5 reasons why you should keep your website up to date
Launching your new website is the culmination of a lot of work put in by you, your staff and your web development partners. After months of editing content, reviewing stages of the website, populating spreadsheets with stock levels and endlessly updating product photo’s you may be tempted to sit back with a refreshing beverage and think “phew, I’m glad that’s over with.”
Few Major reasons Why you should keep your website up to date.
1. Keep content fresh
You should keep news and product releases up to date to show visitors that you are busy. Got a new member of staff? Put it on the website. Launched a new product? Put it on the website.
Keeping content fresh is key to ensuring returning visitors and keep your website up to date.
- Keep news up to date, product releases etc to show visitors that you are busy
- Regular updates and changes are good for SEO
- Old, out of date or incorrect content loses customers
2. Security is important
From a technical point of view you should keep abreast of updates as things change. Security exploits in everything from the operating system through to changes in end-user devices (browsers, phones etc) mean that this is a never ending task. An unpatched security vulnerability could lead to your website being hacked and there could be legal repercussions if customer’s personal data is stolen.
You should keep your website up to date with security fixes immediately an exploit is announced and fixed.
The main reasons for a security update being needed are:
- Exploits in Operating System (Windows, Linux).
- Exploits in server software (database servers, web server software)
- Exploits in server-side languages (PHP, Node.js)
- Exploits in frameworks (Zend Framework, Symfony)
- Exploits in WordPress, and Magento are publicised widely
- Exploits in the web infrastructure (for example, see the Heartbleed vulnerability)
3. Beat your competition
Keeping your website up to date helps give you the edge over your competition. Sure, you’ve just spent thousands on your new competition-killing website and you want to sit back and recoup the benefits but it won’t be long before your competitors improve their websites. Keeping on top of design changes, social media, performance and analytics are crucial to beating off your rivals.
Customers also shop around and compare products across different sites. After price and delivery it is likely that design and ease of use become the major factors in choosing which website to buy from. Keep your website up to date with user experience tips and techniques to help beat your competition.
4. Marketing
Changing your website regularly gives your marketing team room to be creative and push to improve sales. Maybe you have a new product you want to promote, a competition you want to run or a conference coming up Providing the marketing team tools to put this information on the website quickly should help improve sales.
It also works the other way too. If there is functionality on your website that simply hasn’t worked out or is no longer relevant you should remove it. If you are leveraging social media to keep your customers updated and you no longer send an email newsletter, you should remove the ‘sign up to our mailing list’ feature.
- Gives chance to improve marketing features, adding sales, improving return on investment
- Remove functionality that doesn’t provide value and add functionality that does
5. Search Engines
Another key reason for continuously keeping your website updated is for search engin optimisation (SEO). The top search engines are regularly updating their algorithms and changing the requirements for high ranking on their results pages. A few years ago Google ranked pages based on the number of links to it from other websites. This resulted in ‘link farming’ – paid services that would link to your website from their pool of sites. Many of these sites would be unrelated to the content on your site.
Google then changed their algorithm to focus on the quality of the content on your website. Higher scoring was attributed to good copy, relevant titles and quality keywords. If your website relied upon the link farming technique to score highly and you haven’t updated since, you’ll find your ranking will have dropped and sales will have fallen badly.
Another change implemented by Google recently is a ranking for sites that use responsive web design. If you don’t keep your website up to date to work on mobile devices you’ll start dropping off the search results.
For the maintainance or a new order for website you can contact SLiT Solutions at sales@slitsolution.com ourJoin our facebook page SLiT Solutions Facebook Page.
