14 Reasons Why You Should Update Your Website

09 Apr 14 Reasons Why You Should Update Your Website

Posted on February 28th, 2018

There is no better or more cost effective way to advertise your business than on the World Wide Web. If done correctly Web pages make your business, company or organization easily accessible to anyone with a PC, laptop, Tablet or mobile phone

There could be many decisions that go into updating your website and we have broken down our 14 key reasons into the following categories:  Design | Marketing | Usability | Time

DESIGN

1. Visual Appeal

When people visit your site, they see it as a reflection of your organization. If your site looks professional and is loaded with useful information readers will see you as an authority and expert. Likewise if the site looks poorly designed and structured and/or out-of-date they’ll make the same assumptions about your company. The website should highlight your product and/or service and the layout should look harmonious and consistent.

Has your content got dates on it – blog posts, events and similar? It makes sense to remove or update out of date content. As websites mature and grow, it often becomes apparent that certain parts just aren’t working well anymore and are becoming outdated.  Check out our designs...

An obvious example of this is the use of flash.

2. Responsive & Mobile Friendly

We are now a smartphone society. We’re spending two hours online on our smartphones every day; twice as long as laptops and PCs. If you factor that fact with Google’s April 21st 2015 mobile-friendly update ignoring the mobile market is a very risky business. It is now considered common practice to make a website mobile friendly (responsive design).

Responsive Web Design is a collection of techniques that allow a website to flex and adapt to the size of screen it’s being viewed on. Someone opening your site on a small smartphone could be shown the same site as the person opening it on their laptop etc.For many businesses it may even make sense to design your website “mobile 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 conclusion, if you haven’t updated your website in a while the chances are that you may be driving mobile users and potential customers away. Find information on our responsive on mobile website design.

3. Technique & Coding

Is your website browser compatible? Is your source code valid (HTML and CSS)? Does your website meet the basic web standards? Is the technique and/or (version) programming language outdated?

An important factor you should consider is the increase of usability in web design. Every year web standards change radically and techniques to build web sites become more advanced in order to comply with the latest standards. If your site was developed several years ago, it probably has a lot of unnecessary HTML code, and may be slowing down your website loads speeds – which may in turn impact your ranking in the Google search results.

Including modern techniques such as CSS coding will allow your web pages to adapt on all smartphone devices.

4. Stock photos

When building your website, it is important to only select components that will positively impact the objectives of the website. One aspect of a website where this is especially true is photography.  Too many dated website designs have an over reliance on stock photos. There are a range of arguments on why not to use stock imagery covered in the blog by Grant Epstein, including:

• Your vision versus the vision of someone else
• Short-term cost versus long-term cost
• Immediate connection

Do the use of images on your website accurately reflect the business message you are trying to present?

Marketing

5. Effective use of calls to actions

Many dated websites lack effective calls to actions that convert users to customers. A call-to-action (CTA) is a button or link that you place on your website to drive prospective customers to become leads by completing an action on your landing page. Is your USP and call to actions highlighted clearly on every landing page? As important, are they interesting enough to persuade your visitor to complete the desired action?  We Build Messenger Chat Bots...

6. Measuring Effectiveness

You’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of your website. An old website may not be equipped with the necessary tools that will help you measure how effective your online presence is. Examples of this include heat mapping, conversion tracking & user recordings. Nowadays, there are an assortment of online tools you can invest in to help you measure what works and what doesn’t on your website, right down to the minutest detail. However, in order to use those, you will need a modern website.

7. Content

The first impression of your website would obviously be the overall layout, but a reader is visiting your website because they are looking for useful information. A site redesign can also give you the opportunity to re-address how you communicate with all your visitors and to write copy that is simple, on target and more effective – remember, in the modern “go faster and faster” world you only have 2 -4 seconds to engage new visitors.

The content of a website should be considered to be the most important thing, as it helps in determining how effective a website is. Fresh and unique website content is an very important factor in encouraging people to revisit your site more often.

8. SEO & Website Update

Just like a website your digital marketing and SEO could be in need of refresh. If you don’t update your website it’s sure to fall down in the search engine rankings. Search engines regard websites with the most recent content as the most relevant to web users. Your content might be gold but if it’s the same content as it was 5 years ago then search engines crawlers might not think it is as relevant anymore.

The redesign also gives you a chance to rethink your keyword targeting and the overall conversion rate of your website. The way people search and how they search has changed dramatically over the last few years, even truer with the explosion of smartphone devices now in use.