16Nov
After a few decades’ worth of internet penetration, the verdict is clear. You need a website if you want to do effective business in the modern age.
But anybody who has regularly used the internet know that, just as it does with other visual mediums, styles change. Furthermore, sometimes your business changes. Either way, you will also need to update your website at some point.
Of course, updating your website can be a big deal. You’ve got one you like; won’t changing it be dangerous? What about your traffic? What if you break something? Fret not—or at least fret less—because we’ve got you covered with some website updating tips.
If you’ve already got a website, chances are that you’ve worked hard on your SEO and gotten some hard-won visitors. That’s great! Whatever you do with your website, your first job should be to ensure that you keep your traffic flowing. Ideally, you’d keep your same domain and branding, in which case visual redesigns would have little impact. But if you do change your website name, make sure you hold onto your old website and set up a 301 redirect. That way, much of your previous SEO efforts and ‘reputation’ will get transferred to your new website.
One of the core questions you’ll need to answer is when to update your website. After all, lots of businesses scoot by on less-than-stellar website setups—you could too, if you really needed to. But there are two ways to tell if it’s time to update your website. The first way is if your customers are signaling that their experience isn’t adequate. This entails some data collection, obviously, but it is the best way to tell for certain. The second way to tell if you need to make a website update is if your business objectives are misaligned with your website utility. This is harder to determine sometimes in others, but it’s important to rely on your gut. If you don’t think it’s working anymore for you, it probably isn’t.
Once you have determined that, yes, it’s time for a redesign, it’s now time to figure out what kind of update you want. There are essentially two kinds of redesigns. One is the minor update. This involves the creation of a few new pages, maybe some shuffling of content, and perhaps an updated design language. Plenty of websites function just fine but don’t quite look professional, and for these sites—or for sites that just want a visual redesign—a minor update is the way to go.
Of course, there’s the other way to go about updating your website, and that is through a major redesign. By definition, this includes a modified visual language, sometimes in a major fashion, and usually includes functionality changes as well. This is your only way forward if you want to make big changes. Thankfully, there are plenty of options now for helping you if this is what you want to do, and consulting firms like US Insourcing are there to help.
Updating your website is a hard decision. But as long as you keep your traffic flowing, choose a good time to update your site, and decide between a minor or major redesign, you’ll be just fine.
US Insourcing, LLC is a business consulting and marketing agency located in Kansas City, Missouri. We focus on helping entrepreneurs to large businesses achieve their goals. Contact us now to jumpstart your business.
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