Actively maintaining a website is important if you want your business to stay relevant in today’s high-tech world. Whether it’s fair or not, people will judge the quality of your business based on how polished your website is and how often it is updated.

This doesn’t mean you need to make large-scale changes each month, but it’s good practice to spruce things up a bit and keep the content fresh. This shows users that you are active and also lets Google know that you’re still relevant, which is critical.

Here are a few things to consider doing each month to keep your website fresh and relevant.

Add Blog Posts

It’s a great idea for a website to have a blog, and you should aim to have an absolute minimum of one new blog post each month. Preferably, you’d publish even more frequently — around once or twice per week.

The great thing about maintaining and actively posting to a blog on your website is that it provides an easy way to make website updates and keep your content fresh for the search engines, even if you don’t have any changes to make to your primary pages.

Aside from engaging users and providing opportunities to market your products or services, your blog is a great way to keep Google’s eyes on you. One of the criteria Google uses to rank websites is the freshness of content. By posting at least once per month, you’ll be providing fresh content for Google to rank.

SEO Updates

Again, we’re working to appease the search engines (particularly Google) to keep your website easily discoverable via search. It’s no secret that having strong on-page SEO is critical, but don’t just assume that because your SEO was on point when the page was created, changes haven’t occurred over time. Google makes several hundred changes every year which can impact your performance.

It’s important to spruce up your website by doing an SEO audit each month. Check for broken links on all of your pages, and monitor Google Search Console to make sure your SEO engine is still running at full capacity. If you’re finding that there are important keywords that don’t seem to be driving traffic to your website, re-evaluate how you can update your page to improve your SEO for these critical keywords.

Test for Usability Across Browsers

Web browser updates occur quite frequently, and you never know when an update may cause some functionality on your website to break. This is why it’s important that you heavily test out your website on different desktop and mobile browsers each month.

Maybe you open Safari for the iPhone and find that your navigation menu is no longer working correctly. The sooner you discover this and fix it, the better. Let’s face it, it doesn’t take much to make a negative lasting impression on a potential customer, so it’s imperative that you continuously update your website to correct these small issues.

It really is all about the user experience, so do yourself a favor and ensure that you are continuously testing to catch any issues.

Make Small Design Updates

You don’t need to make major updates each month, but small incremental monthly updates are a good way to always keep your website fresh. This will allow you to avoid having to make massive updates further down the line when your webpage inevitably begins to feel completely outdated. By making small updates every month, you keep up with popular design trends without having to do a major site overhaul.

An example of a minor update could be something as simple as updating your hero images and the placement of the hero image text. It’s critical to always make sure you are using high-quality images to facilitate the best user experience. Also, ensure images are properly sized to optimize page speed.

You could also make some minor tweaks to the location of elements on your page. For example, maybe you decide that a section of your homepage would look cleaner with left alignment rather than its current center-aligned design.

When you make these monthly updates, keep an eye on the popular design trends. Designs become trendy for a reason; people think they look good. Perhaps your fonts are all serif fonts and suddenly sans-serif is all the rage. Small changes like this are quick and easy to implement and will ensure that your website is always looking fresh and modern.

Key Takeaway: Stay Fresh in the Eyes of Both Users and Google

When it comes to monthly website updates, it’s simply a matter of considering the perspective of your target audience as well as Google. Keep up with what is trending in popular design, and keep an eye on news about Google algorithm updates while also monitoring your on-page SEO.

Maintaining a regularly posted-to blog is a great way to stay fresh, and regularly testing your website for functionality as new browser versions become available will ensure that users don’t become frustrated by usability issues.

This can seem like a lot to consider, and it does take some research to stay up to date in the ever-changing world of website maintenance. You could always enlist the assistance of a highly-experienced company like Camber Creative to ensure that your website always remains fresh and clean.