There are over a billion websites on the internet today. People from all over the world create websites for many different reasons. The moment that the website goes live is exhilarating. You do your best to keep current customers and draw in new ones. Unfortunately like with most things as time goes on it gets older and doesn’t work as well and the design isn’t as interesting as it once was. You may be thinking will it really be worth it to change my website. Will your current customers get annoyed with the updates or will new customers really decide to sign up just because you made some updates? Those are important questions, ones we will answer here for you so you can make an educated decision on whether you should move forward with updates or not. 1. Safety Hacking has become a serious issue over the years. Some of the largest companies in the world get hacked. There are many different ways and reasons why people hack sites. There are so many problems that come with this whether that be stealing credit card information, personal information, installing spam, and more. If you have an older website you are more vulnerable to these attacks. Your software should always be up to date. This can be a pain but every website should make sure they take precautions. 2. Speed People don’t have as much patience as they used to so if it takes longer than 1 second for your website to load people get irritated. You have to get users on your website right away to keep them there. If your website speed is slow, there are many reasons this could be. Who you host with is a major factor as well as the number of images and videos, caching, how many daily visitors, and more. Older websites usually have problems in many of these areas that is why updating everything helps greatly with speed. Your website code is very important and as time goes on it has to be updated to keep up with technology advances. You always want to check with your website development company about increasing your website speed as this is incredibly important for keeping visitors from bouncing. 3. Content Your content should be completely updated as well. Everything on every page, yes even the about us page. Many older sites lack calls to action. This entices someone to read on or look at other pages. It goes hand in hand with beautiful relevant images. These calls to action items can be the simple sign up now buttons or quick witty lines of content that spark an emotion. Everything you say needs to be informative and interesting. Find a story about yourself and your team and put that on the about us page. When you talk about your products think about why your customers need and/or want this product. Then use that to fuel your content creation. You will want to update your website content regularly. 4. SEO Like most, you probably want to rank well on Google. After all, that is how most people are going to find you. If you have an outdated website and/or haven’t updated anything in a long time, you will rank really low. It will be hard for anyone to find you. Google is constantly updating its algorithms to look for websites that make constant updates to their website. The newer the content the more relevant you are and therefore the higher you rank. Once you do make design and content updates to your website you then need to update all your tags and various other SEO data in the code. SEO is one of the most important pieces for website marketing and getting people to find you so take it seriously. 5. UI/UX When people land on your website what do they see? If they see old images and old content it gives off an unprofessional feel. You should make them want to learn more about you and find interest in your services or products. If you haven’t touched your website in 10 years they probably won’t feel like looking around long. Remember everything you present on your website tells a story about who you are as a company. This is called your user interface (UI). If you have old photos, they need to be updated with brand new ones. There are so many stock photo sites out there. Some of them you pay per photo and some provide photos for free. Either way, you don’t have to take them or edit them yourself. Visitors should find it easy to navigate and find what they want. How they get from point A to point B is the user experience (UX). Many older sites didn’t take this into account and therefore tend to be a little complex to navigate. Although, on the other end they can be too simple by not providing customers with the option to do certain things that could yield you more results. Both ends of the spectrum are important and should be looked at when considering a website re-design. 6. Statistics Do you know how many visitors you get each day? If you don’t know you are missing out on important information. You should also know what pages users spend the most time on, how they are coming to your website, which devices they are using, where they bounce off at, and more. This is so important to help you decide what changes you need to make not only on your website but also in your business itself. You can talk to your web developers too about this. 7. Responsiveness If you search your website on your phone and images aren’t coming through and/or content goes past the edges of the phone, or in general, it just looks messy, then you don’t have a responsive website. When you decide to start the website re-design process your website development company should know to make it responsive and talk to you about doing it. This way people can view your beautiful new website on any device. Keep in mind you don’t just update your website 1 time. You have to do it regularly. Content should be updated every week. That doesn’t mean you have to update all your main menu pages every week but if you have a blog you should add one at least weekly. You can also have a news page or updates page which has new information about products or anything else you want to say. As far as page content updates, that should be once a year. The design of your website should be updated every few years. However, updating little things here and there are also recommended. There are many more reasons why you should update your website besides what was mentioned but this should give you an idea if you need to look into it. If you are thinking about updating your old website or are unsure if you really need to, contact the team at SDI or Sakshi Sharma at sakshi@sdi.la for a free website review.