Stale Website Content is as Appealing as Stale Bread

Have you recently read a blog post and realized halfway through that it was written five years ago? There is nothing more frustrating than stale content for a consumer or business owner researching a topic. Industries and trends change so quickly that the five minutes you just spent reading those few paragraphs were completely wasted. Would you do business with a company that did that to you?

Now look at your own website. Do you have stale or outdated content on it? Is the design from 2006? Sure, you can call it “retro” or “unique” if you want to, but the truth of it is that your website is outdated and your content is what we classify as “stale bread”. You need to make some changes.

Evaluating Your Website Design and Content

Begin the process by evaluating what you can easily change and what you’ll need help with. If you’re not a web designer, you’ll need to hire a designer or at least have a professional look at your website to determine how current it is. You will know of course when the site was most recently worked on (hopefully) or roughly when it was created. How does it measure up by today’s standards?

Content is typically dated, either openly on a publicly viewable page the way it appears in a blog post, or in your content management system. Access to the CMS is critical for the update process. Do you know how to log in to yours and add new content? Do you know which platform your company used to create your website? WordPress and Drupal are two of the most common, but custom CMS is a possibility too. Make the answer to this question part of your research.

Which Content Should You Update First?

Find anything with a date and create something new in that category. This is a very simple rule of thumb. Blog posts have dates. If the most recent post showing is old, create a new one. The same holds true for press releases and calendar events. Update both on your website as soon as possible so visitors will see that there are live human beings paying attention in the background.

Content pages and images should come next. Content is time consuming because you need to read through each page and determine if references and statistics are still current. With pages that are more than a year or two old, you might want to simply rewrite the pages entirely. As for images, stale photos need to go. Find something new, original, and different from what everyone else is using.

Your Original Design Expense is Wasted If You Don’t Update Your Website

How much did you spend to build your website? If the content, images, press releases, and event calendar are not current, you wasted that money. Updating does more than just ensure a good response from visitors today; it justifies the expenses of yesterday and will increase profitability for tomorrow.