When to update your company’s website

Even the tech giants of today were caught out at one stage or another with a dodgy website. If you don’t believe me, I will show you!

#1 Apple

I mean Apple is not the worst. It fit the tech era layout with email newsletters and a clear navigation bar. However, all the different fonts, columns and lack of whitespace just makes it look crowded and dated.

#2 Amazon

However, Amazon is a much better example of an awful website layout from the 90s. One classic 90s column, no navigation system at all, no infographics and that sweet, sweet 1995 logo before they became the ecommerce giant that they are today.

#3 Arngen

Also, Arngen is a good example of questionable website layouts that some people still do! Less is more. Make each page of your website have one purpose only. Let’s not just throw all our content on to one page. I don’t know where to even look in the image above!

If your website looks like this then that is one very clear sign that you need to update your website pronto (no offence). However, if you're happy with how your website is formatted and the information in your content is still relevant, how do you know when you need to update your website?

Search engine algorithms

These change on a regular basis so the schema that is hidden on your website needs to evolve to give search engines the information they are hunting for. A good example are the schema updates that were rushed out for COVID-19 updates.

There are two ways that you can implement your COVID-19 announcements [according to Google Search Central]:

- Add Special Announcement structured data to your web pages (recommended): Structured data is a standardised format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. - Submit announcements in Search Console: If you don't have access to your site's HTML, or you need to quickly submit the announcement, you can do so in Search Console. This tool is only for short-lived announcements that are set to expire within a month of posting. Also, there is currently no way to update your announcement unlike structured data.

These changes to schemas on browsers can occur at any time. As you know, web crawlers use ranking, usability, relevancy and keywords for web browsers to sort and index your content. To find out more about Google ranking read our blog on SEO. However, it is important to keep up to date with the changes that are made to the algorithms and use them to your advantage. The more relevant your content the more likely you are to rank highly. Just look at the below image for how often Google alone updates its algorithms.

Page Speed

Google Page Speed is a perfect tool to get a good idea of how your page speed is going. It is ranked from 0-100. 100 is the best it can be. A score between 50-89 would indicate that the site needs some work. A 49 or lower is marked as poor. Do not be disheartened if your score fluctuates or is not what you thought it would be. The goalposts Google set are also ever changing. Therefore, keeping an eye on your page speed score would be a valuable metric to keep an eye on when doing your website audits.

You are ranked on things such as (but not limited to):

- Lab Data: e.g., speed index, total blocking time and cumulative layout shift. - Opportunities: e.g., defer offscreen images and remove unused JavaScript - Diagnostics: e.g., minimise main-thread work, serve static assets with an efficient cache policy and keep request counts low and transfer sizes small. - Field Data - Origin Summary - Mobile/Desktop Speeds

Infographics

Infographics are collections of imagery, charts, and minimal text that makes your website grab your readers attention and makes your content easier to digest. However, they must also be informative of complex processes, opinions, causes, statistics or content in a quick overview format.

In marketing it can also be for landing pages, newsletters, online courses, social media, eBook/whitepaper, and testimonials. For further business uses, infographics are extremely flexible. The list can be endless. Further uses of infographics could be for client presentations, proposals, progress reports, brand style guides, flyers, sales pages, about pages, webinars and most likely a lot more.

Do you reckon that’s an extensive enough list to prove how very valuable infographics can be? Good. Our design team can help you build your perfect infographics in a heartbeat!

If your website is lacking infographics, then this is the sign you needed to get some. This is the time for your website to be updated to be much more visually pleasing and digestible.

To conclude

We have more content from our Your Business in Your Hands series that cover more ways to grow your business online.