7 Tips for Website Upgrades

If your website is in need of an upgrade, basically there are several mistakes that you could potentially make. So, I have compiled some website upgrade tips to help you with ensuring that you don’t make any of those mistakes and that your website gets off on the right foot.

Needless to say, your goal is probably surpassing your competition, outranking them in the search engines, building an exceptional website, or all of the above. That’s why you need to take these tips under consideration. If you were to go to an agency for this purpose, they would probably only be focusing on their specialised area of expertise, whether it’s SEO, graphics or whatever, but you need every area of your website to work properly. We will go into this further in three major areas, which are the CMS or system that you are using, your website design, and its content. Following that, we will then provide a few marketing tips that work well in unison with all of these areas.

1. Introduction to a better website

For starters, it’s crucial that you use the very best system that is capable of helping you not just now, but in the future as well. It should be fast, secure, easy to use and completely upgradeable, while still being affordable.

2. Website Software

You definitely need to be using WordPress if you’re not already. The main reason is because Google loves WordPress. The secondary reasons are because it’s free and open-source, it’s simple to add pages and it’s technically superior to the majority of CMS systems. It’s also used by thousands of users worldwide and there are no contracts to get locked into.

In addition, the shopping cart plugin called WooCommerce is definitely one of the very best shopping cart systems that I have ever used. It’s easy to install and has not only a one-page checkout system, but also user friendly payment processors plus some excellent shipping plugins. On the other hand, if you simply don’t need a shopping cart, you can still benefit from the WordPress media manager and its ability to easily create new pages, add images and posts to your site.

The only downside that I can see to using WordPress is that it must be kept up-to-date and on a solid hosting platform which is the same for all online software and website systems anyway. If you dont keep your website up to date then you put your business and customers at a huge risk. I have written an entire article on website support and maintenance.

3. Themes and Templates

Website software requires several tweaks when they’re just out of the box for helping with SEO. This includes WordPress. The theme you use may be coded well for SEO, but you’ll still need to correctly set-up permalinks, a cache plugin and the URL structure, including page titles, prior to your site being indexed by the search engines. In addition, an SEO plugin like Yoast should be installed to test page content and control what the search engines see and index. Once your website is built, you must submit a sitemap to Google and Bing.

4. Website Content

Your website cannot rank well unless your wording and descriptions, as well as your page structure and product categories, are set up correctly. It’s important to research the best terms for using on your page and creative writing is quite important. If you want to succeed, you’ll need excellent content, so if you’re not adept at writing, then try hirewriters.com for getting good content written for you.

After your site goes live, be sure to watch out for landing page reports, query reports, bounce rate percentages by page, as well as conversions, so that you can constantly improve on all of these areas. Your site could be doomed if you just set and forget it, so watch for market changes and fix any areas on your site that require improvement.

5. The Design

A unique design is worth much more than just a simple free theme when it comes to building a good website. You should consider creating a mockup and showing to several people to get their opinions. You’ll get new ideas and you could save many hours of changes later. Having a clear design strategy, as well as a target audience, can go a long way toward success.

6. Graphics

To be successful, your business should be visible on a number of sites and directories. That means that your logo and images must be consistent across all platforms. Both Google business page and Facebook have different image dimensions for banners and logos. The local directories need to be set up for helping improve your local rankings, including Yellow Pages free version, True Local and Start Local, just to name a few. So, you should employ a logo designer and a graphic artist for creating consistency for your brand across all sites.

7. Marketing and Advertising Tips

Google Adwords and systems like it can give you a better page score and, if you maintain a consistent content creation strategy that is based upon popular keywords, they will work for you. In addition, social media posting will become easier and you can successfully target specific online audiences without having to waste your money on ads that don’t even work. As a result, over time, your website will rank better across literally hundreds of keywords organically.

One other important thing to remember is that, in the event that your website is hacked, you will be held responsible for any customer information that hackers steal and use. In order to protect customer info when it is being transmitted across the Internet in the form of registrations, contact forms, emails, etc, you need to make sure that your website software is up-to-date at all times and that you have an SSL certificate installed. You also need a great hosting system, not one of those $40 a year cheap systems that go down consistently and get hacked. In addition, they might not respond for several days or more while you are losing sales. You’ll also want to ensure that your hosting system has regular backups and site restore capabilities. The following website creation tips and website upgrade tips will tell you more about why you need proper support, maintenance and defense against hackers for your site.