Why Staying Up-to-Date With Your Website is Important

How often should I update my website?

There are a lot of factors that play into this answer, but on average it’s best to update about once a month, or as often as it needs to be. Technology moves fast and Google is constantly updating its algorithms. Updating your site at least once a month will keep your site fresh and new for your visitors as well as show the search engines like Google that your site is active and up-to-date.

Design trends are always changing as well. Full site overhauls should be done every 1-2 years depending on how fast design trends are changing. You may notice that websites from 2010 look nothing like they do now, and this is because as technology advances, websites become more and more responsive and web designers need to stay on top of these design changes.

Along with changing algorithms and changing design trends, there is also trends in the language we use. With time some terms that people use may fall out of favor or be updated to a more “politically correct” term. This is something that website owners need to pay close attention to because if you are using an “old” term it may effect the user experience.

For example, LGBT is now LGBTQ+. Terms will fall out of favor after a while, like how the term COVID-19 has been big the past 2 years, but in a few years the term will fall out of use and will need to be updated. In a few months this very blog will need to be updated to stay current with the times

What are the benefits of updating my website?

Keeping your website up to date is one of the best ways to ensure your business’s success. It will show prospective customers that you are current, relevant, and engaging with their needs. Some benefits of updating your website regularly are:

• Improved search engine optimization (SEO)
• Builds domain authority
• Keeps your audience engaged and informed
• Gives you an upper leg on your competition

Fresh and relevant content are one of the major ranking factors when it comes to how Google decides who to put at the top of the search engine results page. When you update the content on your website, Google will see it as new and relevant and give you a better opportunity to rank higher.

Updating broken links on your website, along with the regular content updates will build your domain authority as well. This is another factor that Google looks at when deciding who to place at the top of the results page.

New content on your website will entice readers to keep coming back to check out what has changed. It also keeps them engaged and informed with what you and your company are doing.

Ways to keep your site updated and fresh

There are many different ways that you can keep your site updated and fresh, most of which we have briefly talked about above. Some of the simple ways to make sure everything is up-to-date would be reviewing old blogs and old content that are on your site. See if you can optimize anything including keywords or the tone of voice they were written in.

Reviewing all of your content for spelling and grammar errors is another way to make sure your website is updated. If you have a large website it might be a good idea to go page by page and split this task up between days so it is less stressful. This doesn’t have to be done often unless you are constantly creating new content, because once you review it and change all the errors, there won’t be any more until the next piece of content is created. I would suggest checking your site bi-weekly for any spelling or grammatical errors.

Checking bad or broken links can be quite easy with help from some outside resources. One of my favorites is AHrefs.com, it has a free broken link checker where all you need to do is enter the domain or URL of a website and it will crawl the website for you and inform you of any broken or bad links. From there you can go into your website and either enter a new link or get rid of the bad ones completely.

Conclusion

By now you should have a better understanding of why updating your website is important for your business. To touch back on some of the things we talked about above, remember that out-of-date content is bad for the user experience because consumers love real-time. They are usually searching for your business because they plan to visit or learn more about it, so having it up-to-date is crucial.

You should update your website every 1-2 weeks checking for grammar, spelling, and anything else you might have missed the first run through. You should also do a full site overhaul every 1-2 years due to design trends changing. There are lots of benefits to doing this including improved SEO, building domain authority, keeping your audience engaged, and many more.

Now it’s time for you to go check out your own website and dust off some cobwebs and get that old content out of there and update it with some fresh, new, and refreshing content.

Happy editing!!