Maybe you suddenly notice that your website isn’t performing as it used to, and you plan to update it. In this case, you need the best strategies regarding how to update a website.
But where can you find practical tips and tricks for updating a site? Well, you can get them through this helpful guide, which features the latest and most effective techniques for upgrading your site.
Let’s explore and implement them all on your website.
How to Update a Website: A Definitive Guide
From here, you’ll start reading all the tips one by one. Hence, let’s get going.
1. Update Your Website’s Visuals
How your website looks matters greatly when it comes to visitors’ engagement and retention. So, when you decide to update your site, it’s wise to consider upgrading its design as well.
While updating, try to edit the website layout to align your site well with your targeted audience. For example, you can implement the single column layout strategy to keep content in a linear and stacked format. Also, you can consider asymmetrical, magazine, or other website layout ideas for your site.
You can also work on your website’s header and footer. You can take inspiration from the best website header examples and best website footer examples to design these essential parts of your site.
Alongside all these, pay attention to your website’s typography, white spaces between sections and elements, images, and color scheme while updating your site. Simply put, give your website a modern touch and make it look professional after considering some trendy website design ideas.
2. Upgrade the User Experience
You need to focus on upgrading user experience while updating your site. Essentially, it’s one of the prime reasons motivating you to elevate your website. Here’s what you can do to provide a smooth user experience to web visitors.
Make Navigation Easy: You can make the navigation effortless. Unless you have an e-commerce website, keep only a few items on the menu. Plus, use simple and descriptive labels for menu items.
Next, group related items under categories and keep the main menu accessible from every page. To make navigation smoother, you can add a search bar to help users quickly get what they seek.
Last but not least, integrate an auto-suggestion feature into your site to speed up users’ search process.
Add Clear CTAs: Strategically scatter clear CTAs that grab attention across your web pages. Make sure that button labels and search bar text remain concise and inviting. Doing this will help you improve user experience, increase engagement, and influence action rates.
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly: According to Statista’s report, the number of mobile users worldwide may reach 7.49 billion by 2025! So, website owners need to make their sites mobile-friendly—basically responsive for all screen and device types.
That said, ensure that your site is easy to view and navigate on all mobile devices. It can pay off big if you do that.
3. Check Your Site’s Technical Performance
Many website owners overlook the fact that they need to improve their sites’ Technical SEO while updating their websites. But you shouldn’t do it. Instead, pay attention to technical SEO to stay ranked in search engines. Here’s what you can do.
Improve Page Loading Time: To improve your site's page loading time and technical SEO performance, try converting large images into the lighter WebP format, compressing background videos, and considering changing to a faster hosting provider. Also, integrate a page-loading animation into your website to keep visitors engaged.
Update Broken Links: While updating your website, it’s essential to fix broken links. You can fix links by setting up 301 redirects to send users and search bots to a live URL.
Also, use clear, descriptive, and concise URLs that feature relevant keywords. Lastly, utilize canonical tags to prevent duplicate content issues.
4. Update Your Website’s Content
You need to consider taking a second look at your website’s content and updating every piece of it while performing the website upgrading job. You can review your site and create a clear list of required changes, edits, and rebuilds.
Visual Content: Review the quality of your website's visual content. Examine all images, infographics, videos, animations, gifs, illustrations, icons, screenshots, and other types of visuals. Update or replace anything that appears blurry, pixelated, or outdated.
You may find images that no longer align with your website’s articles or brand identity. If you do, you can edit or replace those images with more-suited ones.
Written Content: Besides reviewing your site's visual content, you also need to examine the written content thoroughly. Cautiously read all the copies scattered across your site's web pages.
Also, read all the articles you have on your website. Check if all the information is relevant and up-to-date. Look for significant errors in articles and carefully check all the aspects of on-page SEO.
For example, you can examine whether Alt texts are relevant or not. You can inspect the frequency of a focus keyword placement within an article. You can also utilize some of the best AI tools for SEO to improve your article quality.
The last and most crucial factor about content upgrading is that you try to provide more value to readers with recent and relevant information in your articles.
5. Track and Monitor Your Website’s Data with Analytics
The next task on how to update a website article is to track and monitor your website’s data with analytics tools. We recommend conducting a thorough survey of your website's front end.
This will let you understand your audience’s behavior and identify ways to improve your site to meet their needs. If you created your site with Dorik AI, you can monitor it using its integrated Analytics tool.
This tool shows the most popular pages, user engagement time, and bounce rate. As a result, you get a better insight into what visitors like and dislike. You can prepare to take further steps to reduce the bounce rate and increase the dwell time on your website.
6. Spy on Your Competitors’ Websites
It’s always helpful to learn from others. That said, before updating your website, review what your competitors are doing. You can browse a few of your competitors’ sites and evaluate your results against your webpage.
You can use several competitor analysis tools to sneak peek into your competitor websites’ data. For instance, you can compare those sites’ traffic with yours using a free website analytic tool, SimilarWeb.
You can also go with other free and paid website analytic apps. With these tools, check what you are missing - it can be a piece of crucial information, a page, or any other content.
7. Take Inspiration from Others
It’s crucial to take inspiration and lessons from other industry experts. You can monitor their work through their websites, social media profiles, and other channels.
You can get ideas before making changes to your website by looking at the best website examples, such as competitors’ sites and other specialists in the field that have attractive designs.
Other sources of design inspiration include graphic design magazines, design museums, posters, etc. After you've searched both online and offline, implement your discoveries into a new version of your website.
Try to avoid making too many unnecessary changes to your website. Your objective is to improve your site with little adjustments.
8. Conduct Simple A/B Testing
After making a few changes and updating your site, it’s time to opt for A/B testing. In case you don’t know, A/B testing refers to comparing two app or website versions to identify the better performer.
While conducting this test, you need to gather the results of two versions of your websites (previous and updated versions). After you update a site, collect stats on traffic and user engagement. Continue making changes until you see your expected results.
For example, you can replace a photo or change landing page copies to see if the dwell time increases. You can even recreate the landing page using the best ai landing page copy generators.
You can also experiment with two different CTAs to determine which CTA captures more clicks.
9. Optimize for SEO
The reason for updating your website is to make it appealing and perfect for users and to find more visitors through search engines.
Indeed, you may have already worked towards improving your site’s SEO, but it’ll be better if you review it again while updating your website.
You can start reviewing by inspecting all the ranked keywords on your site. Check how many visitors you receive for each keyword and seek ways to gain more traffic.
Look for keywords that aren’t performing well, find reasons, and take necessary action. You can improve the quality of your content, build high-quality backlinks, optimize your URLs to be more descriptive and keyword-rich or perform thorough keyword research.
Your goal is to follow SEO best practices until you see the desired results.
10. Strengthen Your Website Security
The last task we recommend you accomplish while updating a site is to check your website's security. First, ensure your website has an SSL certificate. Then, redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS to prevent unencrypted connections.
Regularly update your CMS, plugins, themes, and other software components. However, you don’t have to think about these tasks much if you’re using Dorik AI. This no-code website builder powered by AI will handle all these technicalities for you.
Last but not least, set up a strong authentication system on your site and periodically conduct a test for security weaknesses to fix them before attackers find them.
Benefits of Updating a Website
Regularly updating your site will bring you many benefits. Below are some potential and key benefits you can enjoy after upgrading your website.
Boosting Search Visibility: If you haven’t seen any positive changes in your website's ranking on search engines for a long time, updating your site can be helpful.
When you update a site, it signals search engines that your website is active, resulting in increased search visibility.
Improved User Experience: By updating your website, you can ensure that it is user-friendly, with intuitive navigation, faster load times, and a responsive design that works well on all devices.
Enhanced Security: You can protect your website from vulnerabilities and cyber-attacks by performing regular updates.
Competitive Advantage: Competitive advantage is another benefit you’ll enjoy after updating your site. When you do it, you tend to stay ahead of your competitors and become more likely to attract visitors and convert them into paid customers.
FAQs on How to Update a Website
What Happens If a Website is Outdated?
If your website is outdated, you may experience poor user experience, low dwell time, and decreased search engine rankings.
How Do You Check If a Website is Outdated?
Slow loading, non-responsiveness, increased bounce rate, low conversion rate, and content accessibility issues are some common signs that indicate your site is outdated.
How Often Should You Update Your Website?
There’s no hard and fast rule regarding updating a website. However, based on your site, it’s a good idea to perform updating tasks monthly or quarterly.
Start Sending Visitors to Your Updated Website
You now understand how to update a website by following the site-updating best practices. Remember that it’s a journey, not a destination, and you can keep going as long as your site is alive.
Sometimes, updating a site requires completing many tasks, while other times, a simple tweak will do the job. Hence, website optimization may sometimes feel like a hassle, but it’s worth it.
We recommend you be patient and cautious when taking all the steps regarding website upgrading. The end result may be fruitful, and your efforts will pay off.
