How often should you update your website's content?
The benefits and potential risks
Regularly updating your website's content can have many benefits for your site, but also poses some potential risks.
Should I update my website?
As a general rule, it is beneficial to update webpages throughout your site on a regular basis. When deciding whether to update your site, you should consider various benefits and potential risks, including:
Benefits
- Visitors to your site will be more likely to return repeatedly to your site if they know they will find new information that interests them on each visit. As a result, your website grows in popularity.
- Search engines often give higher search result positions to webpages that are up-to-date.
- You need to keep ahead of the competition. If you let your website's content get out-of-date, visitors are likely to visit a competitor's website instead.
Potential risks
- If some of your webpages have been well optimised for search engines, making changes to those pages raises the risk of effecting the page's position in search results. You therefore need to weigh up the benefits and disadvantages of updated content.
- If you remove content as part of an update to your website, visitors who return to your website at a later date will no longer be able to access it. A possible solution is to create an "archive" on your site where visitors can access information that has been removed.
How often should I update my webpages?
The ideal rate at which you should update your webpages depends on several factors including:
- The type of website: Online visitors will have different expectations on how often content should be updated depending on the type of website they visit. For example, visitors would expect a news-related site to be updated daily, or perhaps even hourly. In comparison, a website for a hotel might be updated only every few months.
- The webpage's purpose: Some webpages, such as those containing your contact details, might never require updating, while other pages, such as a list of products you sell, might require frequent updating. Some search engines determine a webpage's importance in relation to other webpages based on the frequency at which it is updated. In some cases, it might therefore be of advantage to you to update your "important" webpages, including your home page, often.
- The competition: If a competitor is updating their website regularly, you might need to match or even exceed their frequency of updates to keep your own site relevant.
What content should I update?
The content you should update will largely depend on your type of website. It might include updating statistics, tables, graphs, images, adding new facts, deleting obsolete information, updating 'Related Links' lists that point to other webpages on your site, and more.
Promoting your up-to-date content
If you regularly update your website's content, making the changes is not enough. You also need to tell your visitors how up-to-date your website is, otherwise they might not realise it. For instance, you can tell visitors about new and updated content by adding a 'What's new' section on your home page or even place a 'What's New?' link on your site's navigation bar. Adding a 'Last updated' entry on each webpage is also advisable. Consider adding the date the webpage was last updated towards the top of the page instead of at the bottom; that way visitors will know how up-to-date the webpage is before they start reading.
Tips for keeping your content up-to-date
In addition to changing the content of webpages themselves, here are some ideas for easily keeping your website up-to-date:
- Add a blog: Blogs are an excellent way to constantly add more information to your site. They are particularly useful in circumstances where you want to add information to your site but a new dedicated webpage is not justified. There are many free blogging scripts that can be downloaded from the Internet and add them to your site.
- Publish news stories relevant to your site: Visitors like reading news related to your website's topic and some might even add your website to their favourites if they know they will be kept up-to-date with the latest information. Some news websites provide news feeds for website owners to add to their site. If you have a website related to sport, for example, you could add a sport-related news feed.
- Add a forum: Let visitors add content themselves by providing a forum. Because visitors themselves contribute to the content of forums, you know that the topics being discussed are topical and of interest to the people that come to your site. As with blogs, there are many free forum scripts that can be downloaded online.
- Add a poll: People like giving their opinion on topical issues. Adding a poll to your home page helps generate interest in your site. You can change the poll question every few days and display past results on a separate page.
- Display the current date: It used to be popular for websites to display the current date using JavaScript code. The practice is less common today, but is still an option you might want to consider. The necessary code is available in the BestAddress HTML Editor's Code Library ( http://www.mmaus.com/bestaddress.html ). From the 'Insert' menu, choose 'Code from Library'. In the window that is displayed, open the 'JavaScript' entry, select 'Current System Date' then click the 'Insert Selected Code' button. If you have a PHP or ASP-based site, you could also display the date based on the current server time, but remember that time zone differences might mean that the date might not be current for all visitors.
Archiving content
If you expect old content to still be relevant to some visitors when you decide to remove it, you could consider moving it to an 'Archives' area of your site and linking to the material from the original page. This also decreases the risk of your website's rank in search engines declining because the original content will still be available.
In conclusion
As a general rule, your website will benefit from being updated regularly. After all, the Internet is not intended to be static, but dynamic and constantly changing. However, you should also consider whether there can be any negative issues arising from updating your site, and make your decision accordingly.
