How to Update Your Old Website

If you are using a website to market your business on the internet, it’s important to keep it updated. Links can break, your design can go out of date, the content that you used in the past may not be relevant anymore and new keywords may be able to increase your traffic. Here are six tips that you can use to make sure that your site is up to date:

Updating Your Content 

Updated content is not only valuable for people who visit your site, but it will also help rank your website higher in search results. When search engine spiders crawl your site, they like to see new content. Now, you may be thinking that this means adding new posts to your site. While that is a good idea, you can actually update your old content and republish it to increase value.

If your business is involved in an industry that has frequent changes, doing this is important. For example, if you have an article on your website that explains the specifications and benefits of a product that you sell, you’ll want to add new content to that article and republish it if those specs aren’t relevant anymore or if you’ve introduced a new model.

Updating Broken Links 

With a multitude of tasks to accomplish each day, tracking down broken links is probably not at the top of your list of important things to accomplish. However, it is one aspect of your site that leads to higher bounce rates. If a visitor is getting 404 errors due to broken links on your site, those dead links need to be remedied. Fortunately, you can use tools to check and see if you have any problems.

Updating Your Design 

Website design is always changing. What may have looked great a year and a half ago, may be outdated by now. Minimalism, moving images and bold typefaces are some design changes that you might want to consider. For inspiration, you can check out what top web design companies are currently doing in this space. Having your website refreshed with a custom design can be affordable, and it can also make a drastic change in the way that people feel about your site when they first land on it. Remember, first impressions matter.

Updating Your Keywords 

If your business has changed one of your service or product offerings to suit your customers, you may need to update your keywords. In the past, the keywords that you placed in your content may have been relevant. If that’s changed, your search engine optimization may not be driving in as much traffic as it could be. Seo tools are a big help in this area. You can use them to increase your presence in local search or discover keywords that you may not be utilizing at all.

Making Your Site Mobile-Friendly 

Google has indicated that mobile-friendly websites will receive higher rankings in their search engine. This makes sense. If you are using a smartphone and the website you are viewing doesn’t look good in your browser, you are probably going to leave that site. Making sure that your site has a responsive design will alleviate that from happening. This type of design is coded so that your website can be seen by anyone using a PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Updating your site to accommodate all types of platforms will really help create a more valuable experience for visitors.

Your Site Must Load Fast 

Another factor that Google looks at when ranking a website is how fast it loads information. If you’ve ever landed on a website that takes more than a few seconds to load, do you continue to wait or do you keep searching? Using a content delivery network (CDN) is one way to speed up your website. It works by distributing a group of servers in different locations. Each server has a current copy of your website on it so that when people in that location search through your site, it loads information from the CDN server that’s closest to them. This increases the speed due to the shorter distance.

Summing It Up 

If you have an older site that’s been sitting there with the same theme and old content, you can see why updating your website is important. By following these recommendations, it should help increase the value of your site, which will also lead to fewer bounce rates and more visitors.