Once, I heard some rumors about changes in the services offered by one of my business associates company. As I couldn’t contact the vendor personally, I turned to their website to see if the sayings are valid. But there was no information on it. Probably they haven’t updated their website. I became doubtful, so I agree to temporarily halt my transactions with them until I get a proper notification.
This is just one example. Website unresponsiveness, information mismatch, low up-time, poor presentation, inappropriate positioning of important information, not-adhering to web policies, mobile incompatible and many other factors can lead to a loss of web credibility. I am listing some detailed reasons for why your business website needs to be updated, to be able to stand identified in a competitive crowd.
1. Your website is the face of your business.
You want to capture the attention of online users. These users are kind of people who believe that you exist only if you are listed on Google. Do you remember clicking some websites name and an error page pops up with a message like “Domain service no longer available” or ” resource cannot be found” or ” something went wrong”? The website manager is responsible for preventing such unwelcoming errors. Now imagine, if this is happening to your website, this is an urgent situation, you contact your website management company and ask them the reason. The error messages might be due to non-renewal of the domain name or some web pages may have been removed accidentally or something wrong has happened to the server where your website is hosted. In any case, an update is required as your customers may think that you have ceased operating.
2. Your website is an authentic source of recent business changes
Any change in the business or services, whether it is the technology, collaborations, acquisitions, new offerings, etc. must be immediately taken up on your official website. As my opening paragraph gives the scenario example, any glitch found by the customers may put them off. If you think your business has scaled to the level where there is need of adding new information, every now and then, invest in updating your static website into a dynamic one, that way, you will be able to control your website’s content and make changes. If you choose to stay with your static website, make sure you provide content updates to the maintenance team.
3. Your website is used to interact with your business.
The website carries your business contact information, web forms for sending you queries, static FAQs, discussion forums, store locator and other such tools that can initiate call-to-action for website visitors, these are good reasons to keep your website fresh and updated regularly. From time to time, these action tools must be verified and tested for their correct functioning.
There are some tools available which can give you website performance information. These analytics tools can help a website owner to monitor user browsing behaviour, conversion rate and indexing of a website on a search engine. These stats give results in form of graphs and numerals and you can decide whether your site needs an update or not. Integration of such tools into a website is highly recommended for monitoring. This monitoring is done by your website management hosting company, though if you are interested in the statistics, you can ask them to share the login details for your website’s analytics account and see the stats yourself. In fact, this is a useful exercise to do because you as the business owner needs to know how customers are interacting with your website.
