How often do you need to update your website?

Keeping your site up to date is important. You want your visitors to read accurate and current information. Next to your content, it is important to make sure that your plugins are updated as well. Updating the plugins on your site helps to improve their performance, but it is also important to keep your WordPress site safe and secure. But how often should you update your website? And what things have the highest priority? In this post, I’ll talk you through everything you need to know about updating your site!

4 reasons why updating your website important

1. Security 

Updating your site is vital for several reasons. Updating your plugins is key because it ensures your site is secure and protected against cyberattacks. Each update often includes security patches that fix vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers. Ignoring these updates can leave your site exposed to malicious attacks, data breaches, and other security risks. Regular updates help maintain the integrity and safety of your site, protecting both your data and your visitors’ information.

2. SEO

Next to updating your plugins, you need to make sure that the content of your website is also up-to-date. Regularly updating your website, adding and improving content is good for the position of your site in the search engines. You’ll get more traffic from Google if you work on your site regularly. For Google, regular updates are a signal that a website is worked on and relevant and that it is rewarded with higher positions. 

3. Trust

If the information on a website is new and accurate, it will appear more trustworthy to your audience. You want your information to be correct and up to date. Wrong opening hours, old contact information, but also outdated blog posts will make visitors distrust your website and your business. Keeping your website fresh and up-to-date is therefore important for your brand reputation and trustworthiness. 

4. Marketing and sales

If you regularly update and add content to your website, you’ll have a reason for your visitors to come back to your site. Make sure to add content that your audience is interested in. That’ll make people interested in your product or service. Engaging content can make people more interested in your product or service and might be the deciding factor for them to make a purchase.

How often do you update different pages of your website?

Not every page needs to be updated as often. Some information changes much more often than other information. A general rule would be to update your website as soon as something changes. If you change your opening hours, make sure to change that on your website too. 

If you are one of those people who remember to make all adaptations on your website promptly, you don’t need to read the rest of this article. Most people tend to forget to adapt changes in their business to their website. Let’s discuss some different pages you may have on your website and figure out how often you should update these sections of your site.

Homepage

Your homepage is the virtual front door of your website. You should make sure that your homepage reflects your business or the person you are. Ensure it clearly communicates the problem your business, product, or service solves. If you do this right, your homepage probably won’t need frequent updates. However, evaluate your homepage twice a year by asking these questions:

• Does my homepage (still) reflect my business or the person I am?
• Does my homepage (still) make clear what problem I am solving?
• Could I refine my homepage?

Your homepage is the most important page of your website. It should always be completely aligned with your business and your business goals. You won’t probably need to make many changes if you evaluate your homepage twice a year. 

Blog posts

The content of blog posts needs occasional updates, too. It depends a bit on your topic and how often you’ll have to update. Evergreen content, like information about birds, may only need updates every five years. Timely content, such as technology trends, may need updates every two years.

Start with updating posts that generate the most traffic. These posts are seen by your audience most often and have the highest priority for fresh content. Regularly updated blog posts will keep your audience engaged and maintain your SEO rankings. Learn more on how you can best maintain your blog posts.

Contact page 

For plenty of websites, the contact page gets more views than any other section of the website. If you have a local business, an agency, or when you’re a contractor, it is of key importance to have a kick-ass contact page. Your contact page should entail a complete list with content details and communication options. And these options should always be up-to-date!

Make sure to check your contact page every 3 or 4 months. Especially if you often make changes in opening hours or other contact details. If you’re not likely to make any changes in your contact information, you’ll probably get away with a yearly check.

About page

Your about page tells your story. It tells your visitors who you are, what your business is and why your website exists. It humanizes your business by telling visitors about yourself and your team. People often visit the about page if they are considering purchasing and trying to evaluate if they trust you. They want to know what kind of business you are, what your values are and what the company’s history is. The story you show on your about page should be completely aligned with the mission and vision of your company.

Take a little time -at least once a year- to evaluate whether your About page is still valid and is aligned with your business and your business goals.

FAQ page

The FAQ page is a dedicated resource page on your website that gives an overview of the most common customer queries. Your FAQ page should quickly resolve the needs of your target audience. 

You should really make sure that your FAQ page addresses the questions that people genuinely have. Those questions may change over time. And you should update your FAQ page accordingly. Also, make sure that the answers you provide on your FAQ page are up-to-date. 

To draft a good FAQ page, you’ll need to do some research. You’ll need to find out what questions your audience has. You can either do a survey or analyze incoming emails or support questions. Make sure to update your research regularly because the questions people have may change over time. Checking (and potentially updating) this page once a year should probably be sufficient. 

Conclusion: make a routine out of your website updating tasks

Your website needs regular attention. To attract traffic and convince your audience to buy your product or service, you’ll need to make sure that your website is up-to-date. Updating your website has a technical side: the plugins all need to be updated regularly to ensure the security of your site. Next to that, you’ll need to make sure that the content on your website is current and up-to-date as well. 

Ideally, you would want all of your content to be accurate and up to date. For larger sites, that’ll probably be too much work. Next to that, people often forget to adapt changes in their business to their website. That’s why updating your website should be part of your routine.

You’ll just need to think about your homepage twice a year and check the details of your contact page every 4 months. And if you update a few blog posts every year, the most important information will always remain up to date. 

Making a routine out of updating your website is more easily said than done. Progress Planner will be able to help you with that. We’ll keep you motivated to work on your website and in the upcoming Pro version, we’ll add functionality to remind you of your most important updating tasks.