There is no better platform to advertise your products and services than a website built to promote your brand. But the trick is you shouldn’t just build a website and leave it at that. You need to constantly work on enhancing your website performance, improving its SEO, and updating your website on a regular basis.
There are many decisions that you’ll need to make to update your website. In this post, we have broken down 10 key reasons why you need to update your website from time to time.
But before we look into those, let’s discuss the most common ways to update your website.
5 Ways to Update Your Website
Here are 5 ways to update your website to keep it going and maintain its traffic in the highly competitive digital environment.
1. Ensure Everything is Still Working
The first thing you need to ensure is that everything continues to function well on your website. This means you need to regularly conduct a thorough audit of your web pages. In particular, you might want to look for one or more of the following issues.
- Themes or plugins that have a new update available
- Missing images, or those that were originally uploaded in poor quality
- Outdated or incorrect user information
- Broken links or URLs, and pages that cannot be accessed due to that
- Features that are not functioning properly due to broken plugins
- Style or formatting issues
- Content that is completely outdated
These might sound like a lot of issues. Still, if you have been updating your website frequently, you won’t face more than one or two of these simultaneously. While you’re checking for these issues on your site, it is also a smart choice to ensure all your content is neatly organized.
2. Perform A/B Testing
Once you update your website to ensure that everything is functioning fine, you need to determine your website is as effective as you need it to be. A/B testing is one of the ways to update your website to check its performance. This technique involves building two versions of something and seeing which one gives better results.
For example, let’s say you want to test the effectiveness of your sign-up form for building an email list. You’ll create two versions of the landing page and insert slightly different content and a different call to action on each. Then you’ll get visitors sent to each page randomly to track which of the pages gets the most clicks or signup form entries.
3. Solicit Public Feedback
Before you update your website, you must know what your target audience thinks about your site. When we spend a lot of time working at the backend or behind the scenes, we tend to forget what it feels like to see things on the other side. Hence, it’s a good idea to solicit some feedback from your audience or your regular site visitors to see what they think about your site.
Their feedback, if used constructively, can help you get ideas on how to update your website to make it more effective. Find out what your audience prefers and likes and which parts of your site irritate them if any. To encourage your audience to give their feedback, you must ask directly. A better way is to give them some incentives or rewards in return for their honest opinions.
4. Conduct Research on Your Competition
Look at other websites targeting the same niche as your website. This might give you ideas on things you could miss out on. This could give you more reasons to update your website. See how your competitors strategize their marketing campaigns and manage their website statistics. Look at the web design they use. Check how much traffic they can attract.
It is easy to spend so much time and effort on your own website that you lose track of others. As a smart businessman, you must always watch your competitors’ activities to make sure you stay in the game. Fortunately, many dedicated tools are available that can help you conduct such a digital competitor analysis. Look for tools that allow you to compare your website performance to others using specific metrics and parameters. Once you know where you lack the most, you can update your website accordingly.
5. Update Your Keywords
A major part of updating your website is to update your keywords. This is a vital part of your website’s overall strategy. The right keywords will help you enhance your search rankings and improve your site’s SEO. This means your website will be more visible and discoverable for the public.
Even if you did thorough keyword research when you first developed your site, there is a high chance that the search volumes have changed. This could potentially harm your site’s performance if you do not update your website on time to change the keywords you’re targeting to rank for. Make sure you devote some time at least once in a year for updating your website’s keywords.
10 Reasons to Update Your Website Regularly
Here is our list of 10 reasons why you need to update your website regularly.
1. Enhance Its Visual Appeal
People might get bored of seeing your homepage if you don’t change its design, color palette or content for months. People often view your site as a reflection of your business or company. If your web pages look professional, responsive, and neatly organized, they would assume that you conduct your business professionally and in an organized manner. If your site is loaded with valuable information, visitors will see you as an expert or authority in your field.
You need to update your website to take care of its visual appeal. Failing to do that might give the impression that you are not much bothered about your business and brand. This will cause decreased traffic on your site and the extent of engagement with your brand.
2. Ensure It’s Responsive and Mobile Friendly
A website that cannot be browsed smoothly from mobile devices has little or no value these days. Maybe when you first built your site, its mobile version was not as important today. You need to make sure that your web pages can be browsed and scrolled through without errors from a mobile phone. The majority of people visit websites from their mobile phones these days. Not giving them a chance to view your site’s content properly from their smartphone can cause you to miss out on large potential audiences.
If your current website is not mobile friendly or not as responsive as it should be, you need to update your website to improve the amount of traffic you drive to it. As you update your website, test its functionality from different devices to ensure it is responsive enough to be browsed from anywhere.
3. Check Your Site’s Technique and Coding
You must update your website to confirm its browser is compatible. The source code used when your site was first developed also needs to be valid. The international web standards keep on changing. Make sure your site is abiding by these standards at all times.
These issues are easy to handle if your web design is compatible and usable. The ways to create websites keep becoming more advanced every year. If your site is slowing down in its loading speed, you need to check what has become outdated in its design or backend settings.
4. Update Your Stock Photos
If you have used a lot of stock photos in your website’s imagery, you might need to keep an eye on those as well. Stock photos can also get outdated, and then they do not attract any more audience anymore. Many web designs rely heavily on stock photography. Check if the images used on your site still reflect the marketing message you want to present to your audience. If not, you need to update your website to change or replace these images.
5. Check the Call to Action Buttons
Call to action buttons are used for various purposes. Maybe you ran a marketing campaign last year, with a call to action leading the audience to a specific sales page. When the sales page expired, or the campaign was completed, you forgot to remove the button from your website.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
When you update your website, look for any outdated, expired, or broken call to action links and buttons on all your web pages. Either remove them entirely or replace them with other valid links.
6. Measure Your Website’s Effectiveness
Updating your website from time to time also helps you measure its effectiveness to make sure it is serving you the purpose it was built for. If your website is old, it might not be well equipped with the essential tools for measuring its performance. Examples of such tools include conversion tracking, heat mapping, and user recordings. Update your website to upgrade its features and include these tools for accessing different performance metrics.
Image taken from Strikingly
7. Add More Content
A website with no new content published for weeks is quite boring. Nobody would like to visit your site if you do not add new content. Your website content should be the most important thing to be updated regularly. Fresh, creative, and unique content is crucial for frequently attracting people to visit our site. If you are running a blog, you should preferably update your website with fresh blog posts every single day.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
8. Improve Your Site’s SEO
When you update your website and its content regularly, Google bots are also triggered to crawl through your web pages more often. This is very helpful in enhancing your site’s search rankings and making it more visible to your audience.
9. Provide Easy Navigation
Updating your website in a timely manner ensures your audience can navigate through its pages easily. Maybe a more user-friendly version is available for the web design or template you used to create your site. Keeping an eye on such updates can go a long way in maintaining a good amount of traffic to your site.
10. Maintain a Favorable Bounce Rate
If you update your website quite often, you will be able to maintain the interest of your site visitors in your content. This means your website’s bounce rate will be low, and user engagement will be high.
Having a Website Built on Strikingly
Image taken from Strikingly
If you use Strikingly, it is easy to update your website and its content any time you like. We have a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface. This means you can not only upload any content you want onto your web pages by dragging a file and dropping it into the editor but also rearrange the content and edit your text on yourself. In updating your website on Strikingly, you will not need to write any code. You can work in our editor the same way as you work on a Word or Powerpoint file. If you need to change some text on a webpage, all you need to do is click on the text and type in the replacing text. Then hit ‘Publish’ to make the changes go live.
At Strikingly, our goal is to provide you with a smooth experience of creating and maintaining a website. Using our platform rids you of the hassle and tension of asking and paying a professional web developer to update your website. With us, you can handle the front end on your own while we support the backend to make sure your website is free from technical errors.
