Updating your website – 5 Top tips.

Your website should always be changing and developing to stay engaged with your audience. If you want to keep your content desirable, you’ll have to stay on top of your game and make sure you’re updating your website, covering the latest trends. Otherwise, you might risk appearing stale and irrelevant.

Our straightforward guide will explain how to update your website efficiently so that you can seamlessly tweak your site and give it the freshening up it requires. We have assumed that you have a website with a high-quality CMS system that will enable you to edit and manage your site as you need.

Updating your Website – Why?

Before you look at updating your website, which includes a website redesign, consider whether a few simple adjustments could help bring your site to the next level. It is one thing to know how to design a website, but it is another thing to keep it constantly up–to–date. If your website has the right tools, you should be able to make quick and simple adjustments that can have a very positive impact on your website performance.

You should consider updating your website if…

• The design is looking tired or outdated
• You are seeing a decline in your website performance
• You have updated the keyword targeting and SEO strategy.
• Navigation on the site is causing visitor issues.
• You need to improve your website speed, bounce rate or other site metrics.

Review your content

To begin updating your website, start by evaluating your current site. Make a list of what works well and what doesn‘t. This will help you determine what changes need to be made.

Visual Content

Make sure your visual assets are high quality and relevant. This includes images and videos. Anything that looks blurry, pixelated, or generally outdated should be replaced. Additionally, check to see if any images are no longer relevant or aligned with your current brand identity.

Written Content

Your written content is vital, not only to communicate articulately to your audience but rank well in search engines.  Make sure that all of the content is accurate, all links are working correctly and make sure that the current content reflects how your business now operates.

Review your data

If you want to better understand your customers, analyse their behaviour. Why do they act the way they do? If a lot of visitors are leaving a certain page without interacting with it, think about what makes that page different. Does it have more text? Does it load more slowly? With this information, you can make more informed decisions about updates to your website.

Evaluate the Competition

As you work on your website update, take some time to research your competitors. Browse their websites and compare your findings to your own site. See if you‘re missing any crucial information, pages, or content. You may also find some good ideas to adopt and implement to help improve your site.

Get Inspired

Get to know your market better by looking around and searching for inspiration in both your own and other industries. For ideas, browse website design examples, design museums, and graphic design magazines. You may find something that sparks your creativity from other fields, such as a colour palette you noticed in a boutique window display or a poster for a concert.

Look at current Trends

If you want to maintain a deep understanding of current web design trends, you need to be constantly keeping yourself updated. This doesn‘t mean you need to be a professional website designer, but as a website owner, you should be aware of what‘s going on. Regularly check your competitor‘s websites to see any changes or updates they make, such as increased use of video, new pages, etc.

In short, if you are going to make significant updates to your website, do your research and identify if more is required. As long as you have a working, high-quality CMS system or website builder and you understand what tools you have available, you should be able to update your website, keep it fresh and improve its performance of the website. The key to a successful update is to identify what you need to adjust and more importantly, why. If you are looking to improve eCommerce sales, plan adjustments accordingly. Once you understand and document the end goal, you are able to plan and track performance with key metrics in mind.

At DigiBubble, we always work with our clients to ensure that their website is updated and fairly reflects their business. We always start with a website health check with will identify any technical issues you would want to tackle. From there we work with clients to look at the industry trends, and common practices and build a content strategy to reflect them. If you would like to book a free consultation to explore how you can be improving your website, click here to book some time with one of our digital experts.