3 Reasons Why You Should Regularly Maintain Your Website
It’s so easy to build and launch a website these days, anyone who can do it. You do not need any technical know-how, you can build a website in 10 minutes “so we are told” by the likes of Wix and GoDaddy and the price is so cheap. It probably costs more to buy an artisan loaf of bread than it does to pay for a website builder for 3 months.
That said, why am I writing an article on the need to maintain and update your website. If you are already doing that, great, well done. Many businesses are great at updating their social media and pushing out a lot of tweets, but they rarely or sometimes never update their website.
What concerns me is that when your customer really wants to find out about your products and services they never go to your Twitter feed or Facebook page. They go to your website, it’s obvious why they would do so. Can you remember the last time you wanted to find out about a business’s products and services and you went to their Facebook or Twitter profiles?
Here are three reasons why you need to keep your website regularly maintained.
- Your Customer needs are always changing
- Your business is changing
- Technology is changing
1. Your Customer needs are always changing
For those old enough to remember, do you remember phone directories such as the Yellow Pages and Thomson’s (these were based in the UK). Almost all businesses had a listing in either directory. Back then each house had one of these directories and if you needed to find a product or business you would dig it out and go to the index and search away. Then you would find the business and contact them via their telephone or actually go to their premises (how novel).
Fast forward to 2018 and how things have changed! Does anyone own a Yellow Pages or Thomson’s directory anymore? I doubt it. Why? Because the customer needs have changed. This is the point your customer is always changing.
For example, back in 2000s customers were happy with websites with rigid designs which did not adapt to screen sizes etc. Today that is completely different, customers expect your website to adapt to their desktop, tablet and phone screens. They also expect your website to be fast, secure and fresh. So simply leaving your website to run itself without regular updates will not work, it might even lose you customers to your competition.
2. Your Business is changing
As a business you are changing. Maybe not at a break neck speed, but still you are probably tweaking and changing your products and services. You probably have special offers, events, giveaways, promotions and the like. While you might be telling your social network of these changes in your business, you need to do it on your website too.
Remember that there is a large portion of your visitors who will go directly to your website from your advertising campaigns, business card or from other promotions you are running. Also guess where your links from your social media need to point to …. your website. Your website is the one place on the web where you truly have the freedom to present your business in the way you want and the way your customers are going to get the most benefit. So, use it!
Next time you have a promotion or are holding an event or when you update a product or service, let your website be the first place you make the update. Ideally, your website should truly reflect your business as it is today.
3. Technology is always changing
I left the number one reason for updating your website last because it’s so obvious. In fact, I am not even going to waste any more words on it!
Okay, maybe a sentence or two. The technology your website is built on changes at the same speed or faster than the technology your phone is built on. This means there are opportunities for your website to be ahead of the game in using new technologies to be faster, securer and fresher.
Another important point here is the need to protect your website from hackers, malware and viruses. It’s a fact that old software is more susceptible to these types of attacks. So, if your website is running on old versions of software, then your website is at a higher risk of being a casualty of an attack. This reason alone should motivate you to keep at least the software version of your website up to date. This is so important especially when it comes to WordPress, where you have WordPress Core, Themes and Plugins all doing things in slightly different ways. This is the reason why the WordPress community is forever pushing out software updates to WordPress Core, Plugins and Themes.
So now you have the three most important reasons why you should update your website regularly. Don’t forget to update your website regularly. Set a reminder in your calendar to at least review your site. Remember your website is one of the most important advertising tools at your disposal, if used well it can really drive your business forward.
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