How Often Should you rebuild or update your website?

First impressions count as there are no second chances to make a first impression.

What is the first impression that your customers are likely to have with your business?

With the popularity of smartphones, virtually everyone has mobile access to the web at their finger tips and able to do some sort of background research and comparison on a business, its products or services offered, prior to deciding to make a purchase.

Look inwardly at yourself for a moment and ask yourself; when deciding to make a non-regular purchase - a gift or a relatively inexpensive product - from either a physical store or online, what is your own buying process? Do you just go to the first store that comes to your mind and buy on the fly or do you do some online research first?

Judgement

The majority of people search firstly on cost and locality of the item in question and make comparisons with other retailers, but before purchasing they will normally check who they are purchasing from which will include your website and checking out any links to social media, available online reviews and testimonials and various other resources in order to build up a sense of trust before parting with any money, which is why it is vital that your website makes a positive first impression.

If you haven’t updated your website for some time, it’s possible that your website is now behind the times, not keeping up with the expected consumer trends and norms, incorrect or outdated information, visually clunky, slow loading or even totally unusable on modern devices such as tablets or smartphones. A good indication of your website performance is a high or low bounce rate, the higher it is, the more you should seriously consider investing in your website in order to turn the tide.

It is estimated that 47% of users expect a website to load in 2 second or less.

But don’t panic, not just yet. Just because you have a high bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean you need a brand-new website. The website itself may be perfectly fine but just needing a bit of TLC from yourself. A spring clean so to speak with information updated, regular frequent blog articles, linking to social media channels – there are numerous ways we can take your poorly performing website and reinvigorate it just by making a few minor tweaks and adjustments.

How Often Should I Update My Website?

How often do shops restock and change their window display? The answer is the same, frequently. My local supermarket is constantly moving things around which turns my nipping in for bread and eggs into a ￡40 shop as I’ll need this, and that and this and oops I forgot the bread and eggs.

Your website visitors (customers) want your products or services, and that’s a fact – they simply wouldn’t be visiting your site if they didn’t want anything.

Updating your site on a regular basis improves your websites rankings with other websites selling similar products or services as yours. 

Updates V Ranking

Lets take your website and an make an identical copy and launch both at the same time so that they both appear in the Google Search Engine Ranks on equal points.

With the identical copy we will just park it, sit it in the corner collecting dust with no updates whatsoever. 

With your website however, we will provide regular updates to the content and a monthly blog post shared to social media.

Where do you think the two websites would be in the organic search rankings after six months? Certainly not on equal points any more that’s for sure.

Your website which has received regular updates would be actively promoted by Google and pushed up the rankings whereas the website covered in dust and cobwebs would be somewhere at the bottom of the pile.

So, where do you think your website currently sits in the organic search rankings? Is there anything you can do to improve its position?

Regular website updates and a bit of TLC maintenance will keep both Google and your customers happy; I personally recommend updating your website in some form at least monthly as a bare minimum. Schedule a couple of hours every month in your diary. Dedicated to updating your website.

With my own website I aim to post a blog weekly (such as this one) which I share on social media which in turn drives traffic to my website, again improving the rankings, however, it isn’t an overnight cure – it takes time to move up in the ranks in a very competitive market but luckily there’s other things such as SEO etc which can help you move up. These will be covered in later topics.

My Recommendations for Website Updates

As the saying goes – Keep it simple stupid. When making website changes, perform small tweaks at a time, if you change a load of things all at once, how are you possibly going to know what’s worked and what hasn’t? Make a small change, sit back and observe the bounce rate.

If not doing so already, consider writing a monthly blog post – it doesn’t have to be as heavy as ‘War & Peace’, just something which your customers will be interested in, an insight into your business, something they could take away and put into practice themselves (such as this blog). Changes could be as simple as writing new product descriptions, latest news about new products or services you are offering or adding new customer testimonials or reviews.

It doesn’t have to be anything major, simply something fresh which tells both your customers and Google that you have something fresh, relevant and valuable to share.

One word of advice, when writing content either about a product or within a blog, remember that what makes sense to you, doesn’t necessarily mean it makes sense to your customer. Always write from your customers perspective. What questions are they asking and how are you going to get the answer across to them?

When Should I Look at Getting A New Website? 

This is the million-pound question –firstly; do you need a new website? And secondly; why?

If your business has significantly changed, possibly the business model itself, the company’s image and branding, significant changes to products and services now offered or more additional functionality is required then yes, defiantly go for a new website and sooner rather than later.

However, if there has been little to no change, then I would recommend having a new website every 3-4 years, simply due to changes in technology, better performance and modifications to the search engine algorithms which your current site simply wasn’t built for.

Investing time and money into your website is crucial, as I mentioned right at the beginning, there is no second chance to make a first impression.

If you would like more information about updating your website or advice on building a new website altogether, please contact Bluemotion Digital