How often should you update your website?

By update, i mean updating content, mainly text and images and also ensuring that your site is working as it should, links and all. Its important to keep the content of your website relevant thus worth returning to. If your website does not change over some time it will expire, the rest of us will have no reason to visit it. It will be like reading yesterdays news papers.

You should update your website content often as possible. This may depend on the type of content on your site. If you are in a fast changing industry, like the finance or entertainment, 2/3 days may be enough to maintain your edge. On the other hand, some sites eg a hardware manufacturer or insurance firm may update every three months or so, when there is a new product or feature of an existing product to speak about. The idea is to match your sites content to the real world business, so you should update your site as often as the real world updates in your feild of scope, and as often as your resources allow.

First you need to look at old content and make sure it hasn’t gone stale. Generally we recommend reviewing all of your content once every three months, this is the equivalent of stock taking, of content. Check the articles and links to make only the necessary changes. Consider that it may be better to create new content rather than make radical changes to old content so that it can be noticed.

Secondly, add new content often as your resources allow. For some sites updating several times a day is not feasible and/or not necessary. Daily updates are brave and admirable. Weekly updates are realistic. Monthly updates should be considered as a minimum. You may need to actively check your surroundings for anything worth mentioning to add to your site. This enables your website to grow, and with some time you will have a content rich site to be proud off.

Depending on your budget, you could write out the changes needed to your site and hand them over to a web designer, or hire a copy/gost writer to do this for you. In the old days your designer would manually add your content and update links throughout your site, but today many designers use Content Management systems (CMS) to allow them to make updates easily and have multiple authors and editors updating the site. CMSs make it easy to add content and maintain the structuer of your site. If you are a techie you can also be trained othe process. CMSs come with toolsand utilities like spell checking, menu management, search, scheduled publishing for future posts, and unpublishing for expired posts.

Some general rules of thumb are...

• Acquire a habit. Consistently publish new pages e.g every Tuesday, or the first Wednesday of the month.
• Add content slowly, adding 1 page per week for a whole year is better than adding 52 new pages all in one week.
• Be as topical and up to date as possible, Keep you viewers aware of any news in your field.
• Don’t fix whats not broken. Radicaly changing content and layouts may stress users as they try to get used to it over and over again. Also adding incomplete content may lead to the unsightly “under construction” should be avoided.
• Reduce your downtime by making your updates in the off peak hours.
• If you are not an expert in web maintenance, get a specialist to check that everything is where it should be, and, if necessary, rewire the web site for you. They may also inspire you to come up with content to keep your site alive

I hope have a rough idea of how often you should update your site. If you need more specific information, add a comment here, or email us.