When was the last time you took an objective look at your company website? 

When first created, it might have been a modern masterpiece, but time and new trends quickly change that.

Often when running a business, we don’t take the time to look at our website design all that often. Over time, this can cause issues for visitors and even reduce sales.

Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathway website hasn’t had an update since the early 2000s. But even though his investment strategies work well, that doesn’t mean you should follow his website strategy.

In today’s fast-moving world, it’s essential to stay up-to-date and current and to offer a first class user experience. Not only in terms of looks but also the functionality. 

Over the years of designing and helping to maintain hundreds of websites for our clients, we have learned a lot about what it takes to keep a site updated and running well. 

Here are four important ways that you should keep your site updated.

1) Patches & Updates

Security specific patches, plugins, and version updates should happen as soon as they become available. Most CRM platforms today will offer an automatic option for updates, which can be a good idea for simple websites.

For complex, high-traffic or ecommerce sites, patches and updates should always be completed in a staging environment to ensure they don’t stop workflow. 

2) Fresh Content

When it comes to keeping your site fresh, your blog and vlog are an excellent way to do it. Ideally, if you can update your blog once a week, that signals Google to visit and index your site more frequently. If you can’t manage writing or recording content yourself, you can always outsource it and get great results. New website content is important if you want the search engines to keep adding new keywords to your site’s ranking. A simple blog post once or twice a week in a topic area that you have expertise in will be enough to start to gather more traffic to your web page.

Make sure to review your FAQs regularly. If you hear the same questions from a lot of your customers, make sure to add them to the website.

3) New Functionality

To improve your customer experience, you can even consider adding new services. Modern websites can offer functionality such as ecommerce purchases, chat functionality, and calendar integration. These can be great additions if you know they will help your customers have a better experience.

Also, you must keep your site updated for a good mobile experience and adapt to new trends such as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). This helps your site work on all platforms and devices, and load quickly across mobile devices. It will also help to reduce website bounce rate which can negatively affect your site’s SEO rankings.

4) New Look

While not every business needs an entire rebrand every few years, it can help to make sure your brand looks and feels fresh. If your logo, fonts, and brand colors feel a little staid, it can help to work with a designer to update them a little.

Having modern images is important as well, and make sure all current team members and contact info are added to the site. Accurate information will help customers to get a feel for who you are before they contact you.

Remember that your website is your virtual ‘first impression’ of your company. Ensure you invest some time to make it a favorable one. Some simple tweaks every three months or so, and a good refresh/rebrand every five years is a great way to make sure your website is working for you.

Ready to improve the look and feel of your site? Brandastic is a web design and development agency with offices in offices in Orange County, Los Angeles, and Austin. We can help grow your audience and drive more sales from your website. Contact us today to get started.