No matter whether you’re a business operating primarily online or one that just wants to establish an online presence, having an up-to-date website is important. Not only do you want to stay up-to-date with current design trends, but you’ll want your site to be secure and generate new customer leads. So what can you do to update your website?
Website Security
By not updating your website, you’re making your business vulnerable to cyber attacks. Software and plugins could be regularly updated to the latest versions to prevent hackers from exploiting any weaknesses in security with older versions.
Also by not updating your site to HTTPS and keeping it at HTTP, it means there’s not a secure and encrypted connection for users on your site, meaning it’s more likely someone could intercept data and spy on your business.
SEO Benefits
The world of SEO – short for search engine optimisation – is ever-changing, and techniques that worked well a few years ago won’t necessarily work today if you want to make sure your website appears high in the search engine rankings.
There are many things that can be updated from an SEO point of view, including page content rewrites, meta title and meta description refreshes, and up-to-date keyword research and mapping.
The overall goal of SEO is to boost the search engine rankings of pages on your site for specific search terms, which will ultimately drive more traffic to your site and lead to more conversions. Neglecting the SEO side of your website could mean you’re missing out on many potential customers.
Design Trends
Just like fashion, design trends evolve over time. What looked modern and advanced 10 years ago would look outdated now, with website development continuously improving in both complexity and design. For example, Facebook looks completely different now from how it used to, and so do many other sites.
If you cotton on to what website design trends are currently popular now, you can improve the likelihood of converting customers who visit your site, as they will enjoy the aesthetics and the function of your site and will be less likely to click away.
User Experience
The user experience, also known as UX, is an important aspect of any website if you rely on people visiting the site and buying a product or submitting a contact form. UX is all about analysing the experience a user would have on your site, and working out where it can be improved to make it an easier and more enjoyable visit. A good website design should follow the seven principles of UX, which are: useful, usable, findable, credible, desirable, accessible and valuable.
You can use services such as CRO, short for conversion rate optimisation, which will look at your site and assess it from a customer journey perspective, giving advice and implementing changes on what could be improved to ensure that you have a higher rate of visitors converting into customers. A poor user experience, where your customer finds it difficult to locate the product or information they’re looking for could see them leave the site and visit a competitor’s more up-to-date site instead.
Loading Speed
Loading speed is all about how quickly a page on a site loads. A slow page load speed can negatively impact a user’s experience on a website, and it’s also detrimental to SEO too as page speed is one of Google’s key ranking factors when it comes to placement on the search engine results pages.
So if your site is old and slow, not only is it due a refresh from a design perspective, but it could also do with an update to ensure that every page on the site loads quickly and you can maximise the potential of your site.
Web Design at DNRG
At DNRG we have an excellent track record when it comes to creating websites that not only look great but function smoothly too. DNRG is a digital marketing and web design agency that has created websites for a range of clients in a number of different sectors.
Some great examples of websites we’ve designed include Eurotaxis, Appliance World Online and The Aerial Man. You can take a look at the many sites we’ve designed in our web portfolio.
As well as offering a website development service, we also offer a number of other digital marketing services to help you drive new customers. SEO will look to improve your rankings on search engines, whilst PPC and Paid Social will look to improve your reach through paid media. CRO will look to improve your page from a user perspective too.
