How often should you be updating your website? This is a common question for site owners and SEO professionals alike. But the truth is, there is no secret number. However, we have a few guidelines that you can follow to determine how often you should update your website.
Reasons to Update Your Website
1. Provide Fresh, Engaging Content - New blog posts, videos, images keep visitors coming back and signals to search engines that a site is active. This can improve rankings.
2. Announce New Offerings - Websites need to showcase new products, services, features that a business launches to inform both existing customers and prospectives. Keeps site relevant.
3. Improve Site Design - Keeping site navigation, layouts, and styling up-to-date improves user experience which can boost conversions and search visibility.
4. Fix Technical Issues - Identifying and correcting broken links/functionality, display errors, performance problems or site crashes through updates maintains site integrity.
5. Adapt to Market Changes - Keep content, messaging, value propositions aligned with evolving customer needs and industry trends to remain competitive.
6. Capitalize on Trends/Seasonality - Timely, unique content tied to seasonal interests, events, or cultural moments can resonate more and perform better.
Mobile and Responsive Website Updates
Feel free to update mobile and responsive design as often as needed without changing core content, URLs or links. Enhancing user experience through refreshed layouts, faster speeds and seamless navigation improves organic ranking potential across devices. Just ensure dev and SEO alignment on URL structures during transitions. More accessibility gains equal greater search visibility.
Updating For Improved Site Speed
Improving website speed should be an ongoing focus through continuous performance monitoring and optimization, changes can be pushed daily. Simple optimizations like next-gen image formats, lazy loading, and caching deliver quick wins while larger core web vital projects run long-term. Faster page loads improve UX and search rankings, so iterative speed boosts incrementally raise organic visibility over time.
How often should you fix your core web vitals?
Update standalone content pages quarterly or biannually to ensure freshness. Homepages and blogs warrant more frequent refreshes such as weekly or monthly. Balance site production capacity with visitor expectations and overhaul design elements as needed but maintain core information architecture. Staying current while preserving continuity and site integrity is key. Search engines reward websites exhibiting consistent maintenance and evolution.
How Often Should You Update Specific Areas Of Your Site?
While specific business models impact ideal website update cycles, consistency and quality matter most.
Blogs
Aim to publish valuable articles several times per week. Balance post frequency with in-depth, engaging content rather than thin volumes straining production capacity. Updating old blog posts to add new, relevant information is a great way to give a post some much needed revival.
Remember, quality over quantity. 300 words or less blog posts that get spammed 5 to 6 times a day every week, despite immense social followings, fail to deliver meaningful organic traffic growth.
For most websites lacking extensive budgets and teams, quality over quantity proves vital. I recommend publishing just 1-2 posts per day maximum. However, these should each provide 750+ words of in-depth value focused on viable, high-potential keywords.
eCommerce
These sites should refresh product pages monthly targeting high-potential search terms not yet ranking well. New items can be added liberally to expand offerings if kept long-term.
While paid advertising can drive traffic to your products, developing an SEO strategy is highly recommended to generate organic visitors to your site at no cost.
In regards to existing products, aim to update descriptive content monthly if they are not receiving expected traffic levels. However, if a product already ranks #1 for important keywords, leave that page alone! You don't want to mess with greatness. Do monitor rankings of all products monthly, whether you edit pages or not.
When adding new products, you can do so as frequently as desired, provided you allow enough time for SEO to work before removing them. The only consideration is that a large influx of new products may require revising your backlink building approach. But if paid ads are your primary customer acquisition channel, frequency of site updates is less critical.
SEO delivers free traffic so should be leveraged
Update existing product descriptions monthly if needed to improve traffic
Don't change pages for already top-ranking products
Check all product rankings monthly
Add new products whenever, just allow SEO sufficient time
More new products may need an updated backlink strategy
If paid ads dominate, site update frequency is less important
Services
Like ecommerce sites, service-based websites can utilize SEO, social media, paid ads, referrals, and email marketing to drive traffic.
If paid advertising is your primary customer acquisition channel, frequent website updates are less important. However, SEO generates free traffic and is highly recommended for service businesses.
For existing services, aim to update content monthly. More frequent changes won't allow proper tracking of what helps or hurts rankings, as Google does not instantly reflect website edits in search results. We've found once per month to be optimal.
However, if a service page already ranks very highly for important keywords, leave it unchanged. Do still monitor rankings of all service pages monthly, whether updated or not.
Adding new service pages can be done whenever you offer those services.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day the decision really is up to you on how often you should update your site. Remember to keep your content fresh, products relevant and a few high quality blog posts per week. A website that never updates any aspects of their site will fall behind the competition and fall out of favor with Google.
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