In many ways, your business website is the centerpiece of all your marketing efforts. It’s the hub where users can obtain information about your products and services. It’s where you draw traffic, capture leads, and ultimately generate conversions. All your other marketing channels, including social media and SEO, orbit around the website.
As such, it’s important to keep your website totally up to date. Rather than considering it to be static or unchanging, business owners should be in the habit of updating their website every few years. If your website was state-of-art when you built it, then you might be able to get away with updating every 5-7 years, depending what new technology is available and expected by users and search publishers. Let’s consider just a few of the reasons why updating your website makes sense.
Why Update Your Business Website?
1) Increase your site speed.
Older websites often move at a languid pace, requiring several seconds to fully load on the user’s browser. A slow website can compromise your user experience and even diminish your SEO efforts, so it’s important to update the structure of the site to ensure optimal performance.
A website redesign can help you achieve the speedy experience necessary to please your users and keep them on the page.
2) Rethink your navigation.
One of the most important roles your website plays is helping users find the information they need without any headaches or hassle. That’s largely a matter of your navigation. A good website provides a simple, elegant structure, making it abundantly clear where users should turn next in their consumer journey.
If your navigation is needlessly complicated or less than intuitive, that’s a good sign that you should update your website with a whole new page hierarchy and internal linking system.
3) Keep up with Google’s updates.
Google’s algorithms change pretty often, and while many of those changes are minor in nature, some of them have a broader impact. Sometimes, algorithmic updates require website owners to adjust their content, their site structure, or other elements that may impact user experience.
The bottom line: Google’s search algorithms aren’t static, so your website can’t be static, either. Update your site to keep up with the ever-evolving search engine.
4) Update your content.
It’s not just Google that changes. Your business changes, too. Over time, it’s natural for your scope of products and services to evolve, and even your brand mission and values may grow and shift.
It’s important to keep your website content fully aligned with what your brand represents, and what you offer to your customers and clients. This may mean tweaking some of the language on your homepage, but it may also mean a full revamp of your written content, images, and videos.
5) Ensure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly.
Statistics show that a majority of online activity, including Google searches, now happens on mobile devices. That means it’s of the utmost importance for your website to be accessible and easy-to-navigate on any type of browser or device.
Even so, we’ve found that there are still some businesses that haven’t invested in responsive/mobile-friendly designs. If that’s you, then now’s the time to move ahead with your website overhaul.
6) Enhance your aesthetics.
There’s nothing shallow or superficial about taking your website aesthetics seriously. On the contrary, the visual presentation of your brand can have a make-or-break effect on the conversions you generate. If your website looks like it was made in the 1990s, or has an aesthetic palette that’s unpolished or unprofessional, you could actually lose the trust of potential buyers.
Take a long, hard look at your website, perhaps viewing some competitor sites for comparison. If your site looks behind-the-times, consider an update.
7) Improve your calls to action.
An effective website needs multiple calls to action, at least one per page, to direct visitors on what steps to take next. Your CTAs must be well-worded, properly formatted, and strategically positioned on the page, ensuring they generate results. Meanwhile, if your website isn’t getting the job done, one reason could be that your CTA strategy needs an upgrade.
To improve the quality of your calls to action, consider a whole new website design.
8) Make it easier to update.
Is it a headache for you to go into the back end of your website to make minor announcements, updates, or revisions? If so, that’s reason enough to update the site. When you work with your website designer, emphasize your desire to make simple updates without a lot of administrative burden. Your website designer should be able to direct you toward an easy and intuitive back end.
Talk with enCOMPASS About a Website Overhaul
No matter your rationale for updating your business website, our team can help. At enCOMPASS, we’re known for designing sleek, effective websites that have SEO and other marketing considerations factored in, creating a final product that helps you achieve all your goals. We’ve won over 240 awards for it!
We’d love to tell you more about our approach to website updates and redesigns. Contact our team to learn more!
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