It’s a common assumption that once a website is built, it will work perfectly forever.

Unfortunately, that’s not the reality in 99% of cases. A website that isn’t updated regularly enough will:

• Start to sink in search engine rankings as your competitors get ahead of you.
• Become less appealing to your target customers.
• Worst of all – Your website will no longer be a valuable, trusted resource and you may lose your status as an authority figure in your market.

Why update my website regularly?

When your business website isn’t up-to-date and performing at its best, it will struggle to:

• Raise brand awareness and increase online exposure for your business.
• Generate leads, enquiries and attract new business.
• Make sales on your behalf.
• Be a valuable and helpful resource for new customers and for your existing customers.
• Remain safe/protected from nasty bots, malicious scripts and hackers.

A monthly website maintenance & security plan is the best way to protect your site and keep it running at peak performance.

How can I tell if my website isn’t performing?

Many business owners never look at their own website after it has been built.

You can do a quick website health check by answering the following questions:

1. How Much Traffic Does Your Site Get?

How many visitors are you getting to your site and how much time are they spending on your site? If both of these metrics are increasing, you may already be on the right track.

If you have Google Analytics installed on your website, you can find your website traffic statistics in there.

Google Search Console will also show you how many clicks and impressions your business is getting on Google Search.

2. Do You Get Leads that Turn Into Customers from your Website?

You could be getting thousands of site visitors a day but if they aren’t turning into new jobs or new customers, then you’re website isn’t performing it’s job.

If you have goal tracking configured, you can easily check out your conversion rate in Google Analytics.

Otherwise, you can simply check your email history to see how many forms are being submitted. This will give you a rough idea of how many leads are being generated by your website.

3. Does Social Media Profiles or Directory Listings Send Traffic To Your Site?

Outside links are important! Posting consistently and linking back to your website will lead to higher traffic.

You can check this by looking at your referral traffic in Google Analytics.

4. How Does Your Site Rank in Search Results?

How are you ranking on search engines like Google?

The obvious optimal spot is number one on the search results page, otherwise, you will want to be appearing someone on page one.

Anything after this and your site will rarely ever be discovered by your ideal customers.

You can perform ranking spot checks using an incognito or private browser window on Google search. However, the best way to check is to have an SEO Professional perform a ranking check using SEO software.

5. Is Your Site Mobile Responsive?

Are all aspects of your website design and content displaying correctly on mobile, tablet, laptop, and desktop devices?

Pull out your mobile phone and check out your website, navigate to every page. Jot down some quick notes about the experience like:

• How everything displays visually, does it look professional?
• Did the website load quickly enough or were you annoyed by the time you had to wait?
• Was it easy enough to use the menu to navigate through the site?
• Were you able to easily find a phone number to click-to-call or fill in a form to get in touch?