How to Keep Your Website Up to Date

Creating a web presence is vital for any business but having a functional website simply isn’t enough. To attract new users to your site and keep them coming back, you’ll need to ensure your website is kept up to date. Tech is one of the fastest moving industries, so there are always fresh trends to incorporate, new algorithms to satisfy and the latest strategies to follow.

Functionality and loading speed are critical factors for users, so the back-end web development of your website should be regularly updated to ensure both of these elements are top quality. On average, users will abandon a website if the relevant content doesn’t load in less than 5 seconds. If your existing hosting service isn’t providing you with enough speed to deliver within this time, it may be time to think about switching to an alternative provider.

In addition, you’ll need to ensure that your website is fully functional and free from broken links or incomplete content. Another important consideration is how your website appears to users. Whilst your website may look great when you’re developing on your computer, you’ll need to assess how it will be displayed on a variety of devices to ensure all functionality is seamless for all users, regardless of which device they’re using.

Currently, users across all demographics are using mobile devices more than laptops or computers to browse the web. This means that you’ll need ensure your site is fully optimised for mobile use. Indeed, the prolific rise in mobile browsers has led Google to adopt a mobile-first approach to indexing. When both search engines and user behaviour is moving in a common direction, it’s definitely time to update your website accordingly.

Keeping Up to Date With Mobile Users

Many companies used to invest in separate mobile websites so that users with mobile devices could access their content. However, maintaining two websites can be unnecessarily time-consuming and costly, and it won’t necessarily deliver the best UX. When it was common for businesses to launch a second website for mobile users, the content on their mobile website was typically scaled back to ensure functionality on mobile devices. In an era when wireless broadband wasn’t commonplace and when data charges restricted mobile browsing, keeping mobile websites simple and straightforward was often advantageous.

In recent times, however, the world has adapted to accommodate mobile browsing far more efficiently. As well as wireless broadband becoming more ubiquitous, data charges have reduced as speeds have risen. As a result, mobile users can now browse for far longer and mobile devices can cope with more advanced content.

To ensure your website is keeping up with the latest user demands, it’s essential to have a fully optimised website for both mobile device users and users who still prefer to browse using laptops and computers. Instead of having to create and maintain two separate websites, however, you can cultivate just one website with response web design.

Created to ensure that websites can be accessed via any device, responsive web design will determine which type of device is being used to view your website and ensure that it’s displayed optimally. Whether a user visits your homepage on a smartphone with a 5” screen or a monitor with a 32” panoramic display, responsive web design will ensure your website is displayed in the most effective, functional and aesthetically pleasing way.

Furthermore, a responsive web design meets Google’s needs when it comes to mobile-first indexing. As a responsive web design functions extremely well on mobile devices, you won’t miss out now that mobile-first indexing has been introduced. Whilst companies with a separate mobile website will have their mobile optimisation assessed before their desktop developments, responsive web design ensures your website meets the latest Google standards and doesn’t fall short of the mobile-first indexing requirements.

Uploading Fresh and Original Content

Ensuring your website is filled with informative and innovative content is another important way of keeping it up to date. If you regularly upload new content, you’ll give users a reason to return to your site again and again. Whilst users may visit with the intention of watching or reading new content, once they’re on your website you have the ideal opportunity to entice them to engage with your brand further.

However, uploading fresh content on a regular basis has other benefits too. As well as directly encouraging users to visit your website, uploading new content will help to improve your SEO rankings and keep them consistently high.

When Google is indexing pages, websites which upload new content on a regular basis tend to be valued more highly than sites which don’t. However great your content may have been when your site launched, this won’t be enough to keep you ranking well on search engine results pages (SERPs). Instead, you’ll need to provide informative, educational, thought-provoking and insightful content on a regular basis.

Remember – search engines don’t just look at the amount of content you’re uploading; the quality of content is assessed. Whilst irrelevant or incomplete content will fail to enhance your SEO rankings, it could actually harm them. Google and other major search engines are familiar with the common shortcuts used to improve SEO rankings, and they’re always quick to shut them down.

Whilst keeping your website up to date with high quality content will be beneficial in terms of your SEO rankings, it’s also the most effective way to engage users and encourage them to share your content. With the option to add your content to guest blogs and share it on social media, you can get a significant amount of mileage out of it, so it’s certainly worth investing in producing insightful and engaging content.

To find out more about the latest tech trends and keeping your website up to date, contact WYSI now.