4 Ways to Keep Your Website Up to Date

Keeping your website up to date is important for a number of reasons. Not only does an old, out of date site reflect badly on your brand, but it can also end up slipping low in the search rankings. Search engines and customers will soon lose interest when they realize you’re not updating anymore. Luckily, updating your site is usually a quick and easy process, and there a few things you can do to keep things fresh.

1. Update your content

Old content runs the risk of being irrelevant, unimportant or even completely wrong, so it’s important to update your website regularly with fresh content. It doesn’t take long to write a blog post or create a fun infographic that can be shared online, and this ensures that people know that your site is still running and that you haven’t lost interest.

Some quick ways to update your content include:

• Writing about new products or business news
  
• Looking at the kind of articles that generate a lot of clicks and focusing on that format
  
• Going through old webpages and checking for errors
  
• Rewriting headers and banners etc. if they need to be seasonally relevant
  
• Making sure things like your FAQs and contact details are correct
  

Don’t be afraid to delete old and irrelevant content and to merge articles that are too similar, as this will give your website a fresh feel.

2. Check your website’s security

As your website gets older, if it’s not updated, it becomes vulnerable to a number of cybersecurity problems. These can range from malware to security breaches. Using managed website host such as Onyx keeps your website secure with automatic updates, as vulnerabilities are exposed. Other steps such as using HTTPS to secure pages where people submit information can also help.

3. Refresh the design

Think of the websites you used to visit a lot 10 years ago. Odds are, they’d look pretty dated by today’s standards, not to mention being slow and difficult to use. Website design is like fashion, and certain designs that look great at this moment can look dated pretty quickly. If your website is looking cluttered, running slowly or doesn’t have that 2020 vibe, it might be time for a website design refresh. Just changing a few elements can bring your site up to date so you’re not left behind the competition.

Design changes are also a great marketing tool, allowing you to ‘relaunch’ your site and giving you an excuse to bring it to people’s attention.

4. Hire a developer

Some websites are patched together in different types of code and don’t run as well as they could. Web developers can either be part of your team or self-employed, and they work on your site’s performance overall, such as improving the way people find products and checkout as well as helping the site run smoothly. It’s easy for websites to become slow and difficult to use over time, so make sure you keep up with the competition.

Whether it is your website’s content or performance that is in need of a refresh, updating your site doesn’t have to be a long or complex process, and a few tweaks can often be enough to keep you on track.