When do you need to update your website? Part of your effective digital marketing strategy should be hiring the right web design agency to make sure that your website is doing everything it possibly can for you. This is especially true for ecommerce websites, where small changes can make big differences. Here are some reasons it’s important to update your website, even if you’ve done so in the last year.

1. It’s the face of your brand. For a lot of consumers, there is no other way they’ll find out about you and your brand except through your website. Your brand is constantly growing and evolving. You’re adding new people and products, and perhaps you value or prioritize different things this year than you did a year or two ago. Does your website reflect this? Have you communicated these changes to your web design agency to make sure that the face of your brand reflects what’s really behind it?
2. Increased conversions come from excellent website design. Of course you want strong SEO strategies and need to be constantly thinking about how to drive traffic to your site. Once consumers get there, however, you’ve got to get them to convert. If you’re seeing the traffic arrive but not convert, there could be a couple reasons behind this. Look at your contact forms. A lot of consumers won’t have the patience to fill in 15 pieces of information before they’re allowed to read your blog post. What about your design? Is it outdated and boring or like everyone else’s? It’s important to keep on top of changes in design. As new websites come online every day, many of them are going to be using quite similar designs. Yours needs to stand out. Worse than all of this, is your website hard to navigate if you don’t already know how it works? It needs to be easy for consumers to find the information that they need on your site, and this applies to the desktop version as well as the mobile version.
3. Your mobile design has to be user-friendly. Many sites have resisted going over to a truly mobile-friendly website design. One of the main reasons for this is a reticence to cut down all the information that’s available on the desktop site to just the bare minimum that is needed to make the mobile site effective. Unfortunately, you must do this if you want to get conversions. All that information may be very dear to you, but it simply clutters up your mobile site and makes people want to click elsewhere. Give your website design company the green light to de-clutter your mobile site.
4. You cannot overestimate the necessity for fresh content. This is no longer simply a plus to a good website; it’s an absolute necessity for any business that wants to stay relevant in the rankings. The more updated information you include, the better your domain authority. Outdated information not only makes you rank poorly in web searches but is irrelevant to your customers. Consumers are increasingly used to the idea that every website is posting fresh content on an almost daily basis. This means that if you haven’t posted something to your website in a month, the best web design agency in the world can’t help you. When people come to the site their liable to wonder if you are even still in business.
5. Security could be the most important consideration. No matter what size of a business you have, security is essential. It used to be that smaller businesses could feel safe flying under the radar. Those days are long gone. Hackers and other bad actors have long since realized there’s a lot more money to be made with an easy hack into 100 small business websites than one difficult hack into an enormous business’ website. A big priority as you discuss matters with your web design agency is how to secure customer information and your own proprietary information from hackers and thieves.

Competition is fierce and if you want to stay on top having the right website design is key. If you haven’t done an update, talk with your web design agency about doing so now.