26 Feb Common Website Mistakes #9 – Not Staying Up to Date!
It’s vitally important that you stay up to date in your use of digital and website technologies. your customers will know if you don’t, and it could cost you your business – this video explains more:
Hi there, folks. My name is Paul Barrs from paulbarrs.com. Thank you for stopping by. Now we’re doing a short series on simple things that you can easily avoid, simple mistakes you don’t want to make when it comes to the management of the website side of your business. And this one, number nine, absolute crack-up, so easy to do, so easy to miss, I’m not quite sure why, and that is not making sure that your CMS software and your design is up-to-date.
Now probably the reason why most people don’t do this is, number one, they don’t know how. Number two is because of the cost involved. So let’s look at those two different things. Firstly and foremostly, most people these days are using a CMS. Most people these days, when it comes to building a new website, are starting to use WordPress. It is essential, it is vital, it is beyond important that you must keep both the core of the CMS up-to-date, but also any plug-ins and tools that you use to manage your website up-to-date as well. If you don’t, you run the risk of not only the whole thing cracking itself, but also of you getting hacked, which would cause a whole graded nightmare of problems.
One of the services we provide for our clients is a monthly service where we manually go in and we update everything. And in some cases, particularly for our clients who have large ecommerce stores, that means we have to keep a backup of their site, brand new every month, which we also do regularly, but we have to test the updates on the backup first. Because sometimes if this plug-in updates and we update it, it doesn’t integrate with this plug-in and it breaks the whole website. And that’s a nightmare, I can tell you now.
So these are things that you must consider, but you must keep them up-to-date. It takes a little bit of time, yes, and if you aren’t skilled enough, it can take a little bit of money, but it’s vitally important. Simple mistake you want to avoid.
Also with the design of your website, how it actually looks to people. Now again, this is one that you can do if you have the skill. What I recommend to clients who are able to make changes to the design structure of the website themselves, if they do it on a backup or a staging site. So they can test, they can look and see how things change, they can make it look all great, and then we replace it back on the live site. Does that make sense? It means there’s less down time from a customer’s point of view.
But the thing is this. While it may not necessarily be easy to do, it’s easy to avoid or at least be up-to-date in your thinking. So go and have a look your competition, go and then have a look at your website. Whose website is more presentable? Seriously, this is often the shop window for your customers. They go looking for what you do. They go looking for your types of products or types of services. They see you, they see the competition.
If your website looks old, looks outdated and isn’t up-to-date, they’re going to know, and that is going to cost you money. It’s a simple mistake that’s easy to avoid. All right, that’s the second last. We’ve got one more video in this series, simple and easy things that you can avoid, mistakes you don’t want to make when it comes to the management of the website side of your business. Thanks for listening. My name is Paul Barrs. I’ll talk to you again real soon. Bye-bye.
