Is your website ready for a spring clean?

Your website is one of your most efficient sales tools, it is the first impression of your brand to potential customers and establishes credibility by providing a seamless experience for your users.

When did your website go live?

Many businesses have a website designed, built and then put live, to simply leave it to fend for itself. The digital world is ever changing and if your website isn’t correctly maintained, added to and improved, you’ll quickly find your business getting left behind. Did you know that the lifetime of a website is just 3 years?

If you website went live more than 3 months ago, we’d recommend taking the time to update the imagery on your most viewed pages. This will freshen up the site and give returning users a feeling as though the site has been updated.

How easy is it to keep your content up-to-date? And does your CMS allow you to dive straight in and add a new article with ease? That’s one of the reasons we’re avid advocates of Craft CMS. The simplicity and ease of use of their content management system prevents any headaches for your marketing team.

When it comes to content creation, we’d recommend adding new articles to your blog or news section to drive more organic traffic to your website. Whether it’s about your company’s recent events, valuable information such as industry trends or opinion pieces to get your community talking, it’ll draw more traffic to your site if it has relevant and interesting content for people to read and relate to.

If you’re using Craft, its post date functionality allows you to automate article posting as well as scheduling when content is due to expire (if it needs to be removed from the site) and that means it’s especially good if your company has regular offers. Here’s some more tips on why content managers love Craft CMS.

It’s not just your articles you should be updating to keep things fresh either. Adding new information to company FAQs based on customer feedback, adding recent testimonials from happy clients and case studies of new work, all enhance your user’s experience of your website. It can look great on the surface but if the content isn’t worth digesting, you’ll soon see your bounce rate and sessions on a page drop considerably.

Google's search engines look for the most relevant content, so keeping your content fresh and appropriate is key for SEO, as nothing stays relevant for a long these days.

Consider introducing a newsletter to your website and audience too. Sending emails can seriously improve your existing traffic and keep customers returning to your website, building their trust and loyalty with your brand. Newsletters don’t just need to be information on your company, they can be a round-up of your latest articles, case studies and any upcoming events. Don’t forget to ensure you’re considering GDPR too.

As well as keeping your site looking aesthetically pleasing, it's also just as important to ensure that the system your website runs off is up-to-date with the latest version too. We don’t just mean installing the latest features that you might feel you can live without. When your system releases a new version, it’s more than likely it has a security update and you could be running a version of the site which has become vulnerable to hacking.

You might have an incredibly designed website with perfect user journeys and slick functionality, but if the pages simply aren’t loading, your website’s performance could be forcing users abandoning your site. Users expect pages to load instantly in a mobile and digital age, and if yours doesn’t, then it could be part of the frustration for a user as well as the reason for a lack of lead generation. Take a look at our article on why website performance matters.

At Abstrakt, we don’t just design and develop websites, we build lasting relationships with the clients we work with. That way, we can share our knowledge and expertise to ensure their website is always working hard for them. If your website isn’t performing the way you’d like it to be, get in touch with us today, and we can help you develop your website into the experience your customers want and need.