The company’s corporate website is its face and an instrument of interaction with the user. Nowadays, it is not enough to have a page with a minimal set of information. The site needs to be updated regularly.
How to Understand That the Site Needs to Be Updated?
If people don’t visit your site, it is worth understanding that something is wrong. Perhaps the site has not been updated for a long time and has ceased to interest people and search engines. The design or content of the site may become outdated, and the functionality may break. It may not be adapted for mobile devices and may not be well optimized. The website needs to be reworked in each case.
A comprehensive analysis, SEO, and usability audit will help you determine what is set up correctly and what can be done even better to increase positions and conversions.
SECL offers an express check. If you answer “YES” to at least one of the items, then it’s time to update the site.
8 Signs the Site Needs Updating
1. Your Site is Morally Outdated
Developers recommend updating the site every 3-5 years. If the site is from the 2000s, made on an old framework with an old layout, it will not be able to adapt to new realities. Design trends change rapidly, visitors quickly catch up with outdated methods, and conversion decreases. Some tools were once popular, but new ones have taken their place.
2. Low Traffic
It is necessary to understand why the traffic fell and confirm this in analytics systems. The analytics tracking code may have been broken due to an update to the CMS template. In this case, you need to check the correctness of the settings. Also, low requests may be associated with a narrow niche or seasonality of demand. But if the dynamics of falling traffic are stable, you need to consider an SEO audit and a comprehensive analysis of content, semantics, site structure, and behavioral factors.
3. Incorrect Structure
The site structure is a logical structure of all pages of the resource. The design directly affects the ranking. The better it is, the faster indexing will happen. If the site’s structure is clear, it will confuse the search engine clear. As a result, the site will not be displayed for some requests. Site visitors also prefer to search for the necessary information quickly. Just as in a supermarket, they expect to find bread in the bread section, so on the website, they expect to find the right product in the appropriate section.
4. The Site is Not Designed for the Demand
Tables and refrigerators cannot be sold on the same site. If you have a multi-directional business, then information about goods and services must be structured and grouped on different platforms.
5. The Site Is Not Adapted for Different Devices
The site needs to be adapted for other devices. Although mobile traffic is significant, people still use computers. And they can also have different screen resolutions, and the presence of an adaptive or mobile version positively affects the ranking of sites. The ranking is the sorting and arrangement of sites in a particular order in search results. Based on many factors, the search engine evaluates how valuable the information on the site is to the user. A new rule works: no adaptive version of the site = no site.
6. Low Site Loading Speed
88% of users say they will not return to a site that fails to load. 75% of visitors go to competitors if they encounter problems on the site. The ranking of pages also depends on the loading speed.
7. Low-Quality Templates that Interfere with SEO Promotion in Technical Terms
They do not allow you to quickly edit the content, change the headings, or contain many unnecessary elements that dilute the textual relevance. Textual relevance is the correspondence of the page’s text with search queries. The higher the text relevance, the more chances the page has to reach the top of the search results.
8. The Site Stopped Responding to Business Tasks
This happens when business processes change: order processing, payment, or delivery work differently. Or it would help if you implemented new functions, for example, a calculator and other services. When the business has new tasks, then there is a need to modernize the site.
What Will Happen if You Leave Everything as It Is?
The company’s prosperity largely depends on the ability to react quickly to changes. This applies to improving the site. They help a business rise to a new level and conquer new heights. If no action is taken, the site’s state and, consequently, the entire business will deteriorate. There are certain risks to which a website without an update is exposed.
A site created several years ago may seem outdated and fit modern standards. Since the visitor evaluates the site in a few seconds, it is critically important to have a fresh and contemporary appearance of the resource. An outdated look makes customers nervous and reduces conversion. The site’s adaptability also affects the visitor’s impression: if the user is uncomfortable using the resource on a mobile device, he will close the browser tab.
Complex, unclear, out-of-date content and a difficult-to-perceive site structure aren’t attractive to the visitor. As a result, the conversion is lost. The loading speed also affects the perception – if the visitor can still not get to the site, this will affect the position and traffic growth.
Using outdated content management systems leads to the leakage of confidential client data and the penetration of hackers who can use your servers for their purposes. For example, old shopping cart systems are vulnerable to hacking without developer support.
With the appearance of new products and services, it is necessary to enter the new market. A change in business focus may require updating to match the new direction. If there are no new products or services on the site or they are challenging to get to, no one will know about them.
The degree of freshness of the site affects its ratings. Search engines evaluate the relevance of data, deciding how to rank their search results. An outdated site can drop several positions in the ranking at once, leaving you with no conversions.
What Should the Customer Do?
In the first stage, it is always necessary to analyze the website’s current state to determine whether it is worth saving the developments. You can do the analysis yourself, but without knowledge and preparation, it can take a lot of time. A similar inspection by an SECL Group professional takes 3 to 5 hours. Let’s talk about the main points:
Site processing is carried out in several stages:
- General and technical analysis of the state of the site;
- Analysis of competitors and commercial factors;
- Preparation of the semantics and structure of the new site;
- Preparation of TK for texts;
- SEO recommendations for site prototypes;
- The processing itself takes into account all the recommendations;
- Monitoring;
- Support and development.
On the site, pay attention not only to the beauty and merits of the company but also to the user’s convenience, ease of search, completeness, accuracy of the information, as well as the technical side of the site. All this affects your positions in search engines and traffic and, as a result, the successful operation of the site and your business.