Five reasons to update your website

Having an online presence in today’s digital world is incredibly important, but keeping your website updated, relevant and as user friendly as possible is just as important. Trends and website standards change regularly, which if not kept on top of can have a drastic effect on how your website runs, but also how it is found and used by potential users. Not only this, but search engines like Google or Bing are constantly making changes to how they rank and display websites to users. It is critical that you stay on top of these changes to maintain a positive ranking on search engines. If the above is not enough to persuade you, check out our 5 reasons why you might need to update your website:

Visual Identity

Your website is a direct reflection of your business and first impressions matter. Having an old, outdated, non-mobile-friendly and difficult to use website will simply lead to you losing potential customers as well as finding yourself lower and lower on search engine rankings. It is essential that your update your website so it is nice to look at, easy to use, navigate and understand, but also keeps up with today’s technology allowing users to access it through several different means as well as be fully accessible to all users e.g., hard of sight.

Security & Privacy

This is more important now than ever. With hacking becoming a very common thing and the security and privacy of people’s data becoming more scrutinised by law it is imperative your website is secure and safe for users.

To protect you, your website, and your email from being hacked, one of the most important things you can do is to make sure your website’s software stays up-to-date. On top of this, ensuring your website uses an SSL certificate (HTTPS) will help to secure it from many common forms of hacking and providing an encrypted connection between the user and your website.

Content

Content is one of the most important aspects of a website, the look and feel of the website might initially hold their interest, but it is the content on your website is that will keep them there and make them want to return.

Make sure your content is clear, to the point and relevant to the subject you are talking about. Users will spend roughly 2 – 4 seconds on a page, so you need to make the keywords and content clear and concise to the reason they have landed on the website in order to keep their attention.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

SEO is ever-changing. Be this down to changing web standards or the algorithms of search engines changing, you must in turn keep the SEO on your website up-to-date. Failure to do so can lead to your website dropping down the rankings and become harder to find for your potential users. Keep on top of it and retain your high ranking. A website without efficient SEO is like owning a business and not marketing it.

Usability

As with design, content, security and SEO, usability trends also change quite frequently. This is especially the case with the surge in mobile-friendly content and the number of different devices that you can now access and use the web from. You must ensure that your website is useable through a variety of devices as well as accessible to all types of people.

Updating your website to ensure it remains useable across desktop and mobile devices as well as for people who may have accessibility issues is crucial. This comes down to many aspects, ranging from how your content is displayed or how your navigation displays on desktop, but differently on mobile.

If you need any advice or assistance, you can always give us a call. We provide a Website Management and Maintenance service to make sure your website keeps competing. For more useful articles, check out the rest of our blog.