Talkin’ Turquoise

When it comes to websites, you can’t simply set it and forget it—not if you want to keep up in the ever-changing realm of the world wide web or compete in your market.

There are many reasons to update your website, but the three main reasons are user experience, performance and security. Let’s dive deeper into each one.

Website User Experience

Your website is your online home and it’s important that your visitors feel welcome. Making your website user friendly and giving them reasons to return again and again is the ultimate goal.

You can accomplish this by reviewing and updating your web content regularly. This might include updating your blog once or twice a month to show people what your business is up to and how you can help them with whatever it is that you do.

Share your expertise! Turning your passion into something people can use—at work, at home, at play—is an invaluable conversion tool, and helps build trust and loyalty. Fresh, relevant content—written content and imagery—not only keeps current customers engaged, but it can improve search engine optimization (SEO), making it easier for new visitors to find you.

Some of the clients we work with who do a great job of this include Eugene Pediatric Associates, Coquille Valley Hospital, and Overleaf Properties. For these clients, we help them plan, execute and promote content updates on a regular basis as part of their marketing strategy.

It’s not uncommon for this type of content to go viral or rise to the top of search engines, especially when web users are searching for keywords on a specific topic. When a blog article becomes popular, Google tips its hat to you and sends even more people to your website.

An example would be the blog post published by Coquille Valley Hospital on the topic of Appendicitis vs. Ovarian Cysts in 2023, which has had almost 14,000 views since it published. This tells us that people are searching for this information, that there’s not a lot of similar information out there, and that Google now considers our client a credible source for this type of information.

Besides blog posts, consider creating case studies, adding to or updating your portfolio, or including new products or services that customers might not know about. Focusing on the benefits of your product or service—how it can improve their life or work life, solve a problem or make them look or feel better—tells customers that you care about them.

And don’t forget to share your blog post, case study or content update on your social channels or by email—or no one will ever know! You can help increase followers on social media by integrating social feeds on your website, which can be done in a way that looks intentional and integrated. Overleaf Lodge & Spa’s Instagram integration on their home page is an excellent example.

Other more obvious reasons to update your website include when there’s been a major change at your organization, such as changes to your business model or when you’ve updated your branding. Simply updating the design of your website every couple of years will keep it fresh and relevant, too.

Check out this website we did recently for Helfrich McKenzie Rafting, which reflects their updated branding and thoughtfully organized content for a better user experience.

By focusing on the user experience (UX), you’re making conscious, intentional decisions based on your business goals and how someone will use and interreact with your website, your product or service, your brand and your organization as a whole.

Website Performance

Let’s talk website performance. Have you ever visited a website where the images are slow to load? Painfully slow-to-load web pages can make your bounce rate balloon. Your bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. What’s a reasonable load time, you ask? According to Google, most people will abandon your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. The slower your site is, the higher your bounce rate.

Some of the many reasons web pages can load slowly include heavy traffic, poor server performance, inadequate caching or an outdated content management system. If these terms are foreign to you, that’s OK! It’s one of the reasons why it’s important to have a dedicated web team on your side that can monitor your site for activity and performance.

It is important to ensure that your website analytics setup is up to date. Doing so will help you track your visitors’ actions and measure the effectiveness of your content or marketing campaigns. Google Analytics is the leading analytics platform for website tracking. Its ability to track visitor actions and attribute those actions—like indicating how someone got to your site, whether it’s organic search, direct search, paid search, social media, etc.—is one of the many reasons why we use it for our own site and our clients’ websites.

Let’s also chat for a moment about content management systems (CMS), because it’s one of the most common reasons clients come to us for help with their website. We build websites on the Avada theme in WordPress—the most widely used CMS on the planet. Avada is intuitive, fast to load, fully responsive, amazingly flexible and has incredible options to customize an entire website with a variety of elements and design capabilities. Another reason we use Avada is because it includes several premium, bundled plugins, and it’s easy for our clients to use. If you’re not on Avada, we can help you make the switch.

Having an updated, responsive website with a robust and functional CMS helps ensure that it’s fully functional and also secure from vulnerabilities, which is critical to protecting your data and your visitors’ data.

Website Security

Over the past decade, we’ve built nearly 100 websites. We host and monitor many of these sites and provide regular security monitoring, ongoing maintenance, support services and regular backups. Our clients’ websites are hosted on a dedicated, redundant web server that provides a walled garden of security, uptime and convenience. This allows us to fully manage a client’s website or support clients who only want to handle regular content updates.

As part of our hosting and security services, we ensure that all three levels of software updates—server, WordPress and plug-ins—happen regularly, as soon as new updates or patches are made available, so that our clients’ websites are secure and functional. And we have systems in place to monitor and backup our clients’ websites to prevent corruption, loss or vandalism.

By keeping your website fresh, functional and secure, you’ll provide a positive experience for your visitors and better search engine results that bring people to your virtual front door and keep them coming back for more.

We’re here to help. User experience is at the heart of our web work. As content creators, designers and developers, we cut through the clutter and look at ways to make your website easy to find, simple to navigate, beautifully designed, fast to load and fully focused on your goals. Contact us to learn more about what we can do for you and your organization.