Benefits of Updating a Website
Last updated: Jan 04, 2020
Updating your website is an essential step in the development of your business and its brand. It is a way to keep your content up to date, your customers informed on new products and services, and enhance your websites SEO value. The most visited sites on the internet are those that always offer something new to digest, while those that remain static getting left behind.
Why is updating a website important?
You may think that when a website is launched – that’s it, job done for a few years. Unfortunately, this is not the case, Google is constantly crawling the web to rank and re-rank every website they find in order to show the best search results to their users. This means that they will favour websites that are constantly updated over those who are not actively updated. Your website presents valuable information to your potential clients.
As time passes the strategies and information that may have been accurate just a few months ago might have completely changed. If Google is constantly finding fresh content on your site, they will recognize you as someone who is always providing new and relevant information to your readers which correlates with you ranking. Fresh design for your landing or home page can also be the difference between a visitor sticking around or bouncing. An eye-catching design may lure in readers to stay for longer which will give the readers more time to appreciate your content. Making unnecessary changes, additions, or postings every hour will not help your website and may actually cause problems.
How often should website content be updated?
Whether your website is going through an overhaul or you’re refreshing the blog post that is getting the most traffic, you may be wondering how often you should be updating your website? a site that is updated at least two to three times a week, is considered a frequently updated site. It could be a minor change to the main content or a new blog post.
Frequently updating your site content often is important due to the way search engine automated bots crawl your site. They do this in order to index the information in your site, providing searchers with the best possible results for their given search query. If a bot comes to your site one week and comes back a month later to discover that nothing has changed, it will wait longer, say 3 months, before coming back again. However, bots will also do the opposite and will come back more often if they discover that you are making frequent updates. Therefore you can train the bots to index your site more often. This becomes important when you make a vital change to your site, you want to make sure the bot discovers it fairly quickly.
Does updating your website help SEO?
Internet users rely on a variety of websites and other digital platforms to provide interesting, up-to-date, and relevant information – placing a higher priority on fresher content. Fresh content means adding new, fresh pages. One of the most common forms of content is a blog and new blog posts add “fresh” pages to a website. Adding these pages can help your website rank for more keywords, boosting SEO for keywords relating to the website’s industry.
Google and other search engines understand that users expect search results that are relevant and up-to-date. As a result, Google is constantly tinkering with its algorithm to ensure that the content that appears atop its rankings is of clear value to users.
How do you maintain and update a website?
1. Blog posts
blog posts that answer to your customers' questions will boost brands reputation and make your website more visible to people who are entering keywords associated with your product or service. Updating old content also increases the rank of the content – giving it a freshness boost.
2. Check site speed
Google has indicated site ad page speed is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. Research has shown that Google might be specifically measuring time to first byte when considering page speed. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines won't be able to crawl as many pages before they use up their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page affecting the users experience.
Here are some ways to increase page speed
3. Track your site statistics
Once your site is launched you must start following the traffic. Without traffic, a website is useless, and the only way to see traffic is through statistics. Statistics provide website owners with knowledge that allows web managers fine-tune their sites and enhance features.
4. Content updates
Updating your headline and description to make them compelling so that they grab your reader’s attention and pulls them in. Fixing any spelling and grammar mistakes in your old content. Additionally, keeping track of the change in keywords and optimizing your website to take advantage them.
5. Broken links
One of the most frustrating parts of old content is finding broken links. Oftentimes, the helpful resources you linked to in the original article, perhaps the website has been shut down, or the URL has changed. A useful tool that we recommend is broken link checker, which not only tell you if the links are dead but it will also show to your where exactly those stale references are located in your HTML code.
6. User-friendliness
Making your site more user-friendly is one of the essential things you need to consider. However, you may not be able to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Asking for input when it comes to the user-friendliness of your website can come in handy. striving to make some changes that would provide your target market with smooth website browsing, easy interface, and readily available information.
