Continuous upkeep of your website is one major thing to keep in mind. We briefly mentioned website maintenance in our previous post, but today we will dive into the dos and don’ts as well as ideas for how to get the most benefits with the least amount of sacrifices.

Why You Should Keep Your Site Updated

First, we will discuss why you should continuously tend to your website. The number one reason is that it shows google that you are alive. Every time you post to or update your site and Google crawls your site to see it, it shows them the follow:

• You’re active. Your site having recent updates and new content shows Google that your business is still open and running.
• You are an authority in your field and you care about providing useful information and therefore you’re serious about your business. Useful content refers to posting what people are looking for and that they care about. We touched on this in Website 101 Part 2: Content, which is the second part of this series.
• You’re focused on the security of your site. Just like your phone updates, platforms and plugins like WordPress and WooCommerce have regular updates that must be installed periodically This updates tend to be fixes for various bugs in the code or issues that can inhibit the overall security and functionality of your site.

Do’s and Don’ts of Website Updating

Now that you’ve gained some insight on why you should make sure to update your website, the next section will be covering various do’s and don’ts of updating your website.

Do’s 

• Test your updates before making them live on your server.
  • This is VITAL as some updates could have unseen/uncaught bugs that can literally BREAK your site completely.
  • Most people tend to leave their updates to automatically install. Doing this saves time, energy, and doesn’t require you to actually do anything. However, doing this doesn’t allow you to catch broken updates before they hit your live server and your visitors eyes.
  • If there is a site break due to an update (like the recent WordPress 5.5 update that broke thousands of themes due to the removal of an older javascript library), it can really hurt your wallet getting it fixed due to the time and coding and such that will go into fixing it. It’s better to do it before hand and save all the hastle.
• Write unique, keyword/phrase focused content.
  • We covered that in depth in Part 2.
  • As a quick reminder though – unique content is very important because plagiarism will get your rankings hit devastatingly hard. You’ll drop in the rankings very noticeably, you will no longer be seen as a leader or authority in the industry in the eyes of Google, and it can hinder your growth in the future even if you do start writing unique content regularly.
  • To boost your rankings each page and post should have a specific keyword or phrase that is the main topic of said content. This helps Google know what you are writing about, what people should search to find you, and how relevant you are to related keywords and phrases.
• Keep It Consistent
  • Consistency is key when it comes to posting not just on your site but anywhere online too.
• Hire someone to do it for you.
  • Many business owners don’t have time or knowledge to take on the daunting tasks of consistently and frequently updating their sites. It can be hard for them to learn how to update websites, especially when it comes to code based updates, so hiring an agency to do so for you can definitely help your company grow online.
  • For example, our website maintenance package includes hosting, backend updates, content updates, security, and backups. These are all useful services that can help you keep your site updated.

Don’ts

• Leave your site to auto update
  • As mentioned above, leaving your site to auto update can result in site breaking errors that will really hurt your online presence.
• Forget to update your website
  • As a counterpart to the aforementioned issues, just leaving your website without updates can open you up to a variety of security issues from having outdated code.
• Plagiarize everything on your site
  • As mentioned before, this is a big no-no and should be avoided at all costs.
• Take on more than you can handle
  • When updating your site content, it is possible to be overzealous and want to update every single day with new content. However, if you are not able to keep this up consistently, it can hurt you overall. Come up with a realisitic posting schedule, and increase as need be. For example, if you start updating your site once a month, you need to maintain that forever. If you start every other week, you wouldn’t be able to drop back down to once a month without experiencing a dip in the rankings.
• Keyword Stuff
  • This used to be a valid way to boost your rankings by stuffing random keywords into your website. However, Google has cracked down majorly on this and it does the opposite now. If you are keyword stuffing, Google will penalize you.

Website Updating Ideas and Advice

Finally, I’ll leave you with some ideas to keeping your website updated frequently and consistently. What you’ll need is a designated calendar (electronic or paper) to keep your posting schedule in check.

Find Your Posting Schedule

Pick a realistic posting schedule, for us, it’s once a week. I usually suggest starting at every other week for my clients, to let them get a feel for what they can handle. The next step is going to be where you do your first line of research. Look up your industry and see when the best time of the week and the best time of the day to post is. You’ll need to play around based on your specific audience but this will give you a starting point. For example, our industry’s best time to post is on Monday at around 10AM or 1PM. We actually see the best interactions on Tuesday at 12PM. Another example is that schools see a distinctly lower level of interactions on the weekends compared to the posts during the week.  Once you’ve decided place reminders in your calendar to make sure you keep it consistent.

Determine Your Content

The next step is to determine your content. For example, you can blog as this is the most common way to update your website with new content regularly. You can rotate through various broad topics in order to get the most out of your strategy. For me, I’ll generally post about SEO, Social Media, Web Design, and then a miscellaneous topic  and rotate through them. However, I also decide if I have a lot of information about one topic, I’ll break it up into  a series like this one. You can also have various types of pages that you update. Some of my clients have special deals each month and use that as the “update” for their site. You can also add testimonials that you get from Facebook, Google, Angie’s List, etc. Other ideas include updating your gallery, portfolio, events, and the like.

Conclusion

Hopefully this installment in the series helps you out! Be sure to read the other parts of the Website 101 series, to really learn all you need to know as a business owner. Looking to get a website? Look no further, check out our web design packages here. If you’ve already got a website and need someone to keep it updated, check out our website maintenance package and get started today!