How to Update Your Web Page: Tips and Best Practices
These days, there’s little within the digital world that isn’t constantly changing and developing. Your website should be no exception. If you would like to stay your audience engaged and your content desirable, you’ll need to stay top of your game and confirm you’re in-the-know about the newest trends. If your site remains an equivalent for too long and isn’t updated with exciting new content every once during a while, you risk appearing stale and irrelevant.
Thankfully, you’ll use a knowledgeable website builder like us to tweak your site and provides it the freshening up it requires. This straightforward guide will explain the way to update your website easily and efficiently:
Deciding whether you ought to update your website
Before you start a full-out website redesign (a hefty project which could potentially take months), consider whether a couple of simple adjustments could help bring your site to subsequent level.
And if you’re unsure whether your website is in need of a touch TLC, ask yourself the subsequent questions:
- Is my design slightly outdated?
- Have my sales been decreasing recently?
- Could I realistically increase my results with better product photography or a far better overall user experience?
- Could my brand enjoy any additional pages, like a blog or a web store?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, or if they got you brooding about your site, a touch website update could also be at hand.
How to update an internet site in 8 steps
- Review your current content and style
- Check your website’s data
- Evaluate your competitors’ websites
- Gather inspiration
- Add powerful multimedia elements
- Align your design to current trends
- Perform simple A/B testing
- Optimize your SEO
01. Review your current content and style
First up in your website update: give your current site a radical evaluation. At now , you’re not creating any new content but simply investigating what works well and what doesn’t. This way, you’ll be ready to make a transparent list of all the small print that require tweaking.
Visual content: Check the standard and relevance of your visual assets, like images and videos. Identify anything that appears blurry, pixelated or generally outdated. you’ll encounter images that are not any longer relevant or aren’t aligned together with your current brand identity.
In these instances, you won’t necessarily need to delete the pictures altogether. Rather, you’ll use online media editing tools to bring them to life. Also, note of your website’s loading speed. Old video files could also be overly heavy, negatively impacting your site’s user experience.
Written content: also as watching your site’s visuals, scan through the written website content too. search for any broken links, also as missing or misinformation .
For example, you’ll have old blog posts that not serve a purpose, or mission statements that don’t quite speak your brand’s language. Perhaps you’ll give more details on a particular product or service you’re selling, or reword the text on your call-to-action button to get more clicks.
02. Check your website’s data
As well as thoroughly surveying your website from the front (the a part of your website that visitors see), it’s also worth looking into your own analytics. this may assist you understand your audience’s behavior and the way you’ll tailor your site to raised fit their needs.
Integrating tracking tools and analytics into your website will enable you to watch your site’s traffic. You’ll be ready to check important information, like which pages are the foremost popular, what proportion time visitors spend on each page and what your bounce rates are (meaning, what percentage visitors left your site without interacting with it at all). For more advice, here’s a comprehensive guide the way to use Google Analytics.
Once you understand your customers’ behavior a touch better, take it a step further by analyzing why they’ll act the way they are doing . If many visitors are leaving a particular page of your site without engaging with it in the least , consider what’s different that page. Does it have more text than others? Does it take longer to load? Insights like these will assist you come up with more informed decisions when updating your website.
03. Evaluate your competitors’ websites
While you’re busy working away on your website update, don’t forget to see what your competitors are up to by conducting some marketing research . After browsing through a couple of of their websites, compare your findings to your own site.
Consider whether you’ll be missing any crucial information, pages or content. Or perhaps you found a pleasant idea or two that you simply could adopt and implement so as to assist boost your site.
Take your evaluation one step further by looking into your competition’s data. this may offer you the prospect to match your site’s traffic to others, using specific metrics that you simply can pick. Don’t worry if this sounds daunting – there are useful website analytics tools dedicated to only that. For example:
- SimilarWeb allows you to enter yours or your competitor’s name into the search bar. It then comes up with a full report of traffic estimates, during a fairly simple to know interface.
- SEMRush may be a highly recommended SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tool that gives you with details on any website’s traffic, whether organic or paid.
- Use the ‘Site Explore’ section in Ahrefs to look at how your competitors’ traffic has changed over time and compare it to your own.
04. Gather inspiration
Now is the time to require an honest shop around and obtain to understand your market better than ever. look for inspiration by browsing website design examples from both your own and other industries that catch your eye.
Open up your look for inspiration to alternative resources, like design museums or graphic design magazines. Perhaps you’ll also encounter something that sparks your creativity from other fields altogether, like a color palette you noticed during a boutique window display, or a billboard for a concert.
Once you’ve scoured the web and offline worlds for inspiration, it’s time to use your findings to your website update. However, try to not get over excited with changing too many details. After all, you’re just trying to find little touches you’ll make to elevate your site.
05. Add powerful multimedia elements
You could have the foremost fascinating and high-quality content on your website, but if it doesn’t look the part – it simply won’t work. Research shows that when it involves web design, first impressions matter. albeit your site visitors have trouble finding the knowledge they’re trying to find , if they find your website visually appealing, they’ll tend to be more engaged.
A good place to start out is by checking whether your website is in line with the core principles of design. additionally , integrating striking visual elements into your site will help create a memorable design which will set you aside from your competition and instantly engage your audience. Consider how you’ll update, edit or add new media features to your website, including everything from videos, to sound, images, animations and more.
Fortunately, you’re not building your website from scratch, so there’s no got to create all of this new content from situation . If you can’t currently afford the time and money required for a full photoshoot, there are many alternatives. Instead, look around your website to ascertain if there are any existing images that would do with a touch sprucing up.
Play around with tools like Photo Studio to edit your images. You’ll be ready to remove your photos’ backgrounds in only a click, also as apply filters and other striking effects. you’ll also browse this free library of high-quality photos to be used for your needs, or explore this fun and versatile Vector collection .
If you would like to feature a dynamic feel to your website, transform your videos or still images into professional promotional videos with a web video editor. Add text, music and computer graphics to make engaging content which will attract your audience.
06. Align your design to current trends
Gaining a deep understanding of current web design trends are often tricky if you haven’t been keeping yourself consistently in-the-know. That doesn’t mean you’ve got to be knowledgeable website designer. However, as an internet site owner, you ought to be keeping your eyes hospitable make sure you stay sharp and relevant.
Regularly check your competitors’ websites to ascertain what they’re up to. You’ll be ready to track and identify any changes or updates on their sites, like a more prominent use of video, the addition of relevant pages and more.
Another way of staying updated is by reading magazines and blog posts on web design trends. you ought to also invest time in browsing social networks that are specifically design-oriented, like Dribbble and Behance. they need a robust emphasis on graphic design, starting from UI design inspiration, to illustration, typography, animation and more. This way, you’ll be ready to gain a solid grasp of what’s happening within the overall world of graphic design, and possibly apply certain elements to your own website.
07. Perform simple A/B testing
Once you’ve made a couple of changes on your updated website, it’s an honest idea to check it using A/B testing. this type of testing involves creating two versions of your website and running a test on both of them to gather stats on traffic and user engagement. it’ll assist you base your decisions on real data, and make changes to your site accordingly.
For example, you’ll experiment with two different CTAs to ascertain which one entices users to click thereon more. inspect these effective call-to-action examples for ideas. Or, replace a photograph slideshow with a full screen video on one among your sites . Then, you’ll test out the 2 variants and see which one performs better.
For more information, inspect this guide the way to perform A/B tests on your site, with the assistance of two recommended tools.
Final Verdict
08. Optimize your SEO
Last, but never least, remember that you simply want your audience to simply find you on search engines like Google. you’ll have already worked towards improving your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) within the past, but it’s definitely worth reviewing it as you’re revamping your website. You’ll have new images that you ought to write alt text, plus additional pages which will require optimized URLs.
A good place to start out is by conducting keyword research. Keywords are two-to-five-word phrases that your potential customers would type into search engines when trying to find a business like yours. to extend your chances of ranking higher, take a glance at these professional free SEO tools which will assist you find the proper words and phrases to focus on through your website.