4 Tips to Keeping Your Website Looking Like New

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Have you ever wondered how some websites still look great after an extended period of time where your seems to fall flat after going live? This is where you must understand the importance of search engine optimization as keeping your website looking attractive to visitors is important in order to maintain ‘the standard’ your brand adheres to.

A website is much like a garden, when it’s untended it eventually becomes overgrown with weeds leaving it looking a mess. Often times when themes and plugins are updated, it can mess up the styling a little bit in certain areas of your site which affect the look and feel of your site – like weeds overgrowing great content.

Here are a few tips that you can use to keep your website looking fresh and new:

Avoid Making Changes Yourself Unless…

In my experience, clients who decide to make changes themselves can easily go off track in their decision to update certain elements. The key here is whatever changes you make should fall in line with the current design of your website. Things such as deciding to make a new headline bigger, or deciding to highlight text to make it stand out may not be the best decision to make resulting in misalignment of elements.

The exception of course to this rule is if you know what your doing, and are able to easily change some text, then it’s not a problem. A website should be designed so that you CAN make changes. If a web designer built your website in such a way that makes it difficult to edit desired areas, then maybe they missed out on some planning strategies.

Check Your website Regularly

There can be issues with your website that pop up at any given time. I recently had a client who got up at 2am and for some reason decided to look at his website. Only to discover that his website wasn’t there. What was there was the first screen of installing WordPress. Since I had a recent backup available, I was able to restore is website in minutes.

While you may not look at your website often, others are looking at it. It’s good to know if there’s any issues that need to be resolved to keep it looking like new.

Keep Themes and Plugins Updated

While this doesn’t relate as much to keeping your site looking new, but more in regards to keeping your site secure. WordPress on average pushes out updates twice a month. Plugins can be updated at any given time. Depending on the plugins used to build your site, and how many, they can happen often. Typically for the sites I manage, I’m updating plugins virtually everyday on one site or another.

Themes and plugin updates are usually related to bug fixes and security upgrades. If you choose not keep themes and plugins updated, your site eventually becomes so out of date that a new site will need to be built. I’ve had it happen before. It’s like updating software from version 1 to version 6. There can be compatibility issues and such as there is such a large jump between versions that it can start breaking the site. Developers stop updating their plugins and can stop working.

If you want to keep your site running smoothly, keep your themes and plugins up to date.

Write a Blog Post Once a Month

Every gone to a companies Facebook Page and noticed their last post was 6 months ago? When I see that it brings a slight downturn in the credibility I feel for the company. I’ll confess, I’m guilty of it too. Whats worse is when you visit a website and see that there’s only 2 or 3 blog posts and no new ones for up to a year or more.

Sure, we all get busy, but to sit down and write even a quick 300 words shouldn’t be too difficult.

Writing a blog post on a regular basis, even if it’s short, helps to maintain credibility, is good for SEO, and shows your visitors that you care about what’s going on online. You don’t have to write often, but at a minimum I’d say once a month.

Keep a list on your phone or in a file somewhere for ideas you come across, then once a month, sit down for 20 – 30 minutes and bang out a blog post.

Conclusion

Keeping your site looking new requires some ongoing maintenance. If it’s not properly taken care of, it will affect the branding of your business and possibly your credibility. By allowing a web designer to update content for you, keep your plugins and themes up to date, and monitor your site every once in a while, your site will be kept running like a clock.

As a web designer, I not only build websites, but I also maintain them. If you would like help maintaining your website, visit my support page, or send me a message, and I’ll be happy to help you in any way I can.

 

 


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