Why is an Updated Website Essential for your Business?

Today people are looking up to the internet to market their business efficiently and cost-effectively. This makes it very important for you to update your website regularly to make it fast, safe and relevant. When it comes to web designing, the trends keep on changing and so you need to keep up with them. You can actually save money by making regular updates. For the users who are not tech-savvy, the only thing that drives their online experience is consistency.

Moreover, Google keeps on coming up with updated algorithms to improve their search results. Now to maintain the ranking of your site, it is best to update your website based on these tips:

Visual appeal

50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) is the time taken for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave. – Source

Your business vision is directly reflected to the visitors through the visual appearance of the website. You need to present your company and yourself as an authority. Your vision should be portrayed through the design and so you should keep redesigning your website to keep it interesting and ahead with the latest design trends.

Visual

Now if your website is not structured correctly and is out-dated, then the potential customers will get the feeling that your business is out-dated too. Your website needs to send out positive vibes when it comes to showcasing your products or services in a way that it will encourage the visitors to buy your products or hire your services.

The website needs to be designed in such a way that it is easy to navigate and looks nice over different devices. The design should be able to adjust itself based on the kind of the device the users are having like a tablet, desktop or mobile phone. By coming up with a responsive design, you will be able to make sure you are not pushing away your potential clients.

Offer great content

91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach customers. – 2018 B2B content marketing statistics from the Content Marketing Institute

86% of B2C marketers think content marketing is a key strategy.

The overall design of your website is definitely considered to be the pinpoint of making first impressions, but this does not end here. Once you have their attention, then the next thing you need to do is keep them interested in great content. The words you write should be offering relevant information about the products or services offered by the brand and it should be interesting too.

When you are involved with the redesigning or updating of your website, you should also consider fine-tuning the content. You need to be sure that the content is effective, simple and direct on target. You need to keep in mind that the time you will get to engage your visitors and convert them to customers will be about 2 seconds. So you cannot just depend on some graphics to woo them, you need to use the right phrase and keywords which can interest the visitors.

To keep up with the SEO

Once you know that you have an appealing design and well-written content, you need to work towards updating the SEO settings of your website. The rules in SEO keeps changing and is greatly influenced by the change in algorithms by Google. This means every time an update is made in those algorithms; it has the potential capability to affect the website. It is important that you stay ahead of the trends and it is not good that you wait too long for the change.

SEO

So, when you plan to make an update in the design and content of your website, you should also think about updating the SEO settings. Now this will include carrying out a reassessment of the underlying code that comes with the new design as well as checking the newly-updated content. You should be asking your web designer to consider the options mentioned above when they are about to carry out website redesigning.

Edit site’s content by adding CMS

Today most of the websites come with a content management system. The presence of such a CMS helps the users to edit the website seamlessly. In case the website was developed a few years ago then for sure it would have been built over HTML or may have made use of a CMS which is out-dated and so such a site is prone to crash or even hard to use.

At this point, you can think about using WordPress. WordPress has been actually used for building blogging sites. It has matured over time and today it can be used for things more than blogging and come up with industrial websites with dynamic functionality.

Stopping your site from becoming an old one

The users will easily point out a website which is an old one. A website which has few years old blogs or news content will not seem to be attractive for the users. When it comes to keeping users engaged, building a strong first impression is very important.

15 seconds is the on an average time, visitors spend around on a website before they move ahead and so you have less than that time to attract the audience and keep them engaged on your site. As per HubSpot

In case your site is not updated and has older content, then chances are more that the visitors will leave your site quickly and will go and find the information or services elsewhere.

When was the last time your website was updated or redesigned? Was your website built to be responsive? In case you are not sure about what the answer is, then it means you have not worked on it in the near future. At this point is recommended that you start working on your site and update it so that you will be able to offer better user experience to the visitors when they come to your website through different devices. This way, they will be able to reach your site through their device of choice and easily get the service or spot the information that they are looking for.

To make sure your site is secure

43% of cyber attacks target small businesses.– SCORE

From the security point of view, updating and maintaining your site is a very important thing. Even if you have made use of contemporary CMS for your website which you know is secure, still you need to be sure as there are people who want to hack your website just for fun.

Sometimes the hackers get into your website and hack its backend and then use it as a spam server. This will get your website blacklisted as it will slow down your website. Once your site gets blacklisted, the visitors cannot visit the site or send you emails.

Web Security

In order to get your website safe from hacking and blacklisting, you need to ensure that the tools and framework used must be updated all the time. Whether you are using Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress or any other content management system, you need to be sure it is updated with the latest technologies.

Update the way you do business

Business needs to keep on changing with time. Say, for example, talk about the food delivery business. A few years back, your customers were not thinking about ordering food online. It can also be said that you were not planning to have an online channel for your business or you did not have a system which you can make use of for checking stock or tracking orders.

With time everything has changed and now you can easily get such things done. Today the possibilities for businesses are endless with the significance of the Internet of Things increasing in everyday lives of people. Now you will be able to have your website integrated with any kind of machines favoring technological advancements and this will let you offer wings to any kind of your ideas.

Today, Amazon has been able to fulfill its crazy idea of swift delivery by making use of drones to deliver items which the customers purchased online. Similarly, if we look at CloudDDM, you will see that they have partnered with UPS to take manufacturing to the next level. Here the customers can make an order online for ordering prototypes and the same will be delivered to them the next day. They are doing their best and making changes in the area of additive manufacturing by making use of the latest technologies and their website.

Increase the effectiveness of your website

For any website, its effectiveness is very critical from the marketing point of view. You should be having an eye for your data and see where the visitors are clicking on and which are the pages they are visiting. You also need to know the time spend by visitors on those pages. You can learn the effectiveness of your website even in other ways, apart from using Google Analytics. You can have a better understanding about how visitors are moving through the website, what are the things that interest them and can increase the chances of hiring you by making use of techniques like conversion tracking, heat mapping, and user recordings.

Making use of calls-to-actions can be one of the best ways to make your website more effective. The call-to-action can be a link or a button which you place on your website and it is used to inspire or encourage the prospective customers to complete the action and become leads. It has to be taken care that the CTAs are interesting enough for the visitors and should be clearly defined so that they actually go ahead and use them.

Usability

As technology change, visitor trends change too. Say, for example, a few years back the design trend was to place all the important information on the first fold over the website. By doing so, the users will be able to see the important information on the website at a single place without having to scroll down. Today the number of mobile users has increased where scrolling on the page has to be done by fingers.

Navigation is another important feature which is linked with usability. Today a number of websites have moved towards offering horizontal navigation which can work well for the users who make use of devices with bigger screens. This can also be offered on devices with smaller screen size and here the navigation has to be adjusted accordingly. The websites of today make use of “Hamburger menu,” which is used at the top corner of the website with three horizontal lines, one above the other. With more number of websites using it, it has turned out to be a universal symbol for the menu button. The menu is displayed vertically over the smaller devices and to help with finger tapping enough space is offered between each menu item.

Improve loading times

45% of 18-to-24 year old say they’ll wait 4-6 seconds on their computers, but only 26% of this age group will wait that long on a cellphone. – Source

The success of the website needs to grab the attention of the visitors just within the first few seconds of its launch. You need to understand that there is no meaning in satisfying all the points mentioned above in your website if it takes much more time to load and the visitors will have to wait impatiently for it to happen. The loading time of the website is very important and even Google find it to be rewarding and they provide better search results placement for such websites. This means that if your website performs faster than your competitors in terms of website loading, Google will place your website on a better position in the search results.

Website performance

A number of things fall into place when it comes to load times of a website which includes optimization of the file system in your website, image sizes, web hosting account, and page caching. All of these factors can be optimized using different methods.

If you are having a lot of traffic to your website and have many local clients, then you should not be going for a shared web hosting which majority of the hosting providers are offering.

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Wrapping it up

With time business vision and user needs change and it is not easy for the business to come up with a new website every few years. It can turn out to be an expensive and painful affair for the business. So instead of moving ahead with this plan, the business can look for ways to update its website. So you should take time to see where the business stands today and where you want to see it a few years down the line. This is very important as in today’s time as such a website is no more the face of the business; instead, it is the most important part of it.

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    Ronak Patel

    Ronak Patel, the CEO of Aglowid IT Solutions, is a NASSCOM member and a published writer in top tech publications like DZone and Hacker Noon. With a background as a full-stack developer, he brings a wealth of technical expertise. Ronak's marketing acumen complements his technical skills, ensuring the delivery of innovative IT solutions that excel in the market.

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