Oftentimes our customers ask us, "how often should I be updating my website?" This could mean their content, the website design, or their images.

It's important to understand the scale of the task at hand because the ease with which the changes can be made correlate closely with the frequency of which updates should be made.

For instance, if something is easy enough for average person to do themselves, such as writing a new blog post, you should do that more often than creating a whole new website design, which would require the coding expertise of a web developer. Here are various kinds of updates that might be done to a website and some advice on how often they should be done. Updating Content Content is the easiest to update and should therefore be updated more often than the design of your website. Additionally, updating content or adding new content is always a benefit to your SEO. With that in mind, choosing what to include or change will depend on what you want to be ranked for. If you're a homebuilder who focuses on “green building,” then you'll want your content strategy to include information about your environmentally sustainable building practices so that you can rank for terms like “green building” on search engines. Sales Inventory For those using their websites as a tool for sales, updating your inventory will be some of the content you update most often. For instance, homebuilders will need to update prices and sales status of their homes on a regular basis, as well as add new listings as needed while building new homes. You should update your website as soon as this information becomes available to you in order to keep your website current and make sure your updates are displayed front and center so your users know there has been a change. Some of our customers use a section on their homepage or a special promotions section on their site to alert users of pricing changes. Another option is to use email marketing to send out updates. If you list a sales inventory on your website, this should be the Number One update you make! Blog Posts Blogs are a great way to keep your website up-to-date. The unique thing about blog content is that you update it by continually adding to it rather than replacing it. This means you have a growing repository of blog posts that can be found by someone on the web, which will lead them to your site and potentially generate a lead! A good rule of thumb is to post between once a week or twice a month. Consistency is key when it comes to the frequency of blogging; If you come up with a bunch of blog ideas all at once, go ahead a write them, but hold off on hitting that publish button! Instead, schedule them to publish at a later date. Wordpress has a handy feature that allows you to set a date and time in the future for individual blog posts to go live automatically, which is a perfect time-saver! Copy Pages These pages are relatively easy to update, but don't need to be updated as often as Inventory or Blog Posts. Your copy pages will typically feature a few paragraphs of information on a certain topic and perhaps one or two accompanying images. A common example is the “About Us” page—almost every website has one. When updating the content on a copy page, you should ask yourself two things:

1. Is the information accurate?
2. Does the content reflect the message I want to send about my brand?

If the answer to either of these questions is no, then it's time to update the page. Making sure any information about the company is accurate is easy enough to check on, but brand messaging can be a little harder. It all relates back to your content strategy: what do you want to be known for? Instead of filling your site with random unrelated pages, think about how they connect the website experience to the overall company image and create the story of why a potential buyer should go to you. Contact Information Team members, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses can change over time, so you should update these as-needed if anything changes. You'll want to make sure you're aware of each place these things are mentioned on your website so that you can make the updates to everything at once. You don't want to update a copy page to say “Contact Sherry” but leave the footer saying “Contact Steve.” Common places for contact information include call-to-action buttons, copy pages (“About Us”, “Meet the Team”, “Contact Us”), and footers. Updating Titles and Headers Titles and headers are a little more integrated into the design and structure of the website, and are closely tied with SEO. They can be updated as needed but proceed with caution. Most of the time, there is no need to update these on existing web pages since they are chosen strategically at the time the website is built. As long as they are simply describing the purpose of the page, they are doing their job effectively. In some instances you may have the ability to directly change them, but sometimes you will need to check with your web developer to get them changed. Make sure to check with whoever is responsible for your website's SEO before changing them in case they are tied to your search engine ranking. Header Images Many websites will include images in header on each page of the website. Since these are integrated into the design of the website, they may require the help of a web developer to change and get formatted correctly. Remember the correlation between the difficulty and frequency of updates: these might be harder to change and do not need to be updated very often. It may be tempting to give it a refresh because you're bored with it, but remember that most visitors to your website don't see the image as often as you do, so as long as the image is high-quality and reflects your overall company image, it can stay! Updating the Website Design With many things changing in the world of web design, it can be hard to keep up. It used to be that changes moved more slowly, which meant a website’s design could remain relevant for a longer period of time. However, as things are changing more quickly, so must your website, and it can be hard to keep up with what’s an important update and what’s a passing trend. A design overhaul is a big change and not one that should be taken lightly. It’s not necessary to change with every design fad that comes and goes, but some features of a design will be taken into account by Google when it comes to your ranking. The structure of the design is the most important feature when it comes to SEO. What things go where? Is content easy to read on a small, medium, and large screen?

A good rule for knowing when to update your website design is every 2-3 years.

Much like phone technology, website technology lasts just about as long. It is best to consult your website developer to talk about your goals and figure out if you need to update the entire design now or later.

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If you're curious about any of the information and how it relates to your website, contact the BuilderIQ team! We are here to help. Our team can answer your questions about site design, content, or image placement. If you like, we can do a free Opportunity Review of your online presence to see if there are any opportunity areas for your company.