The 7 Easy Steps To Update Your Website

Even though we’ve seen a rise in mobile apps and there is an app for almost every brand, it still hasn’t reduced the significance of a website.

Websites are still pretty important users even engage with them on their smartphones. However, when users find a website that doesn’t look attractive, loads slowly, or doesn’t offer multiple payment options – they abandon such websites and forget about them.

In the digital era we’re living and breathing in, website updation has become crucial. The technological world is changing and evolving every second, and your website needs to stick with the times to stay relevant.

If you fail at website updating, then you risk losing your customers to your competitors, which means a significant decrease in your revenue.

Five Signs That Indicate You Should Be Updating Your Website

Your website is the first platform where customers interact with your brand unless there is a mobile app; however, if you just have a website, you should do your best to keep it updated.

Web development technology and techniques are constantly changing, so here are five signs that will indicate you need to mix things up a little.

1. The Design Is Old

A website only attracts attention if the design is fresh and clean. If a user likes what they see, they will continue to interact with your website. You might think your website is trendy, but that was when you created the website; however, now, chances are with the new technology, it’s outdated.

2. Needs Better Security

With the increasing public involvement with technology, the old website security options have become history. Website security is one of the things brands can tend to look over; however, it’s extremely important. Go through your framework and platform to analyze how much more secure you can make it to protect your website and user data.

3. Your Website Needs To Be Responsive

We’re in a society where smartphones are a big deal; because everyone owns one. Smartphone users find it easy to browse the internet and shop online through their smartphones. However, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, then you could lose those customers. The way to combat this is by implementing a responsive design. A responsive design-based website will adjust according to any screen size. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, then maybe it’s time to revamp the design.

4. The Content Is Outdated

Keeping your content fresh and unique plays an important role in improving your SEO ranking, and it helps you build a trustworthy relationship with your customers. The easy way to update website content is by checking your website content to analyze how old it is. You might have overlooked outdated addresses, outdated blogs, or old product descriptions. Make sure to change your addresses, and improve your old blogs and product descriptions so that your website can attract new traffic.

5. The Load Time Is A Nuisance

One of the most annoying aspects of an outdated website is a slow loading speed. It annoys the customer, they end up leaving, and you lose customers. To prevent that from happening, you can use technologies like lazy loading, which only loads images and videos on the screen and loads other visual content as the viewer scrolls down.

The Step By Step Guide On How To Update Website

1. Review Your Current Website And Use A/B Testing

One of the important things to understand while updating a website is the important aspect of your current website. Before you revamp your website completely, you need to keep the things that have worked up till now.   The thorough evaluation will help you make a list of things that are great for attracting website traffic. Here are things you need to look into:

Visual content – Check to see if the quality of the images on your website is up to the mark. Are they blurry? Broken? Distorted? Do you think a fresh product shoot will make your website better?

Likewise, check all the embedded videos as well. Are the links working? Are the links relevant? Can you add better videos to your content? Make sure your video content aligns with your brand image.

Written content: After visuals, go through your written content. Do you think your product descriptions should be updated? Do some of your blogs need more content? Can you make your blogs informative or add more visual content?

2. Review Your Backend Technology And Analytics

The front end of your website is for your customers; however, it’s important to review your backend controls as well. The analytics of your website will give you insights into your target audience. You will understand better what your audience is like, how they behave, where are most of your traffic coming from, and how you can tailor websites updates according to their needs.

In this step, you can add new tools to monitor your website’s traffic better and check important information regarding each webpage separately. You can make use of insights like, which page is popular, which page is least popular, how much time users like spending on your website, etc. A famous tool for gathering all this data is Google Analytics, it records everything, and you can generate a report at any time.

When you understand your audience better, you can improve the backend and frontend of your website to fulfill your audience’s needs.

3. Study What Your Competitors Are Doing

While you’re busy running a website with outdated designs and technologies, your competitors are getting ahead of you and stealing your customers. After understanding your audience, the next step is to create a detailed report on what your competitors are doing.

The market research will reveal information that you might be overlooking, like:

• What is your competitor doing right?
• Why is there web design more popular?
• How often do they update their website?

Additionally, if you study your competitor websites closely, you can also get some design inspiration from them. You can also come across something they’re doing wrong and then do that correctly for your website. The key is to thoroughly compare your website with theirs, to adopt their good traits, which helps you attract more traffic and update your website.

Some great tools you can use to gather data are SimilarWeb, SEMRush, and Ahrefs. You can use these tools to study your competitor’s website and understand why they are attracting traffic.

4. Research What Your Audience Wants

Now you’ve analyzed what your competitors are doing and make a list of things you want to add to your website. The next step is considering your audience who might be asking for some new features like maybe a shorter check out process or more payment options. It’s important to know what your customers like about the current website.

Your audience would love new features, but there are also features and aspects of your website that they love and would want you to keep. Why do you need to do this? Because the website is a platform to attract customers, and if you remove aspects they love, they’ll take their business elsewhere.

Talk to your audience, ask them what they like and dislike and then add features that will add value to your website and the user experience. Additionally, this step can also help you identify some problems your customers face while engaging with your website, and you can work on updating that too.

How can you gather feedback? Well, there are multiple ways of gathering feedback.

• You can create a poll on your social media pages.
• Send emails for your customers to fill out feedback forms.
• Have customers rate your website and ask for reasons if they rate nine out ten or lower.
• Talk to them in comment threads and address their concerns.
• Conduct detailed surveys across platforms.

5.  Add Powerful Graphics And Written Content

The good thing about updatable websites is that there is no need to build them from scratch; you just fix existing issues and go back to doing your thing. Your blogs could be great and extraordinary, but if they don’t look like it, then there’s no use having them. When it comes to website design, the impression you make on your audience plays a major role. Did you know the graphics, theme, and colors of your website will encourage them to engage with your website even if they can’t navigate your website properly?

You have two options to spruce up your website. Study your existing graphics, images, and videos to analyze if they could use some bling. The other option is creating new content from scratch.

If I were redesigning my website, I would want fresh visual content to make my website look new and chic. You can leverage tools like Blender or Anima8 to create new images and videos that can improve the appeal of your website.

How can you edit existing images? Well, you can add appealing effects to them, changing their background, or play around with the colors. Alternatively, you can also download new images and edit those.

Another great technique is to revamp your product images by doing a fresh photoshoot completely. You could give them the same background so that your catalog is appealing to look at for customers. It’s all about drawing the attention of your audience.

6. Infuse Your Design With The Hottest Trends

Up to this point, you know the content you need, what your audience expects, and what your competitors are doing. The next step is to align all the elements and your web design according to the hottest trends. When was the design last updated according to the growing market?

Ask your developer and designer team to understand the current web design trends and techniques which are famous. They need to be in the know consistently so that your website is always up-to-date.

One thing you can do is keep a close watch on what new trends your competitors are implementing on their website. Use the right tools to identify any new changes that you can use on your website.

Another way to stay on top of trends is by reading tech-related blogs online or simply Googling the newest website design trends. You can pick the best trends that compliment your website design. The only way you can do this if you’re always aware of what’s new in the market, so make it a habit to browse new trends weekly.

7. Improve Your SEO

The last step and the most important step of this guide is optimizing your SEO. You’ll be able to target your audience, but what about the search engines? You probably have a few techniques to make your SEO work; however, it’s time to change up things a little. Before you launch your redesigned website, it’s important to visit your SEO strategies as well.

Make sure all your new images have meta tags and alt texts, your new web pages have meta titles, meta description, and SEO content which the search engines can find easily. You will also need to revamp and edit your URLs to ensure they are SEO-friendly.

You can start by searching for high-volume keywords, which you can incorporate in your content and overall website to attract the search engine bots and traffic. In case this is too much work, you can hire website updating services that can offer you in achieving your goal. The company will help design your website and make it SEO-friendly so that customers can engage with your business.

In Conclusion

If you’re someone who’s updating their website for the first time, the guide should help you do it properly; however, I think every website should keep changing.

A big part of the audience loves change and a crisp, new website design, so you have to make sure to changes things up a bit by bit each year.

Once you’re confident that you’ve updated your website to the best of your abilities, launch it and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Good luck!