Some people think that you can just create a website and then that’s it, just leave it to sit there. But that couldn’t be further from the truth, keeping your website updated is vital for many reasons and is something you must do. You may not realise the benefits of keeping your site updated, but when you take into account that some companies have full time members of staff just to update their website then there must be something to it.
The most obvious reason for keeping your site updated is to keep it looking fresh and modern. There’s little worse than presenting customers/visitors with a website that looks outdated! Make sure that you keep your site looking modern by updating images, layout, design and just the general look and feel.
The next important thing is to keep the content on the website up to date. So that’s things like adding blog posts to it regularly, updating your main pages with new info on the business and this also helps SEO when Google see that you are updating and posting to your site frequently. After all, you wouldn’t pick up and read the same newspaper day after day, week after week.
It’s always important to update usability, to keep the site in working order and you can never make too many usability updates. For example there might be a new mobile phone launching that your website doesn’t look as good on compared to existing smartphones, so it’s important to update it in that aspect so that it continues to work on modern devices and web browsers. Also in terms of usability websites only ever used to be accessed on a desktop PC but now a lot of internet traffic is from smartphones so you need to make sure your site is up to date and all of the elements are easy to use on a mobile device.
In terms of security it is very important to update the components and plug-ins of your website. On website platforms like WordPress it is very easy to run updates. Although it might not make the site look different, it will improve other aspects of the site like security to help to avoid it being hacked or compromised.
Last but not least, you can update your website template. So that could be a major update like a completely new layout and look to the site or just simple changes like different colours for the background or action buttons. A completely new template is something to take caution with, because unlike the updates above changing to a new template too often could have a negative affect. This would be that your company could potentially become unrecognisable to regular customers, so if you are constantly changing the colour scheme and template of your site customers may not recognise the site so this is something to take care with as too many of these updates could affect your business due to unfamiliarity. The main rule to follow here is only change the whole template if you are doing a complete company branding change or if the site is well overdue an overhaul.
Overall it is good to keep things exciting and fresh on your website as an old website can become boring for customers and if it is the same every time a customer returns, it’s likely that they’ll eventually going to stop visiting your site.
