Having a website is one thing, maximising its performance requires ongoing commitment. When you monitor your website, you’re receiving priceless information that can help you to understand why you’re losing sales and how you can can improve user experience.
Remember, most people’s first experience with your brand, is likely to be your website. It’s a critical part of your branding and advertising strategy. Your site should communicate clearly what your business does and how it solves your customer’s problems. It should cement your brand as an industry leader and play a major role in building relationships with your customers. Being up-to-date and functional, is critical.
Top 5 reasons to keep your website up to date
Delving deeper, there are many other less obvious reasons why your website should always be as up-to-date as possible. Our team at Woven have handpicked our top 5 reasons below.
- Security
Failing to update your site leaves it vulnerable to being hacked and in the more extreme cases, could instigate legal repercussions if any personal data is stolen (due to unpatched security). It’s best practise to complete all security fixes as soon as they are available. The same can be said in relation to payment vendors. As more customers move to online payments, payment vendors tend to modify their implementations, making older versions outdated. The worse case scenario could see you losing the ability to process payments, directly impacting your bottom line.
- Design
Aesthetics speak volumes and the look and functionality of your site will impact sales. If your site looks old and out of date, your customers are likely to bounce right off it. Failing to update your site directly impacts your branding and your customer’s first thoughts regarding your product/service. Ideally, websites should be re-designed or freshened up (at the very least) every few years to remain current and cater for changes in consumer needs and habits.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engines are regularly updating their algorithms and modifying the requirements for sites to rank high on their search results pages. It’s important to ensure your website is regularly updated for SEO purposes. In the past, Google ranked pages according to the number of links from one site to another (disregarding whether the content was even relevant). Google has since shifted its focus to quality and relevance of content. In other words, if your site still relies solely upon link building to score highly in search results, you need a new website as soon as possible. If you do your research, you’ll find that your ranking has dropped dramatically in Google and as a result, sales are on the decline.
- Technology
Website development techniques are always evolving and changing. Having a responsive website is important - this means that any one page will automatically adapt and display differently based on various screen sizes. If you view this article on a desktop computer and then on a mobile device, you’ll see that it responds differently. Your site needs to cater for all screen sizes. In 2017 and beyond, there is no doubt that not having a mobile friendly site, is damaging your brand and impacting your business in a negative way.
- Legal requirements
It’s not the most exciting of topics but it’s imperative that you’re aware of the legal requirements of operating an ecommerce store. Laws are always changing and evolving - failing to comply with the law has serious implications for your business. You need to ensure that a qualified lawyer is checking all of your site’s legals on a regular basis. Consider the European Union. In May 2011, the body mandated that all websites in every European country must request explicit permission from visitors to store ‘cookies’ on their computer. Should any website fail to comply, the business in question risks action being taken by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office.
Keeping your website updated gives you a competitive edge. It’s vital you understand that websites are an ongoing investment and you need to keep your site fresh in order to stay ahead of your competitors.
To discuss your business’ website needs, contact us and a Woven team member will get back to you as soon as possible.
