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Everyone knows that, as a business, you need to be online. When you aren’t online customers cannot easily find you, new customers have no chance of finding you, and your sales are limited to those in your area. Being online isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity, but having a bad website is almost as unhelpful as having no website at all.
If your website has a high bounce rate, meaning that visitors land on your front page and then leave, you need to update your website. If your website is outdated both in terms of look and function, it needs to be updated. If your website doesn’t have a strong and easy-to-use e-commerce platform, your website needs to be updated. Knowing how to update your website for the future is key, and following this guide can help you:
Audit Your Website
The first step to understanding what you need to fix on your website is to audit it. There are two main portions of this audit that you will need to undertake.
The first is to determine whether the look and function of the website are enough to attract users and make the experience a positive one. Typically, if you don’t love how a website looks or if your friends cannot perform simple tasks due to outdated links or broken pages, your website will need a complete makeover.
The second kind of audit you should do is an SEO audit. The last thing you want is outdated and now black-listed SEO techniques like keyword stuffing on your website. Google now looks for these black-hat techniques and will rank you negatively (and even de-list you entirely) from its search results.
To do this, you can use programs to crawl through your website. There are options, both free and paid, that will help you find broken links and other faults on your website with ease. You should also use site analytics to help you determine where the faults are on your website. If you have one key page that doesn’t get any traffic, it could be because there is no way to access it.
Your website will be judged by many factors, including its user-friendliness, speed, use of white-hat on-page SEO techniques, and its security. You will also want to improve and update the content on your site so that it is valuable and SEO-friendly.
Updating the Aesthetics
Depending on how old your website is, updating your aesthetics could be as easy as choosing a new theme or as time-consuming as starting a new website entirely. Thankfully, websites no longer need to be manually created in order to work. In fact, you barely need to have any experience in XML, HTML, or XHTML in order to get a beautiful site up and running. All you need to do is choose the best website builder for you, the hosting options, and the theme. The better your audit, the more you will understand what your website needs. Sometimes it is much better to start from scratch and get it right than it is to try to fix a very flawed website.
Make it Secure
Security has come a long way, and if your website doesn’t have the latest protocols and security measures in place, you need to make changes immediately. This is especially important if your website has an e-commerce section. You will want to ensure that your customers’ data and financial information is as secure as possible. This will mean using SSL certificates, web application firewalls (WAF) and more. The more effort you put into making your website secure, the better.
Keep it Updated
One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is to put all that effort into building or redesigning their website and then leaving it. Google ranks websites that update frequently more favorably, and, furthermore, adding a blog section that offers tutorials, and other helpful bits of information can provide more value to your customers.
Your website is your digital store. The more effort you put into it, the more attractive it will be to users and search engines alike. The more attractive your website is to them, the more customers, sales, and repeat business your business can expect. Updating and fixing your website is imperative, and starting today should be your next step.