3. You need to keep ahead of the competition by adding new products, services and prices. If your rival is offering a new gizmo or giving 25% off a particular service during March, you might want to respond to that by offering something similar or better on your own site.
4. How a site looks, feels and responds can get dated. Photos, fonts, colours, themes, layout, etc all contribute to how old a site looks, and in turn how dated your business looks.
5. Your site should be updated to cope with evolving technology. Do your visitors use PCs, or do the majority of them browse using a phone? Are they using small resolution screens or high resolution? Do they prefer to scroll down to find content or click links? You need to know this and your site needs to respond accordingly.
6. Search engine ranking doesn't just index your site based on the text content but takes many other factors into account. Sites where the content is constant changing will be seen as dynamic and more relevant so will rank higher. Sites that load quickly will be ranked higher than similar sites with slow content. Sites that use https for secure browsing are looked on more favourably than http sites. Sites that are not mobile device friendly will get penalised. In short, search engines will give preference to sites that will deliver the best content to customers whilst also giving them the best browing experience.
7. You may need to update your site to reflect changes in legal requirements. How many sites had to be changed because of the GDPR regulations that came into effect in 2018? Sites may also have to change depending on VAT regulations, accessibility regulation, and dare we mention it - Brexit!
8. Do you measure how effective your site is and take steps to optimise your customer's experience? Do you check which pages are accessed most, and that they are the most accessible for your customers? Do you know how long customers stay on your site? Do your online sales fizzle out somewhere in the process. Have you optimised page load times? Do you know which keywords are being used to find you, and whether you could get more hits by making better use of these search terms on your site? There are many ways to improve your customers' experiences with your site.
9. And inevitably, Security. Almost every day there is news of how hackers have exposed flaws in common software technology. Website software needs to be kept up to date to keep hackers out. For example Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc regularly update their frameworks not only with new features but also to plug security holes. But don't forget to update the plugins, themes and modules that these frameworks use too as they can also introduce vulnerabilities.
Summary - there are many reasons why you should keep your website looking fresh. Go now and take a look at your site to see what you can do to improve things for your customers and ultimately for your business!
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