How To Keep Your Website Updated

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In our increasingly digital age, it is crucial to make sure you keep your website updated with the times.

This means making changes when an aspect of your site is no longer working for your business. Your visitors may also get bored with the same design and content.

Therefore, an outdated website can be detrimental to the success of your business.

If you want to learn more about why you should always update your website and what areas to focus on, continue reading this post!

1. Change Your Design

An essential aspect of your website is your layout and page design. This can vary depending on what kind of content you provide.

A way to check is to get feedback from viewers to see what they like or don’t like about your site design.

Make changes as necessary, but remember, you have control over the final creative decision.

Experimenting

Managing your site will take time, and you don’t want to bounce around from design to design.

Find colors, fonts, and themes that you want to represent your brand and continue to use them. If you find after a few months that something isn’t fully conveying your brand, don’t be afraid to try new things.

You might find that your values/interests have shifted, and that’s okay!

Brands are not one set thing but are always growing and changing with time. It’s important to embrace those changes and have them flow into an updated website.

As they change, make sure you update and improve your site to reflect them. For example, if you start using a new logo or style, make sure you implement the change across your entire site.

Updating

And a friendly reminder, if you are just starting out, you will likely need to update your website design more frequently than a more established site.

This is because you will discover what works and doesn’t work. More seasoned websites don’t usually change as much because they have a well-established image that they have tailored and adjusted over time.

Even if you have had your site for a while now, it is still important to update other aspects. Most San Francisco web design companies will offer some sort of updates and maintenance as part of their package, and that will come in-handy.

2. Use the newest technology

Besides your physical design, you also want to pay attention to the technology you are using.

WordPress, and many other sites used to design websites, release updates often. However, this doesn’t automatically mean your personal site will be updated.

You likely will have to manually update it.

Be user friendly

Because of our fast-paced society, people spend less time in one place—both digitally and physically. So, first impressions can make or break your site.

One step is to check your site navigation often. You want to make sure pages load fast, links lead where they should, and it is easy to use.

To do this, you might want to enlist the help of friends or family to test out your pages for honest feedback. It is easy to be biased if you do it yourself since you know what you envision it to be.

This can also be a useful method when exploring layout designs as well.

Enhance security

Besides updating your technology to be user friendly, it is also crucial for security purposes.

This is especially true if you run an online store where people insert important information like card numbers.

Keeping your website up to date allows you to protect their privacy and information.

Using more dated technology and not updating when new updates are released can make your site more susceptible to hackers.

While this is not only dangerous for your customers, it can also affect your business’s reputation.

3. Pay attention to old and new content

You might think that you need to focus only on the new content you are, but the truth is your old content is just as important.

Refresh old material

You don’t want old content that no longer reflects your brand to stay on your site. Go through older posts as needed to weed out material that is no longer relevant or beneficial.

If you find stuff that is no longer accurate, be sure to delete or update it as well.

Connect old content to new content

Along with eliminating old content, you should also connect it to newer content.

Oftentimes, this content can be forgotten, just collecting metaphorical dust in the dark depths of your site.

Add hyperlinks to these old posts when they relate as a way to drive traffic to them again.

But that’s enough talk about old content, so let’s move on to new.

Have a schedule

As you probably expected, the content you are and will produce is also vital.

An excellent way to stay on top of it is to use a content scheduler. This can occur in different ways based on your individual preference.

Here at LadyBossBlogger, we use a WordPress plug-in to schedule our blog posts.

However, we also use social media schedulers like:

Tailwind for Pinterest
SmarterQueue for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
Planoly for Instagram

This ensures a post is always guaranteed to be published at a specific time each day.

While consistent posting attracts more attention to your site, it also makes your life easier. You won’t have to struggle each day to produce a post.

Follow trends

And lastly, don’t be afraid to take advantage of trends. They can be a business’s best friend.

But to be able to use them, you have to keep up with them in the first place. Always keep an eye out for how you might be able to tailor them to your content and boost your traffic.

4. Perform checks often

For your website to succeed, you should dedicate a set time in your monthly or even weekly schedule to make sure everything is updated.

If you don’t make time, you likely never will.

During these checks, go through:

If links or sites are broken or no longer relevant, take them down as soon as you notice or when you stop using them.

Additionally, if your website or business includes an online store, keep your products and prices up to date as well.

5. Evaluate target audience and analytics

You should also evaluate and pay attention to the demographics of your visitors as much as possible in your journey to keep your website updated.

If you’re not reaching your target audience, maybe shift focus groups or brainstorm how to engage them better.

Learn their popular habits/interests and their favorite social media apps. You can use both as a guide to how you design and market your brand and website.

Do this often to make sure you are succeeding in reaching who you are trying to. If you don’t, it could cause a lack of traffic or sales.

While keeping your website updated can seem like a daunting task, if you focus on your design, technology, content, and audience your life will be much easier.

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Katelyn Beery is a blogging intern at LadyBossBlogger.com. She majors in writing with a minor in environmental studies at Ithaca College. Katelyn hopes to pursue a career in either technical or professional writing. She can usually be found cleaning, listening to music, or gazing at clouds.

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