It is not enough to design and launch a website, no. It is also beneficial to upgrade it when necessary to allow your users to have a better experience. But what should you consider when updating your site? Should you just focus on how nice and techy it should look? What exactly influences a successful site upgrade? I invite you to be my guest as I answer these questions in the remaining sections of our discussion.
Before updating your website, it is necessary to factor in site analytical tools because these tools are critical in relaying to you information regarding your site. This way, you will be better placed to know if your site has any challenges that can interfere with its functionality and user experience. Moreover, they will inform you about user behavior on your website. For example, you will know who visited your site, the pages they visited, their location, and when they visited it. Moreover, they will enable you to know how effective your marketing strategies are. For example, they inform you about your SEO’s effectiveness by showing you your website’s conversion or your user response to your calls-to-action. This way, you will be in a better position to know which of your marketing campaigns are failing or succeeding. Consequently, you will be better placed to invest your money in activities that will give you the best value for your money and time.
We are all familiar with speed warning on our highways such as “Speed kills, slow down.” However, on information super highway, the warning changes to, “Slowness kills, speed up.” What do I mean by this? I simply mean you should consider your website’s page speed when updating it. People are busy and have limited time to attend to their lives. Therefore, they have no time to waste on a web page that takes ages to load. Even if your site has the best content, your users will switch to your competitors unless you are a state monopoly. Therefore, make it easy for your visitors to get and enjoy what they need when they need it.
When updating a website, shifting and replacing URLs is a common practice. Therefore, you have to factor it in your efforts so that your users can find the same information they had on your previous domain. Therefore, you have to offer your users 301 redirects because it is the surest way of preserving almost every bit of SEO value your initial URL address had.
Safety is a necessary consideration when updating your website. It is therefore necessary to incorporate it in your new-look website to ensure your users are safe as they transact on it. For instance, including an SSL certificate is one way of doing this. With this type of certificate attached to your domain name, you will encrypt all the interactions users have between their browsers and server. The certificate ensures that all the information that passes between servers and browsers remains private until it is decoded on the other side. This will boost your users’ experience on your website as well as their trust in it. Don’t forget that an SSL certificate is one of Google’s SEO requirements. This means that the search engine will flag your website as “not secure” when they log on to it.
Lastly, consider your website’s SEO when updating it. Why is it necessary in the updating process? First, SEO or search engine optimization will enable your website to gain freemium traffic from search engine results. Also, it will keep your products, services, and brand on the competitive edge because modern buyers conduct searches before purchasing online. Don’t also forget that SEO will keep you visible in a highly competitive environment where everyone is competing for space and visibility. Moreover, it gives your website additional value for your money compared to other channels such as paid email leads and social media marketing.
Five factors are critical when updating your website. You will need to consider its SEO ranking, user safety, page speed, 301 redirects, and analytical tools as I discussed in this post. By considering these factors, you will be in a better position to make a successful update.
