Does updating the content of my website matter?

• Why is it important to keep iyour ecommerce site looking fresh?
• Are there steps you can regularly take to make sure it looks fresh and vibrant for your customers?

The visual appearance of any ecommerce website is all-important. Website usability experts will tell you about how visuals can affect site performance, whilst a look at old websites on a service such as www.archive.org will remind you just how dated websites built a few years ago now look. There are though, very particular reasons why a site should keep evolving, even once you have found a visually attractive layout that performs well.

 One reason is the constant change in devices that we use to view websites on. From a time where the majority of traffic was from desktop or laptop devices, we now have a proliferation of mobile devices and tablets with multiple screen sizes, operating systems and browsers. So it’s vital to ensure that a website stays on top of the latest devices, and functions on as many of them as possible.

The latest best practice in this area is responsive layout. This simply means that a website will automatically reformat itself according to the device it’s being displayed on. If you’re unable to constantly refresh the layout of your site to enable it to display on the latest devices, you’re missing out on valuable visitors.

Key to the success of any ecommerce website is its performance in search engines. Google regularly updates its algorithm to encourage freshness of content, so sites which invest in continually updating themselves and their content will be rewarded in terms of their search engine position.

Social media is also an agent for change where website content is concerned. Updated content is more likely to be picked up and distributed across social media channels, resulting in generating traffic for your website, exposure for your brand and in turn further increasing your traffic from SEO.

So, the key thing to remember in terms of keeping your website fresh is to continually develop your content. For an ecommerce site, changing and updating product information can be difficult, so this is where you should try to think outside the box. User guides, product reviews, videos, implementation guides are all types of content that are hugely valuable, so regular creation and updating can pay dividends - increasing your site visibility, your traffic and ultimately your profit.