3 Great Reasons To Do Ongoing Website Updates
How often have you had a conversation about website updates with your web designer? Chances are – many times over the years But what you might not realise is that, if that conversations with your web site design team goes without follow-up action, your business operations could be at risk.
Here are three great reasons why your web site designer should frequently update your website.
1. Website security
Like any creative activity, designing a website takes a great deal of passion and commitment. However, the professionals developing your company’s website have no control over their product unless you, the website owner, are willing to continually update the site.
When you work with any reputable provider of web designing services, their primary focus will likely be building a site that’s secure from hackers and scammers. That’s Web Design 101 for them If your service provider is worth the money you pay them, then there’s one other thing they will strongly advise you to do: Make sure you update your website frequently.
So, what’s the danger to not applying frequent updates?
-- Hackers are always looking for ways to get into your online system. When they detect a vulnerability, they’ll quickly explore it to compromise your system, and your user’s data. The only way to prevent that is to make frequent updates a part of your web site design strategy
-- If the backend of your system looks and feels slow, chances are that spammers have taken control of it and are using your website to spam other sites. You could end up getting blacklisted for that – and there’s not much your web designing agency might be able to do about it – except work with Google to get you re-listed. Regular updates can help prevent that situation from taking hold.
-- Most of the websites run off popular content management platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and SharePoint. Unfortunately, all of them discover vulnerabilities from time to time, and issue updates for their plug-ins. The only way to secure your website therefore is to make sure your web design service applies those plug updates frequently.
The onus for updating and maintaining the site is up to the client. That’s the basic rule that any website designing agency works with. So, if you want your company’s website to remain safe and secure for your visitors and clients, you need to insist that your team applies frequent updates to your website platform.
2. Enhance your visitor experience
Security of your website, and everything that comes with that secure feeling, is the number one reason that web designing professionals advocate frequent updates. However, there’s much more that happens to your website – perhaps as a “by product” of getting secure.
-- Most frequent updates contain tweaks and enhancements that add speed to the various components of the site. So, while your latest update might enhance your security, it is also delivering faster content downloads and page refreshes to your visitors and clients – a great reason for them to come back, over…and over…and over again
-- You may have asked your web design agency about adding a particular new feature or functionality to your website. And while your design team has the capability to deliver, they might not necessarily have the technical tools to satisfy your requirements – because of limitations of the platform. Well, the next update could very well deliver exactly what your website designer is looking for.
-- Website update cycles are often a great time for businesses to take a fresh look at their online marketing strategies. So, while the techies are applying the updates, this is a great time to also get your website designing team to work with them to come up with fresh user experience-enhancing ideas and content too.
If a first-time visitor enjoys his/her experience on your website, statistics tell us that he/she will tell at least 8 other contacts on their social media about it. Those 8 contacts spread similar good news to 8 other contacts…and there’s a snowball effect. If your website design team can provide you this kind of “free word of mouth” publicity by making frequent updates to the site – is that a bad thing?
3. Attract BOTS and Spiders to your website
Ask any web designer, and chances are they love Spiders, and Crawlers…and Bots These are elements that search engines (like Google) use to rank and rate websites. The thing about these intelligent algorithm-based components is that they undergo frequent updates themselves, and are often trained to “sniff out” stale website design.
If your design team doesn’t apply updates more frequently, chances are that your site could be flagged by the Bots and Spiders as being outdated and irrelevant for search queries. To avoid that from happening, you need to instruct your web designer to apply all the latest patches and updates that are released frequently.
Only you can do it
While your website design team might have the technical capabilities to manage and apply frequent website updates, only you can mandate that they comply with such a policy. At the end of the day, if hackers and spammers do compromise the site, it’s you that will be the biggest loser for not embracing frequent website updates
