Why An Outdated Website Is Costing You Business {Updated}
It’s hard to imagine doing business without a website.
Statistics shows that vast majority of consumers choose to buy products as well as services online.
The main goal of a website is to drive customers as well as sales to a business.
Without question, the success of your business largely depends on your website.
You need to know that a website is a powerful online marketing tool that can do great job for any type of business.
However, creating a well-designed site is only half the battle.
We live in the fast changing world and website development is an ever changing industry.
That’s why it’s very important for you to keep your website up-to-date.
It’s not enough to attract visitors to your website.
Most importantly, you need to turn your site’s visitors into real customers and sales.
Bear in mind that your website needs to be convenient for users, fully functional, 100% responsive and, of course, search engine friendly.
Do you find that your website is outdated?
If so, you may begin to lose your customers as well as sales.
If you don’t take an action quickly and don’t improve your site, you may even lose your business over time.
There will probably come a time where things will go wrong with your business if people find that your website is outdated.
Actually, an outdated website may hurt your business in many ways. You may begin to lose your mobile traffic, search traffic as well as social media traffic.
If your website is outdated, then its conversion rate will most likely drop significantly over time.
If your website traffic decreases, then your business will get fewer customers and, therefore, fewer sales.
Another important thing that you need to be aware of is that it would be much easier for online criminals to hack an outdated website.
And of course, you should do everything possible to prevent your site from being hacked.
However, the most important thing is that an outdated website will have a huge negative impact on your brand.
And of course, you should do everything possible to prevent these kinds of things from happening.
Today, we’ll talk about the importance of keeping a website up-to-date and explain to you how an outdated website can cause you to lose your business.
Plus, we’ll give you tips for improving your website and boosting your business success.
You May Lose High Amounts of Mobile Traffic
Let’s assume that your website is outdated and its web pages don’t look great on all major mobile devices.
If this is the case, you’ll definitely lose a lot of mobile traffic and sales.
If people can’t open your website on their mobile devices then they will most likely leave it within a few seconds and choose to deal with your competitors.
It’s widely known that mobile traffic has already surpassed desktop traffic.
That means that more and more people choose to use mobile devices to browse the Internet.
The number of mobile users is expected to grow dramatically in the nearest future.
It’s pretty clear that your business will definitely lose high amounts of prospects, customers as well as sales if your website is not mobile friendly.
If your website is outdated, then you obviously need to have it updated as soon as possible.
It’s not a good idea to use flash elements on a website anymore.
It’s important to point out that this type of content is not displayed properly on mobile devices.
Flash is not supported by Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and other types of mobile devices.
That means that if mobile users come to an outdated website with Flash elements, they will not see anything.
So, it would be great for you to replace Flash with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.
It makes a lot of sense for you to take advantage of responsive design and adapt your website for screen of any size.
You should know that a responsive website will automatically adjust to fit all types of resolution and its web pages will fit any screen size.
You May Lose High Amounts of Search Traffic
It’s no surprise that spammy SEO tactics (also known as black hat SEO tactics) don’t work anymore.
Search engines are getting smarter!
The reality is today’s search engine optimization is all about improving your website user experience.
In other words, you should aim to make your website more convenient for visitors and do every single thing possible to increase user engagement on your content.
By doing so, you’ll be able to boost your site’s SEO and improve your Google rankings dramatically.
Is your site outdated and users find it hard to navigate it?
Or, maybe, content on your website needs to be improved?
One way or another, you need to update your website!
If you make your site more user friendly, its search engine rankings are likely to improve.
You May Lose High Amounts of Social Media Traffic
Popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube and others bring together a lot of people from different parts of the world.
And of course, you and your business can make use of this fact.
It’s worth noting that popular social media sites can drive high amounts of traffic to your website.
If you promote your site on social media networks effectively, then your business will probably get a lot of new customers.
Social media sites can also be used as an effective online communication tool.
It’s pretty easy to take advantage of social media platforms to inform your target audience about new product launch, important news related to your business and so on.
Additionally, social media marketing will positively affect your brand.
It goes without saying that social media promotion needs to be a key part of your online marketing strategy.
On the other hand, you’ll find it difficult to get the benefits of social media promotion if your site’s web pages are not optimized for social networks.
The question is – what does social media optimization of a site means?
In fact, the process of site’s social media optimization is very simple.
Your job is to make it easy for site’s visitors to share your content on all major social media platforms.
All that you have to do is to connect your business site to your company’s social media profiles.
It’s a good idea to add a blog to a website and publish fresh content on it regularly.
Also, it would be great for you to integrate social media buttons with each of your blog posts.
That means that each of your blog posts must have social media sharing buttons.
By doing so, you’ll be able to make it possible for users to share your website content in all major social networks fast and easy.
If site’s visitors find your content interesting, they will certainly have an opportunity to share, like or comment it on social media platforms quickly and easily.
This will help you draw attention of other social media users to your content and contribute greatly to your business promotion efforts.
An Outdated Website May Have a Low Conversion Rate
No one ever said that landing high paying clients for business was an easy task.
First and foremost, you need to promote your website in a cost effective way and this will help you attract targeted audience to your business.
After that, you have to turn your site’s visitors into customers and sales.
So, your potential clients will become your existing clients.
There is no doubt that an outdated website will have a huge negative impact on buyer’s decision and, therefore, on your sales.
As a result, all of your advertising efforts will not be crowned with success.
You’ll just lose your time and money.
In fact, it’s a big problem for business.
Remember, that your website is a face of your business.
If people see that your site is outdated, then they will most likely begin to think that you are not serious about your business. If this situation happens to you, then your prospects are likely to choose your competitors.
It’s common knowledge that business owners, who don’t care of their sites, usually don’t care of their customers as well.
Thus, a poorly designed site means that you don’t care of your business.
An Outdated Website Will Negatively Affect Your Brand
Creating an awesome brand for business is no easy task.
It’s important to know that brand building is a complicated process that requires patience and dedication as well as certain knowledge, experience and skills.
Plus, it may take you too much time to build brand awareness for your business.
If you promote your brand efficiently, your business will get a lot of new clients as well as repeat clients.
However, you’ll hardly be able to increase the awareness of brand for your business if you have an outdated website.
Without a doubt, an outdated website will have a huge negative impact on your brand and on your business success.
People May Think That You Are Out Of Business
If, for example, your business site has a blog but its content hasn’t been updated for a long time then your customers may think that you are not doing your business anymore.
An outdated site is something that stops your customers from making a purchase.
Your job is to show your clients that your site is constantly changed and improved.
It would be nice for you to publish fresh content on your site at least once a week. So, your prospects as well as existing customers will see that you are serious about your business.
As a result, they’ll not worry and make a decision to contact you when they need to buy your products or services.
An Outdated Website May Have Security Issues
There has been a lot of talk about the importance of protecting a website from hackers.
You need to know that keeping a website up-to-date plays a very important role in online security.
The reality is an outdated site may become a target of hackers anytime.
That means that you should update your business site on a regular basis and install the latest security plugins on it.
Above all, you should change passwords on your website periodically.
By doing this, you’ll be able to make your website more secure and decrease the risk of hacking your website significantly.
An Outdated Website May Work Slowly
Having a fast loading site is crucial for doing business successfully.
Do find that your site’s web pages load slowly?
If this is the case, you should definitely do something about this. If the problem is not resolved effectively within a short period of time, your business may begin to lose customers and sales.
Slow page loading issue negatively affects site’s conversion.
On the other hand, slow loading site’s web pages are not good for site’s SEO.
If your site’s pages load slowly, your search engine rankings may drop significantly.
That’s the reason why you should do your best to update and speed up your website!
The big question is – how to improve your website load time?
Keep in mind that large sized images, videos as well as audio files and music files have a huge negative effect on website load speed.
Luckily, there are a lot of speed optimization plugins available these days.
Each of these plugins has been designed to make it easy for you to make your website load faster.
Your site’s web pages may work slowly because of a slow server.
In this case, it would be great for you to transfer your website to another server as soon as possible.
On way or another, you should do everything possible to fix slow loading web pages on your business site.
Thank you so much for reading this article. As you can see, there are many reasons why your website needs to be up-to-date.
If you would like to update your website, contact us right away!
We are a team of highly experienced, hard-working and creative web designers, web developers and online marketers.
Our professionals are always happy to fix your website and take your business to the next level!
Here are some additional resources that you might find helpful:
How to Set up a Proper Remarketing Campaign for Success [updated]
4 Easy Tips to Create Short and Engaging Marketing Videos
5 Tips for Improving Your Content Marketing Strategy
How Important are Value and Listening in Social Media Marketing?