Updating Your Website

The dynamic nature of the Internet demands that you keep updating your website regularly.

When an existing or potential customer arrives on the website, he or she is expecting the content they are viewing is the most up-to-date information about your business. Thus, the need to perform frequent updates to your website.

It’s better to have no website at all than to have a site that hasn’t undergone maintenance for ages. These days there are so many sophisticated content management systems available that make it easy to add fresh content to a website. Therefore, there is no excuse for not performing regular website updates to rid your site of small errors or incorrect and/or outdated user information.

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A lot of websites for small businesses, in particular, fall into this category. These days, (depending on your industry or niche) not updating your site with fresh content for more than a week is one of the worst things you can do for your online business.

Google and Bing love it when you keep your website fresh with relevant content, and they reward your efforts with higher rankings in search results.

An enormous amount of work has gone into the creation of your website and online presence. Whether you did it yourself, hired the neighbourhood tech geek, or a professional.

That’s why it’s sad when you sit back and expect your website to be active and run forever without updating it.

Things to Keep in Mind When Updating Your Website

When updating your website, you need to keep the following in mind:

1. Be specific about what goals you want to meet using your website. For instance, do you want your website to be a lead generator, an online brochure or an e-commerce site?
2. Identify what key performance indicators you will use to gauge the success of your website. For example, will you use phone requests, appointments scheduled, email subscriptions, or bounce rates as a key performance indicator? For instance, on average, we consider a bounce rate between 40-60% as being okay (this varies depending on your industry).
3. Get into the nitty-gritty of the techie stuff on your website. Make sure the content on your site is the latest version. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and secure. These will help to improve the user experience on your site.
4. Remember that over 60% of website traffic is via mobile devices. Review each page looking for any outdated content, coding and spelling errors. Look for missing or duplicate page titles, header tags and meta descriptions. Fix any broken internal/external links, sitemaps, robots.txt and URL structure. Pay attention to your website speed and other performance indicators. For example, 95% of websites have ditched Flash technology and people viewing pages with Flash on Chrome decreased from 80% to less than 8% in 2018.

How to Update Your Website

Here’s a summary of how to go about it:

Establish a Schedule

If your site visitors know that you place new content on your site every Wednesday, they’ll visit your website every Wednesday.

But you must relate the schedule you set up to the content on your site. A sports website must be updated more often than that of a paper clip manufacturer.

Establishing a schedule and updating your website accordingly is important to search engine optimisation (SEO). According to MarketDive, 82% of marketers say the effectiveness of SEO is on the rise, with 42% stating that it’s rising significantly.

Today, 34% of all websites on the Internet are WordPress-based. For WordPress to operate smoothly, you need to keep your PHP up-to-date. There are two main benefits to keeping PHP up-to-date: your website will be faster, as the latest version of PHP is more efficient.

Determine What Needs Updating

Have there been any changes in the management structure of your company? Have you changed your logo or brand colours? Have you changed your business? These are some things that call for website maintenance.

For best results, you need to do a website audit and site crawl. The purpose of crawling your site is to identify metadata, structure, and other errors on your site easy to miss.

As part of your SEO tasks, you need to determine which pages need to updated and which pages to delete from your site. When you delete any page, you need to redirect links to the deleted page to another relevant page. Don’t forget, when you redirect links, you’ll lose around 10%-30% of your link equity.

Find New Content

Finding new content for your site is one of the most important things to keep your site active and relevant on the Internet. The need for content is often challenging for most website owners.

Finding new content for your site is the most challenging. But there are two ways to go about it:

Providing New Content Yourself

Here you could consider adding any of following to your website:

• A Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page: Make a list of all the common questions asked by your clients etc. about your product/services and your answers to these questions and upload it to your site.

• News Page: With up to the minute information about your company/industry.

• Links to other Pages: With links to other websites of interest in your niche market or industry.

• Testimonial Page: where you publish feedback given by your clients about your products/services.

Having Your Visitors Provide New Content

You can urge your visitors to give new content for your website and interact with your site by incorporating any of the following into your site:

• Blog: A blog (such as the one you’re on now) can be added as a plugin to your existing website or incorporated into the site in the design stages. With your blog, it’s best to keep your postings relevant to your niche market. Your site visitors can then read these and add their comments or post their topics.
• Forum: Unlike a blog, which in most cases is more relaxed and informal, a forum is more formal and structured. We expect its users to join the online discussion before they can post their comments. But like the blog, you can add a forum to your site as a plugin, or you can include it in the development phase.
• Helpful Reviews: If you have an e-commerce site, you can provide a section for reviews. This will offer helpful previews of items in your online store to potential customers.

Having a blog or forum is time-consuming, and it will take a while to grow your online community.

Until recently, most companies often wrestled with the idea of having a blog or forum. They didn’t like allowing anyone to add negative comments about its products or website.

It is understandable because no one likes bad press. But by allowing your customers to air their feelings, the result is favourable.

What do you think?

Conclusion

All your effort in building a strong online presence and updating your website with fresh content won’t mean a thing if your site is not available 24x7x365.

You also need to host your website with a reliable firm that can guarantee that your site is online and secure.

Your website is the centre of all your digital marketing activities. You must not toy with updating your site.

Doing so will only be harmful to your marketing efforts.

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