What things do your HubSpot CMS website and Oscar the Grouch’s trash collection have in common? More than you think.

Oscar the Grouch was one of Sesame Street’s most popular characters created by Jim Henson. With a green furry body, bold eyebrows and a permanent frown, he was a fixture on the television screens in many of our childhoods. His most identifying feature? The fact that he lived inside a trash can. One of his most popular songs was titled “I Love Trash”, an ode to all his favorite pieces of garbage.

He held on to a 13-month-old newspaper with a smelly, dead fish wrapped inside it, an old, worn sneaker he got from his mom the day he was born, a defective clock, an old telephone and other random items - and we’re thinking they’re all pretty symbolic of the garbage inside many HubSpot CMS website that you might be holding onto.

While we don’t want to offend you by comparing your website to Oscar the Grouch’s trash collection - there are a few parallels we can draw here that might help put things into perspective.

Your old website and stinky landing pages are no better than a 13-month-old fishy newspaper.

Oscar might love his stinky fish newspaper - but your aging website and outdated landing pages aren’t cutting it anymore. Website design trends change with time and that means updating your navigation for emerging trends (we love mega menus, for example) and refreshing some of those landing pages. When was the last time you did some heat map analysis or took the time to consult with a gifted HubSpot CMS developer to understand what trends they’re seeing and what recommendations they can make when it comes to your existing resources and offers? Been awhile? Never done it? It’s probably time.

Shaking a stinky fish wrapped in old news at your prospects isn’t exactly appealing to your target audience. There are so many ways that you could be repelling your website visitors - and it’s not just stale content. Whether it’s page speed issues sending your bounce rates skyrocketing or ill-conceived design, you need to explore ways to make your website and landing pages more appealing to your audience.

Technical SEO, page speed audits, UX design improvements and more can all go a long way to giving your website and marketing the baseline infrastructure updates it needs to thrive.

The design you loved years ago may not function for you now, just like Oscar’s old shoe 👞

I have here a sneaker that's tattered and worn
It's all full of holes and the laces are torn
A gift from my mother the day I was born
I love it because it's trash

We’re all a little nostalgic sometimes, and while Oscar’s old shoe might be something he wants to hold onto, it’s time for you to let that old design go. You may have loved your website 5 years, 3 years or even 1 year ago - but odds are good that if you’re a savvy business leveraging HubSpot software, you’re constantly evolving in the way you deliver your products and services to your audience.

That old design got you by, but you need something more to really move your website prospects into action and an outdated website isn’t gonna cut it. Why? 81% of people think less of a business if its website is outdated, according to SearchEngineJournal.com and 39% would think twice about using a product or service if the website isn’t fresh and current.

The very last thing you need is your salespeople and marketing working hard on your behalf to get people to your website, only for the outdated design, features and information to send them packing. In a world of picky customers, where the smallest issues can repel your customers, don’t hold on to outdated design just because you like it or it worked before.

What’s the point in metrics if you’re obsessed with a broken clock?

Oscar the Grouch’s love for a broken clock might entertain preschoolers, but your website prospects are anything but amused by your failure to acknowledge the most important metrics.

You should be actively exploring metrics like time on page, session duration, interactions per visit, pages viewed and more. This will help you to determine how much time your prospects are spending on your website, what actions they’re taking and what content is sending them away or closer to conversion.

The journey of a buyer once they arrive at your website is so important. Understanding the actions the most qualified leads are taking is critical - and yet you and your development team are ignoring these metrics when designing your new website or making strategic designs for new features.

You can stare all you want at that clock, but the hands won’t move until you fix it. Dig into your metrics and gather intelligent insight from them that’s actionable. You don’t have to generally focus on improving every single one of them, but identifying trends in problematic pages that can be tweaked to help buyers convert better from a technical SEO, UX or content perspective will go a long way.

Broken telephones don't work to reach people

Oscar can hold onto old, broken telephones all he wants inside that trash can of his, but your website lead capture efforts need to be updated regularly, especially if you’re an agency. Take the time to audit old landing page designs, pop ups, chatbots and tweak campaigns to help them work better for your audience.

You also need to start exploring how emerging applications and integrations can help you maximize the reach that you have with your audience. Apps that actively manage phone call and text message campaigns and integrate with HubSpot can help make the lives of your sales team easier and give you much more insight about what’s working and not working. You’d be surprised how much replacing that “old phone” can save you when it comes to automating your outreach and combining it with your inbound efforts with the help of a HubSpot developer.

At the end of the day, you are in control over the performance of your website in the bigger strategy that is your inbound marketing. If you’ve made it this far, we know that you probably agree - it’s long past time to take a look at some of the important metrics and design elements of your website and give it all a much needed facelift.

Oscar the Grouch’s love for trash might have been charming in the context of Sesame Street’s character quirks, but there’s no amount of website trash that will help endear your prospects to you in the same way.

It’s definitely time for an audit.
Let’s sit down and sift through things together to see where we can help.