Does Your Website Need to be Updated?

If you are reading this article, there are probably some changes that you should make to your website right now. However, if you’ve been avoiding making important updates to your website, you aren’t alone.

Many small businesses simply avoid website updates because they consider the updates to be too costly or time-consuming.

If you’d like to overcome these challenges to get better results for your business, here are 5 reasons small businesses avoid updating their websites.

1. Your Website Doesn’t Really Help Your Business

This reason is a major reason why businesses fail to make updates to their websites. If your website isn’t driving most of your sales or leads, you may wonder why you need to bother with it at all.

However, if your competitors use their websites to drive business, your website probably isn’t as irrelevant as you think. The problem may actually be that you don’t know how to design a website to drive leads and sales to your business.

These are the main elements that you need to get great results from your website:

SEO strategy. Having an SEO strategy is the only way to drive organic traffic from the search engines to your website. By ranking your website for specific keywords, you can attract potential buyers and leads to your website. However, in order to receive higher rankings, you have to have a consistent strategy in place that involves creating content for various platforms and optimizing the technical elements of every page of your website, including the title tag, content, image alt text and URL.
Great user experience. Making your site easy to navigate is the only way that you are going to get visitors to stay on your website once they arrive. This means that your site must use responsive design and the page elements and site content must be organized in a way that is intuitive to your users.
Promotion. It’s rare that a site gets tons of traffic simply by existing. If you want to see results from your website, you need to promote your website by using paid advertising, including the site URL in your marketing materials, using social media, and other promotional opportunities that are available for you.

2. You Don’t Have Time

If you don’t have time to make changes to your website, then it is probably time to outsource at least some of the regular tasks, such as adding content to your site, generating reports, and updating your SEO strategy. If you aren’t making time for your website, then you shouldn’t expect to see any results from your effort.

Your website is key to your online reputation and if you want to build your brand online, you need to make sure that your website receives the proper attention that it needs.

If you don’t make time to update your website, expect less traffic, fewer leads, and lower search rankings. All of these have a direct impact on the bottom line of your business.

3. You Don’t Have the Money

If you don’t have money to spend on updating your website, figure out why. Perhaps you are overestimating the costs of updating your website, when you could likely outsource many of the tasks that are required using a virtual assistant.

Additionally, you could probably find the money to update your website if you simply calculated how much not updating your website is costing your business in terms of revenue.

Here are some stats to consider:

IT downtime caused by site errors, hosting and other issues. According to CA Technologies, businesses in North America and Europe lose more than $26.5 billion in revenue each year from IT downtime, which translates to roughly $150,000 in losses annually for each business.
Shopping cart abandonment caused by lack of personalization options and poor user experience. LisTrack reports that every day, 76% of online shoppers abandon their carts, resulting in a staggering $18 billion in lost revenue annually. The most common reasons that shoppers abandon their carts are related to the design of the ecommerce website.
Poor mobile user experience. According to Meditative, 73% of consumers find mobile websites load times to be too slow and 74% say they will leave the site after waiting 5 seconds or more.

If you think avoiding updating your website will save your business money, these statistics alone show that your business is actually bleeding money by ignoring problems with your website.

4. You Aren’t in Control

If you don’t want to update your website because only your web developer knows how to fix it, it is time that you find someone to help.

Most small business websites really aren’t that complicated and are fairly easy to update if they are built on a content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, Joomla or shopping cart software.

If you have been avoiding making changes because you are scared to update your site, find someone who can convert your website over to a CMS so that you can start making minor changes, such as adding new content on your own.

When you are back in control of your website, you’ll feel more comfortable making changes and your business will no longer have to suffer due to your lack of technical expertise.

In addition, using a CMS might actually be a more secure solution for your website because CMS are regularly updated by their developers for security issues. If you want to protect your business, your website should be run on a platform that is reliable and secure.

5. You Don’t Know If the Updates Are Worth the Cost

As a layperson, it can be virtually impossible to identify which website updates matter the most. This is because you won’t be able to tell which problems with your website are having the greatest impact on your bottom line.

If you want to get a better idea of where you should start, reach out to a internet marketing firm to get further assistance. Having a professional review your SEO strategy, your website design and content will give you a better idea of where you stand so that you can make the most cost-effective decisions for your business.