How to Know When Its Time for Website Maintenance?

Website is the first place of contact of a prospective customer with your offerings. It is a first impression, which you are giving to the customer. Any lag or glitch on the website can ruin your business impression. Businesses require the use of fast, responsive, and glitch-free websites that provide a seamless user experience. This is where the need of website maintenance arises.

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As per reports and surveys website, load times have serious implications on the sales of the businesses. It is estimated that even a second delay in website loading can lead to about a 7% loss in conversions.

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At the same time, a website that loads in about 1-10 seconds has a 123% probability of generating sales.

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Furthermore, there is around 53% chance that the customers might abandon your website in case it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

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These are some of the basic reasons why regular website maintenance and up-gradation are required.  However, how to know that your website needs an upgrade? In this article, we will discuss a few pointers that help you to know when the time to upgrade the website is.

1. Website is 4-5 Years Old:

This is probably the simplest way to find out, whether your website needs up-gradation or not. Although there is no such rule that you have to upgrade the site every 4-5 years, data from the Google Search Rankings supports this practice.

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Technology changes almost every year and it is seen as a trend that in every 4-5 years there are big disruptions. Upgrading the website every 4-5 years will ensure that you are incorporating all the latest technologies or at least most of it on your site. Furthermore, website up-gradation will boost your search engine rankings, which will overall increase the visibility of your site.

2. Website is not mobile-friendly:

These days the entire internet traffic is mobile-driven. Surveys suggest that 2 out of 3 digital media minutes spent by people are on mobile devices. In this scenario, if your website does not load properly on mobile, the losses could be huge.

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Moreover, you can lose about 61% of your customers if your mobile site takes a long time to load.

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3. The website looks more Outdated than Competitors:

This is a relative yet effective concept and varies as per the industries or the firms that you are operating into. You can check onto your competitor’s website and see whether their overall site responsiveness is very different than yours. You can take the help of your company’s website designers and operators to look into the minutes of the competitor’s website.

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If there are significant changes in the overall website design and appeal than their previous versions, then you should consider upgrading your website.

4. Visually Appealing:

Modern websites are having simpler designs and cleaner user interfaces. The overall feel of the newer websites is bold and urban. If you think that your website is not that visually appealing, as it was at the time of the launch, then you should move forward with a change in the website design.

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5. Website is not Responsive:

You need to check certain parameters timely to ensure that your website remains responsive irrespective of the type of device in which it is being viewed. The parameters could be:

• How is the website looking on the mobile screens?
• Is the website behaving differently on different browsers?
• Are the website contents in harmony, when the screen is rotated horizontally or vertically?

These basic parameters can help you find answers to your website up-gradation needs.

6. Diminishing SEO and SEM Effectiveness:

Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are conducted to enhance your product and the overall website rankings on the internet. But, if you find that the efforts in your optimizations are not being reflected on the search engine rankings, you can go for a website update.

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Updating the website as per the latest optimizations boost your overall search engine rankings to new highs. This is because the inherent keyword integrations onto these sites make the A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) rank your website higher in the user’s search results.

7. Less Number of Call to Actions (CTA):

CTA on your website is necessary to garner maximum customer engagements. CTAs can be in various forms like Surveys, Clickable Ads, Ratings, and Reviews, Add to Cart, Quick Checkouts, and more.

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These simple yet effective tools of engagement can boost your website rankings and overall sales by a huge margin. The positioning and designing of the CTA buttons are also important. They should be designed in a way that customers are compelled to click on them. Research has shown that CTAs can provide conversion rates ranging from 7 to 35%.

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So, when there is a low number of Calls to Action (CTAs) on your website, you should opt for a website upgradation.

8. Outdated Security Protocols:

Website up-gradation becomes necessary when your security is not up to the mark. Security standards change from time to time as per the advancements in technologies. You should remember that your website would contain sensitive data relating to your customers. Data points like Customer Addresses, Contact Numbers, E-Mail Addresses and even Credit / Debit Card Details will be stored on your website.

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You should ensure that your servers and all the backend website support are secured and protected. Proper Security Monitoring Tools should be integrated into your website to ensure utmost customer data safety.

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9. Website Lacks Monitoring Tools:

Almost all the new website designs are integrated with advanced monitoring and reporting tools. These tools are necessary to track everyday website performances. They also help your web developers in tracking fastly, any possible glitches that might occur in the system.

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If your website has no monitoring tool or the monitoring tool is too old, you should opt to upgrade your website. This will benefit you in multiple ways and will lead to faster resolution of glitches if any.

10. The website has a large number of Plugins:

Old websites particularly those built on an open-source platform have a large number of inherent plug-ins. Sometimes even ranging to 10 plugins on a single site. Most of these plugins are from third-party developers, and as such, they are not fully adaptable to a growing user base.

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Moreover, compared to HTTPS or an HTML website, these open-source websites have a lot of cache and template files to work on. This combined factor of a large number of plugins and template files drastically reduces your website speed. You have to update your site to get rid of these lags.

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These were some of the pointers that indicate that your website is requiring an update. Website updates require a lot of time and are very hectic. However, they are necessary for generating leads and maintaining competitiveness.

Technology is changing as we speak. Newer and better things are being developed now and then. To stay at par with the competition, and move ahead of the curve, you and your website must stay updated.

To learn more about such useful aspects of website maintenance & development, visit Articles Fit today!