House Software Development?
Simply put — your developers are your employees. They're on your payroll, sitting inside your organisation, building software that serves your business directly.
That might be a fifteen-person engineering team at a Series B SaaS company, or two developers at a mid-sized retailer who keep the website running and quietly build half the tools the operations team uses daily. The team size doesn't really matter. What defines in-house development is that the people doing the work are yours — accountable to you, invested in your business, and building with full context.
That last part is underrated. There's a version of software development where someone builds exactly what you asked for and delivers something that solves the wrong problem. In-house developers — when they've been with a company long enough — don't do that. They've sat in the meetings. They know the politics. They understand why a feature that looks straightforward on a brief is actually complicated by three legacy systems and a finance team that needs it done a different way.
Worth saying: this model isn't just for big companies. A lot of people assume in-house development requires enterprise-level resources. It doesn't. What it requires is enough consistent, ongoing development work to justify full-time hires — which is a different question entirely.
Sign 1: Your Bounce Rate Is Through the Roof
Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who land on your eCommerce website and leave without doing anything. For an eCommerce store, a high bounce rate is one of the clearest signals that something is broken. Either the page is not loading fast enough, the design is not building trust quickly enough, or the visitor landed and immediately felt like they were in the wrong place.
The frustrating part is that bounce rate problems compound. Google and other search engines track engagement signals. A site that consistently sends visitors back to the search results is a site that gradually loses rankings — which means less traffic, which means fewer sales — and that makes the underlying problem even harder to solve.
High bounce rates on eCommerce sites are usually caused by one of four things: slow page load times, a design that looks untrustworthy or outdated, poor mobile experience, or a mismatch between what the ad or search result promised and what the page actually delivered. The last one is worth checking separately, because sometimes the problem is not the eCommerce website at all — it is the traffic source. Understanding how to reduce ecommerce bounce rate starts with isolating which of these four factors is the real culprit.
What a healthy bounce rate looks like
For eCommerce specifically, a bounce rate between 20–45% is generally considered healthy. Landing pages and paid traffic tend to run higher. If your site-wide bounce rate is consistently above 55–60%, it is worth treating as a problem rather than a benchmark.
Check your bounce rate in Google Analytics broken down by device. A healthy desktop bounce rate alongside a high mobile bounce rate points directly to a mobile experience problem.
Sign 2: Your Conversion Rate Is Dropping
Traffic without conversions is noise. If people are landing on your eCommerce website, browsing your products and leaving without buying, your website has a conversion problem. Conversion rate drops are easy to rationalise — but when the drop is gradual and persistent, the eCommerce website itself is usually part of the story.
The other thing worth knowing: conversion rate and bounce rate are not always linked. You can have a low bounce rate and a poor conversion rate, because the path from interest to purchase has too much friction. That is a harder problem to solve than the visitor who leaves immediately, and it often points to checkout or product page issues rather than first impressions.
Quick conversion rate benchmark for eCommerce
The average eCommerce conversion rate globally sits between 2–4%, though this varies significantly by industry and traffic source. According to the Nielsen Norman Group’s eCommerce UX research, friction in checkout and navigation consistently ranks among the top reasons shoppers abandon without buying. The number to watch is not the industry average — it is your own trend line. If your conversion rate was 3.2% six months ago and it is 1.8% now, that is the conversation to have regardless of where the industry sits.
Sign 3: Your eCommerce Website Looks Outdated or Off-Brand
Consumers make trust judgements about eCommerce websites in milliseconds. A site that looks dated, inconsistent or visually rough signals one thing: this business does not invest in itself. And that is exactly why a customer would not trust it with their money. Outdated website design does not just mean old-fashioned aesthetics — it means product photography that is inconsistent or low quality, typography that clashes, and a colour scheme that no longer reflects what the brand actually is.
The off-brand problem is subtler but equally damaging. If your social media, your packaging, your email campaigns and your ads all communicate one thing — and your eCommerce website communicates something else — you are creating a dissonance that undermines trust at exactly the moment it matters most. These are some of the clearest signs you need a new website, not just a style refresh.
Sign 4: Your eCommerce Website Is Slow or Broken on Mobile
More than 60% of global eCommerce traffic now comes from mobile devices. If your eCommerce website does not perform on a phone, you are losing the majority of your customers before they have seen a single product. Mobile performance issues are often invisible to business owners because they test their site on a fast WiFi connection from a desktop.
Google made this worse by switching to mobile-first indexing. Your eCommerce website’s mobile experience now directly determines how Google ranks you. A slow, broken mobile experience does not just lose customers — it loses search rankings, which means it loses the traffic that would have become customers.
How to check your page speed right now
Go to pagespeed.web.dev. Enter your URL. Google’s PageSpeed Insights will give you a score for both mobile and desktop, and a specific list of what is slowing your eCommerce website down. A score above 90 is strong. Below 50 on mobile is a problem that needs addressing — and often the first step toward a proper ecommerce website redesign.
Sign 5: You Can’t Add Features Without Breaking Things
This one is less visible to customers but just as damaging to your eCommerce business. If every time you try to add a feature your developer tells you it is complicated, expensive or likely to break something else, your eCommerce platform has outgrown its architecture. eCommerce platforms age, and technology that was modern five years ago is not modern now.
The signal to watch for is not just developer frustration — it is business velocity. If your competitors are launching features and improving their customer experience faster than you can, because their platform allows it and yours does not, that gap compounds over time. Technology debt is debt. It slows everything down and accrues interest.
How many signs did you check off? Here’s what to do next
One sign on its own might be a targeted fix. But two or three signs together usually point to something more structural. Four or five means your eCommerce website is actively working against your business — and a proper eCommerce website redesign is not a cost, it is an investment.
Here is a summary of what each sign points to:
The businesses that win in eCommerce are not always the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones that catch these problems early, take them seriously, and act before the revenue impact becomes impossible to ignore.
At Kombee we work with eCommerce businesses to identify where their website is losing them sales — and build the upgrade that fixes it. If two or more of these signs sound familiar, it is worth talking to us.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I redesign my eCommerce website?
There is no fixed rule, but a meaningful eCommerce website redesign every 3–4 years is a good baseline. What matters more than the calendar is the performance data. If your bounce rate, conversion rate or mobile scores are trending in the wrong direction and targeted fixes are not working, that is the signal to redesign — regardless of how long it has been.
What is a good bounce rate for an eCommerce website?
For eCommerce stores, a site-wide bounce rate between 20–45% is healthy. If it is above 55% consistently, that is worth investigating. The most useful number to watch is your bounce rate by device — a high mobile bounce rate alongside a healthy desktop rate points directly to a mobile experience problem rather than a broader site issue. Working to reduce your ecommerce bounce rate by device is usually a more precise fix than site-wide changes.
How do I know if my eCommerce site needs an upgrade?
The five signs in this article are the reliable indicators: rising bounce rate, falling conversion rate, a design that looks outdated or no longer reflects your brand, poor mobile performance, and a platform that has become too rigid to build on. If two or more of these apply, a proper audit is the next step — these are the clearest signs you need a new website.
Can a website redesign improve my sales?
Yes — when the redesign addresses the reasons sales are being lost. A redesign that improves performance, reduces checkout friction, builds trust faster and modernises the brand can have a direct and measurable impact on conversion rate. The businesses that see the uplift from redesigns are the ones that go in with clear data on what is broken, rather than just wanting something that looks newer.
