You have probably come across websites that seem to be stuck in time – with old-fashioned design, outdated information, and no new content. Many people build websites that they don’t really maintain for quite some time. Even company websites and online stores often display outdated information or use old technology.

In this article, we will explore if you really have to update your site. After all, if it works fine and it has a decent look, should you really change anything? If you decide to update it, we will see how often you should do that. We will also mention some good practices you should follow before, during, and after the update.

• Should you really update your website?
• New content
• Security
• Improve the user experience
• Implement new technologies
• Refresh the look
• Fix issues
• Stay ahead of your competitors
• Changes in your company
• Good practices
• Wrap-up

Should you really update your website?

This is a legitimate question. You have spent time building it, you may have even paid a lot of money to a developer to create it. Once the site is ready, is there any point in updating it, especially if you don’t need to post new content regularly?

To answer this question, look for signs that tell you the site is aging. Falling traffic, software incompatibility with new technologies, difficult navigation, bad user experience – these things tell you loud and clear that it is probably time for a change.

As you will see below, updating your website does not mean only changing some text, adding new products, or clicking a button to upgrade the version of the platform you have used to build it. An update can involve changing any part of your site, no matter if it is visible or not. This includes, but is not limited to text, products, images, visual elements, navigation, branding, software, features, and more. Let’s have a look at a few reasons why updating your site is a must.

New content

Why: The only reason why you wouldn’t want new content is if you don’t really use your website. If you want to offer something fresh to your regular visitors, to attract new visitors, or to give your site an SEO boost, you should add new content. Updating articles, creating new ones, or posting some other type of content will tell visitors that your site is active. Fresh content will drive organic traffic to the site continuously. As a result, people will see you as being a trustworthy source or partner in your niche.

How often: Adding quality content every now and then is more important than adding a lot of low-quality content in bulk. This is valid for both text and visuals. This is why how often you should add new content depends on the nature of your website and on the time you can spend. If you can create good content quickly, we suggest that you update your site as often as possible. This way search engines will be able to index more quality content for a shorter period, and regular visitors will have more incentives to come back to your site. For a blog-type website, for example, try to post new content weekly or bi-weekly.

Security

Why: This is one extremely important reason to update your site. No matter if you use a content management system, some framework, or a web application for your site, there is always a chance that a security hole may be discovered and exploited by an unauthorized third party. Not updating the site puts it at risk of getting hacked. You have probably seen how many high-profile service providers and tech giants have suffered security breaches in the past several years. Some of them were due to security holes left unpatched for some time.

How often: Without a doubt, this is the one issue that you should handle immediately. Leaving your site unprotected means that your content can be deleted or copied illegally, or even your entire hosting account or server can be compromised. Delaying your actions puts your content and your reputation at risk. To prevent such a scenario, check regularly if the CMS/platform you use has any updates. This is valid for your server software as well.

Improve the user experience

Why: A common reason to update your website is to improve the overall user experience. Adding small elements here and there can make browsing your site easier. Of course, this depends on your website and on what exactly you would like to do to improve the user experience.

How often: While user experience is important, editing your site to improve it is not something urgent. Depending on how much time you will need to add/edit a single feature and to test it, you can update the site once a month or once every few months. It really depends on the particular case. You can also collect feedback about new features that users would like to have and add several different features with a single update once every few months or even once a year. After all, updating your site is important, but updating it too often is not very appropriate.

13 Tips to Improve the User Experience on Your Website

Implement new technologies

Why: While there are still people who use HTML or deprecated PHP versions for their websites, there are many new technologies and programming languages to construct frameworks and build sites. If you want to keep up with new technologies, you have to update your site software, i.e. the platform you use to publish content. There are many advantages of doing that – better memory utilization, improved security, and various new functions that are not available with the old platform you have used.

How often: If your website works well, you don’t really have to implement the newest technologies right away. Unless you need a specific feature, you should allow at least six months, or even a year, for the new technology to become more widely used and possible bugs to be fixed. Changing the web application or the programming language of your website, for example, is a major step, so you can wait even for a couple of years to see if the new one will be widely adopted.

If you want to keep your existing CMS and simply to update its version, you can give it a month, or if you want to use a newer PHP version, allow at least half a year for bugs to be fixed and for software developers to make sure the themes and plugins you use are compatible with the changes (and again, this is only if the new CMS or PHP version does not include a security update, as any security updates must be applied immediately).

Refresh the look

Why: Visual styles change over the years. If something looked modern several years ago, it most likely looks outdated today. You should keep up with new trends and refresh the look of your website every now and then. Give the site a fresh touch by updating images, colors, fonts, and forms. Make it accessible or more responsive. Whether it is a small redesign or a complete overhaul, you will show your visitors that you want to stay trendy. A clean, modern look will make your site more usable, so you can boost your brand recognition.

How often: Most medium and large companies redesign their website more significantly every 2.5-3 years. It is up to you whether you will follow the same schedule, or you will choose a different one. You should make sure that your website won’t look too outdated, though. While existing users often get used to a certain design and sometimes don’t want any changes, new ones may feel that your website is (almost) abandoned solely due to the way it looks. This is why you should probably update it at least every few years.

Fix issues

Why: Whether it is a broken link, a typo, or a more serious issue, something may come up every now and then. If you simply ignore the issue, it will look quite unprofessional, especially if it is something visible. Fixing issues can save you time and money in the long run and decrease the number of support requests you receive in the short run. Without a doubt, it is better to resolve any issue that comes up, no matter how insignificant it may look, than to rely on people ignoring it or getting used to it. Of course, issues can vary greatly, but in the general case, you should do everything that depends on you and make the necessary changes on your website to fix them.

How often: Fixing various issues may not be as urgent as taking care of the security of the website, but you should still act quickly. If there is a major issue that affects the proper operation of the website (broken order form, hidden or distorted content/CSS), you should act right away. For typos or small functional errors, you can wait for a day or two, but do not delay fixing them much. People may hesitate to use your website if they think you do not pay much attention to such details and do not fix errors for a long time.

Stay ahead of your competitors

Why: Your competition never sleeps. You have to keep up with industry changes, price updates, or anything else that your competitors may do. Failure to do so will affect your business or the number of your visitors/customers. If most or all of them start using a new technology and their websites are much faster, for example, you will notice a decrease in the number of visitors and an increase in the bounce-back rate on your site. And vice versa, if you are among the first ones to adopt a new technology, to offer information on a particular trending topic, or to provide an innovative online service, you can use the hype around it to increase the number of your visitors.

How often: Like some other reasons above, it really depends on the case. If you offer some sort of online content, try to be persistent and publish new articles at least once a week. Regular posts can make your site more appealing to people. When it comes to adding a new type of products, innovative services or advanced features, try to add something new or different at least once or twice a year, although minor updates can be more frequent.

Changes in your company

Why: Your website should reflect what your company stands for. If you change your business goals or you want to start offering a different set of services, you should update your site accordingly. The same is valid in the case of staff changes. If you hire a new person or a team member leaves, you should update your site accordingly if team members are listed there. It will look unprofessional if people no longer working with you are listed on the company site, or if people not listed there manage your operations.

How often: Since these updates depend on specific events, you should make them as often as needed. There is no risk of breaking the site code, or of losing traffic, so they are not urgent, but any change within the company should be reflected on the site. Of course, this doesn’t need to happen on the same day, but a couple of weeks is a reasonable period that you can consider for such an update.

Good practices

There are some good practices that you can follow when you want to update your website. Of course, some of them may not be applicable to all websites and in all cases. Nonetheless, following at least most of them can help you and your visitors to go through the update process easier.

• Plan the update in advance. This step is very important. It doesn’t make sense to update your site if you don’t know what exactly you have to do, what you want to achieve in the end, and roughly how much time you will need. This is valid for any update. For new content, you should have an idea how much text you should add, whether you need any visuals, and where you will link this content within the site navigation. For software updates or changing the platform entirely, you should plan specific actions such as backups, possible downtime, data migration (if necessary), possible rollback if anything goes wrong, etc. You should have a plan for the update, even if it is a minor one.

• Inform people in advance. This is required if you want to update the platform or make some other system changes, for example. Notify your customers in advance of any update that may potentially lead to any sort of downtime for your website, for a service you offer, or for the client accounts. This includes adding features or fixing issues. Of course, it isn’t possible to notify customers in advance if you must perform an emergency security update, and it isn’t required to notify them if you are adding content or doing anything that will not impact your site in any way.

• Add a maintenance page. Sometimes updates take time, or things simply do not go as planned. This is why it is a good idea to add a maintenance page and disable access to the site temporarily. You can add some information about the update, an ETA, as well as contact information. Adding a maintenance page serves two purposes. First, people will know why your site is not accessible, so they will not contact you unless there is some urgent issue. Second, updating database-driven websites may go wrong and may result in the loss of information if new data is being added or deleted during the update. Restricting access temporarily solves both problems.

• Post regular updates on social media. If you use social media accounts for your website, make sure that you post updates regularly. If people comment on your status, you can receive useful feedback regarding the way you have handled the update or about their first impression of the new design or features on the site.

• Do not perform partial updates. This is valid regardless of the type of update. If you add new content, make sure you add all of it. Publishing half a post or adding products with no description or prices, for example, will look unprofessional. Changing the design partially will probably make your visitors think that your site is broken, or something is wrong. Partial software updates can even take your entire website down.

• Find the right SEO/redesign balance. No matter if you update content, design, or navigation, you should make sure that you keep the organic traffic you have been receiving so far. Map old URLs to new ones, update backlinks to your site if possible, or add 301 redirects. Give search engines some time to index all changes before you change anything else. A site update may help your SEO and in fact, this is a good reason for an update, but it can also break it.

• Test beforehand if possible. While text and images can be updated easily, and visitors will not notice the actual update, design or software changes can have a serious impact if anything doesn’t go as planned. This is why it is a good idea to test the update before it goes live. Of course, this isn’t always possible, but if you can create a staging environment, you can make sure the update will go smoothly, or you can fix any issues before you update the live site.

• Collect feedback. It is a good practice to listen to your visitors, so if you update the design, add new features, start publishing a different type of content, or do anything else that affects your site and the services you offer, you should check what your regular visitors think. Of course, a better option is to collect ideas in advance and make the changes they request, but often it is useful to collect feedback and see how they feel about the changes after they have been published/applied. You can then decide if any further work will be needed.

Wrap-up

Updating a website encompasses different activities – adding new content, redesigning or rebranding the whole site or just a part of it, updating the site software, etc. If you want to have a successful website that attracts new visitors regularly and offers a good user experience, you should update it regularly. This is the only way to make sure that the site is fast, secure, and with a modern design that will look appealing to visitors. Regular content and software updates will also allow you to stay ahead of your competitors.