6 reasons to update your website

The Internet is the best and least expensive way to advertise your business. The key, though, is not just to have a website, but to build it in a way that helps your business grow.

There are many things to think about when updating your website, but here are the six most important ones.

1. Visual Appeal

People see your site as a reflection of your business when they visit it. If your site looks professional and is full of useful information, people will see you as an authority and an expert. In the same way, they will think the same thing about your company if the site looks badly designed, organized, or out of date. Your website should show off your product and/or service, and the layout should look good.

Does your content, like blog posts, events, and other things, have dates? It makes sense to get rid of or update old information. As websites get older and more popular, it’s often clear that some parts don’t work as well as they used to and are becoming outdated. The use of flash is a clear example of this.

2. Responsive & Mobile Friendly

People all over the world now use smartphones. We spend two hours online every day on our phones, which is twice as long as we do on our laptops and PCs. When you combine that with Google’s upcoming mobile-first indexing update, ignoring the mobile market is a very risky thing to do. Making a website mobile-friendly is now thought to be standard practice (responsive design).

Responsive Web Design is a set of techniques that make it possible for a website to change its layout depending on the size of the screen it is being viewed on. If someone opens your site on a small phone, they could see the same site as someone who opens it on a laptop, etc. For many businesses, it might even make sense to build a website with mobile users in mind first.

“Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows. Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites for the decade to come.” – Jeffrey Veen

In the end, if you haven’t updated your website in a while, you may be turning away mobile users and potential customers. Find out more about how our website is designed to work on mobile devices.

3. Website Speed

The time it takes for your website to load is a big reason why people stay or leave and never come back. Kissmetrics made a great infographic about it. We suggest that you use YSlow, Google Page Speed Insights, or Pingdom to find out how long it takes for your site to load. If your score isn’t good enough, you should think about what parts of your website are making it slow. Images and their size can often make a difference. Find out more about how important it is to optimize images online on our blog.

4. You’ll reduce your risk of getting hacked.

Hacking incidents involving websites and social media feeds are becoming increasingly common. Any website, new or old, is susceptible to security issues, but the risk of security flaws affecting an older website is substantially higher because it relies on older, less secure software and technology.

5. Provide easy navigation.

When we say “user experience” (UX), we’re talking about more than just how your site looks. We’re talking about the whole experience that people have when they visit your site. UX is how easy it is for people to use your site, how fast it is, how easy it is to find information, and how little friction there is when people try to do whatever they’re trying to do. Your website’s navigation should focus on guiding the right visitor to the must-have experience.

6. SEO & Website Maintenance

Like a website, digital marketing and SEO may need a revamp. There’s a good chance your website’s ranking may suffer if you don’t do regular maintenance. Search engines prioritize the most recent content on a website when ranking its relevance for users. Even if your content is gold, search engine crawlers may not deem it relevant if it is the same as five years ago.

In addition, a redesign gives you a chance to reevaluate your keyword targeting and the overall conversion rate of your website. In recent years, people’s search habits have changed significantly, and this is even more true now that smartphone use has skyrocketed. SEO basics can be learned here.