Why Should you keep your Website Update to Date?
Having a website is one of the most beneficial to improve your businesses notoriety and increase your overall sales and audience. While having a website is an important part of your businesses digital marketing you can sometimes forget about it giving it little attention and the love that it needs.
As website design changes over the years and design trends come and go it is always important to stay on top of the new wave of design and functionality. Not just to provide your audience with a good user experience but to also ensure you are making most of the improvements that come with new website design such as mobile friendly layouts and website responsiveness.
Here are eight things that you can look for on your website to determine whether you should be looking at a website update.
1. Your website isn’t mobile friendly
Ever since smartphones were introduced there has been an upward trend of people using their phones to surf the web. Almost half of all website traffic comes from mobile devices making it an important reason to have your site mobile friendly and responsive to these smaller screened devices.
When we are designing a website, we are always designing them for mobile rather than designing a desktop only website. If a user comes to your website and is unable to few it on their specific device, then the likelihood of them sticking around is very slim.
2. Your site is hard to update and manage
As websites are becoming more and more long-term projects it is important that you have a site that is easy enough to update and manage. As digital marketing practices change over time your website should too and having a website that is constantly being improved on and updated will increase your chances of being found through a search engine.
Thankfully with the improvements of no-code and low-code options available for websites you are now able to change almost everything without having a computer science degree. We recommend looking out a Content Management System (CMS) that can stay up to date with the ability to evolve with new trends that appear. We personally use WordPress for most sites but there are other options out there.
3. Poor user experience
Even though your website may look great and is responsive on all devices you do need to ensure that the user can navigate throughout the site and is able to achieve what you want them to, whether that is submitting a form or buying a product.
Having different options throughout your pages to navigate to different pages is beneficial to a user and can also help you streamline their process to have them complete something that you want the user to do. Creating a funnel of links for a user can streamline their process in purchasing a product for you or encouraging them to get in touch about a service you provide.
4. Your site isn’t optimised for search engines
So, you have a website with a great design that you are proud of, you have also tackled your user experience ensuring it’s as good as it can be. Now, how do you get people to go to your website. If you have created a website and wonder, why it’s not receiving a lot of traffic or is not appearing o your search result then that you have bad SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.
The higher your site is in search engine rankings then the more clicks you will receive. SEO is a technical and ever-changing topic that can seem overwhelming and confusing. If you are looking to find more information on SEO you can read our blog Local SEO Guide for Beginners.
5. Your website is outdated
If you can’t remember the time your website was last updated, then it is probably about the time you should think about doing that. Mentioned previously trends change in website design, with better options for both layouts and functionality having an out-of-date site means you won’t be making the most of these new breakthroughs in design.
Like other languages certain words or terms will go out of fashion leading to certain features on your website not working. This was seen when Adobe Flash was not long supported by Google which ultimately phased it out completely in 2020. On top of these old features, you need to think about the security of your website If your website does not have an SSL certificate your users may be turned away as your site will be listed as having a non-private connection. If you are looking for more information about keeping your website secure you can read our blog, How to Improve your Website’s Security.
6. You’re not receiving expected traffic, leads or conversions
If you have noticed a recent drop off in your site traffic and leads you are probably going to want to think about getting a website refresh to bring back your audience and attract new users to your website. Having an updated User Interface (UI) full of animations and effects for users to interact with can keep them engaged and on your site for longer.
We aren’t saying that only having animations and effects on your website is going to bring in a mass increase of new users, but it will help. Having a site that has images and breaks up long paragraphs of text can also really help keep users interacting and coming back to your site.
7. Your site has poor page speed
There are a lot of factors that can affect your websites page speed. As you are looking to keep users on your website it is important that you are grabbing their attention with one way to lose that attention being a website that takes a long time to load. These days a long load time is over 3 seconds which shows you how quick people will leave a website if it doesn’t load and provide them with content.
One of the biggest causes for this long load time is large images which can be resolved simply by decreasing their size and compressing them. We highly recommend using TinyPNG to compress your photos as it is free and keeps your image quality relatively unchanged.
8. You have missing imagery and broken links
One of the worst things to face when browsing a website is clicking on a link that takes you to a 404 page. Not only can this show that your website is not optimised correctly but can also lead to users clicking of your site as you have wasted their time by not providing the information that they expected to find when clicking on a link.
Having missing images can also lead to users clicking off your website especially if you are selling products or are showcasing a service that you provide. If a user clicks on a product and they cannot see what the product is then how are they meant to know what they are buying. Another reason to ensure you have all your images is that Google hates when a website has missing images ranking them below websites that have all of theirs displayed and available.
Does your website need an update?
Now we have been through some of the reasons that you should think about updating your website, are you looking to have a whole refresh or perhaps a couple changes.
If you are needing help with making the changes that you want with your website, then get in touch with Portal and we can assign a developer to help you make those changes or redesign your existing website. Contact us to get a quote or advice on what steps you should take to better improve your website.
