The dynamic nature of the Internet demands that you keep updating your website regularly.
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there is no excuse for not performing regular website updates to rid your site of minor errors or incorrect and/or outdated user information. 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.
Why Updating Your Website is Important / Importance of Updating Your Website.
Updating your website is an essential part of digital marketing. When you build a website, it is like a factory for your online presence. Now your business name, address, phone number, social media links and any other information that is important to your customers will be there. So why not make sure this information is up-to-date? Since online business owners are more informed than ever about what their websites look like and how they are doing, this is a new opportunity for finding out how customers feel about your business and what issues need to be resolved.
Updating your website means updating all the functions that run on that site. It is a great way to grow your business. It not only improves the look and functionality but is also a great way to attract new customers and keep current ones happy. We can attribute this not only to the fact that updating your website will keep your leads and customers coming in, but also because updating your website can improve the way you deliver your services to your clients.
Updating your website is one of the best ways to keep your business updated on the latest trends and improve your chances of getting more clients and exposure.
Does Updating Your Website Help SEO?
Updating your website is important for getting more organic ranking from Google and other search engines. In recent years, organic search engine ranking has become critical for many businesses. Many businesses still rely heavily on pay-per-click marketing or SEO / SEO agencies to get them visibility on the first page of Google. Updating your website with new content can give you an obvious SEO boost without compromising the overall design and functionality of the site.
Updating your website is increasingly a marketing imperative as Google Penguin updates, the social web crawls, bots check your 404s and you’re still not seeing results. And that’s only if you’re doing the basics and using the right tools like Google Analytics, a contact form, or checking for broken links, etc. Because if you’re not updating your website, especially if it isn’t mobile-friendly, then all is not well on your SEO campaign. It could actually hurt SEO!
Updating your website can help boost SEO, drive qualified leads, increase sales, and be helpful for virtually every aspect of your business. Updating your website can be a big help with SEO, and lack of updating services means you could lose out on valuable SEO opportunities.
If you’ve done a good job of keeping your site up-to-date, chances are that a lot of search engines will give it an honest go, instead of penalising you. This will only strengthen your business. It is essential that your website is up to date with current SEO and the latest technologies that can use its functionality.
Updating your website brings a better user experience to your potential customers, improves conversion rates and increases social media shares. However, not every website owner has the time or resources to update their site regularly.
Having a reliable website increases sales, leads and leads per minute. It reduces bounce rates (the number of people that abandon your site). If you’re struggling to attract new customers through organic search, consider updating your website.
Updating your website can turn a good website into an excellent one. It is not only going to improve your branding but also it will bring you visibility to your content, product and service.
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Updating Your WordPress Website
WordPress is one of the most popular site builders/CMSs available today. While we use WordPress in many ways, it’s primarily used for building websites. And if you are thinking of building a website – or have already built one – chances are you’ve done a decent job. The problem is that if you stop updating your WordPress website, you could lose users and revenue.
If you are using WordPress, you’d want to make sure that you update your themes and that you code these themes with security in mind so that hackers could not hack your website. Updating the software will also bring up any bugs and security loopholes that hackers might use in their planning of attacks.
Updating your WordPress website is, and always will be, something that every WordPress user should do regularly. Regardless, if you’re new to blogging, it’s certainly worth the time and effort to learn how to update your WordPress website effectively. It may not be a glamorous or glamorous task, but if you intend on actively using your website for your business, it’s crucial that it be as error-free and functional as possible.
Most people know that it’s important to keep WordPress up-to-date, but not all of them have a clue how to do it. Updating from a GUI is ideal since you can easily view progress in real-time and work with your developers or webmaster to get the job done as fast as possible.
But although you can update your WordPress website daily, a little forethought goes a long way toward ensuring that it will endure throughout the years. Many sites are built on an older version of WordPress and might need some TLC. You can speed up your website’s growth by fixing some of its critical issues, upgrading your plugins, and making sure it’s organised properly.
Sadly, no matter how skilled you are at building websites, if the hosting provider (website host) doesn’t keep up with the latest WordPress updates or cannot provide reliable service, then it is difficult to keep users and visitors engaged. For a lot of websites, this is one of the major steps when they rewrite their entire site and install the latest version of WordPress.
Updating Your Business Website
Updates are crucial for maintaining a professional website and online reputation. No matter what you do, being a little behind is going to hurt. Not only will you risk looking amateurish and outdated, but you could also miss out on valuable traffic, which leads to more money earned. The economic downturn has made it so that websites older than 6 months are at risk of being hacked, but there are ways to help safeguard against this and still be successful.
Nearly every business today needs to update its website. Whether the business is a start-up or an established one with an active blog, every website needs updating.
But with so many updates, it’s hard to know how many there are and how to go about them.
Benefits of Updating Your Website.
There are benefits of updating your website as we have seen in this article. One of the major reasons to do this is to improve the user experience of visitors to your site. Visitors can read more information about your products with up-to-date content, which will lead to an increase in sales. But there are also disadvantages of updating your website, which can make you think twice before going through with it. But the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Therefore, let nothing prevent you from updating your website.
Things to Keep in Mind When Updating Your Website
When updating your website, you need to keep the following in mind:
- 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?
- 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).
- 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.
- 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, according to Web.com, 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.
When updating your website, you need to keep the following in mind Click To TweetFinding 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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