23 May 6 Best Reasons For Updating Your Website Design

Once you’ve created a beautiful WordPress website, you shouldn’t rest on your laurels. You should always look for new ways to keep it fresh, and a regular website design update makes for good best practice.

It’s not just about aesthetics either — although that plays a part. Read on to discover the 6 best reasons for updating your website design in 2019.

Take your visuals into the 21st century

In the digital world, appearances are everything. The way your website looks reflects on your business or blog, giving customers a sense of who you are and what you represent.

If you want to get ahead in your industry, you need to show your customers your value. Just as a nice office and a slick business card show prospective clients that you are an MVP in your field, so too does an aesthetically-pleasing website do the same.

If your website looks like it was made in the early Nineties, then your business will seem just as archaic. And while web design trends are changing all the time, as a rule of thumb you should keep it clean and minimalist — less is more.

Make your load speed short and snappy

Your load speed is an important factor in strong website design. You have only a few seconds to retain visitors when they arrive at your website. And if your website takes a few seconds too long to load, then your visitors will bounce away.

There are myriad factors that affect your website load speed. These include:

• Image sizes
• High traffic volume
• Page caching
• Poor web hosting/servers
• Site structure
• Excessive plugins

Spend some time during your website update looking at these factors.

Resize your images using a tool like TinyPNG, and look at removing superfluous plugins (or adding some to increase your load speed). You might even look into different hosting, especially if your website is growing in traffic volume.

When it comes to your website load speed, seconds count. The shorter your load time, the more rewarding your website will be to you and your visitors.

Keep yourself — and your visitors — safe and secure

Cyber-attacks are a real issue for website owners. No matter how small your blog is, it’s at risk of unscrupulous hackers. Maybe they want to use it as a spam server, or they want your personal data, or perhaps they’re just after a challenge. Whatever the reason, everyone is at risk — including you.

And hackers today are smart — they’re more than capable of exploiting weaknesses in websites. If you haven’t updated your website in a while, you might lack the necessary safeguards to prevent an attack.

Malware is one such risk that you should be aware of, holding entire systems to ransom in return for substantial monetary payments. Updating your web design protects you against malware. Whenever your antivirus, CMS or hosting provider releases a new patch, ensure you update immediately.

This isn’t just good for you — it’s good for your customers too. A weak website is an untrustworthy one, and if you don’t update regularly, you’ll lose custom as a result.

Stay commercially and financially viable

Your website isn’t separate from the rest of your financial infrastructure — it is a vital part of it. Your website is where your customers enter their personal details, where you host your payment gateways, and so on.

As such, your financial systems should be commercially sound. A professional, financially secure website helps you manage your overall cash flow better. For example, if you’re billing your customers to access content, but your website is sub-par, then your commercial viability will be out of skew and you’ll lose customers at key parts of the sales funnel.

You should present to your customers a sound financial bedrock that is aligned with your overall website and business goals — without it, you’ll lose trust and lose your customers as a result. It’s about future-proofing your website to stay ahead of the commercial curve.

Ultimately, a strong website is the hub of your financial network. It helps you manage the rest of your business’s finances better by providing a professional, secure nerve center.

Give your content a shot in the arm

Your website content and your website design are inextricable. The latter supports the former, and good design keeps your visitors on-site to read your great content. In short, first impressions count.

Your website design update might transform your site into a visual feast for the eyes, but if your content stays the same (and it’s not performing to standard), it will detract from your new look. To that end, take your website redesign as an opportunity to freshen up your content.

During your update, you might find that some pages could be consolidated, or even removed entirely. You might even find duplicate content on your site that is dragging down your SEO. Consequently, you’ll need to rewrite, revise, or simply delete your content.

Fine-tune your SEO

Web design is just one facet of strong SEO, but it’s an important one. The criteria for good search engine optimization is always changing, and it’s worth staying abreast of Google’s changes and updates as they come out.

But despite this, a few things stay the same. Ensuring every aspect of your website is indexable is important. Written copy is a key part of this, using relevant keywords in your headings and main body to show crawlers what your site is about.

Ditto for your images — make sure you use the alt text feature in the upload function on WordPress to show crawlers what is in the image. It’s also worth adding in some internal links to each page. These help the crawlers quickly navigate your site for indexing. Familiarize yourself with WordPress SEO and follow best practice across your website.

The reasons above are just a few examples of why you should update your website design. It might be time-consuming, but it’s well worth it for the added value your WordPress site will receive. Stay ahead of the game and keep your website fresh, and your audience will return to it time and again.