How often should you change your website?

You have been told, by a salesperson or a well-meaning nephew, that Google wants fresh content and your website should be updated every week. You have not touched yours since spring. Now it sits on the list of jobs that make you feel slightly guilty, somewhere below the van’s MOT.

For most local businesses the weekly schedule is wrong, and following it can do more harm than leaving the site alone. What matters is whether the site tells the truth today, which is a much smaller job.

What Google means by fresh

Google does favour recent pages, but for a particular kind of search: one where the answer changes. Election results, this year’s tax thresholds, a product that launched last month. For those, a page written in 2022 is likely to be out of date, and Google ranks newer ones higher.

Somebody typing “electrician Skipton” or “family solicitor near me” is asking a different question. They want a business that does the job and covers the area. A page you last edited in March answers that as well as one edited this morning, and Google treats it that way. What decides who appears for those searches is mostly distance, relevance and reviews, which we went through in why your site does not show up locally.

Two things people do to look fresh are worth knowing about, because neither helps. Changing the “last updated” date on a page without changing what it says does nothing: Google compares the content, and Google’s own guidance warns against it. And rewording the home page every few months to keep it moving tends to blur the words it was ranking for in the first place.

The changes that earn their keep

The updates that matter are the ones a customer would notice. They are reading your site to decide whether to ring you, and every fact on it is a small promise.

Prices. If your site gives prices, they have to be today’s. A customer who rings expecting the figure on the page and hears a higher one starts the conversation feeling misled, and some of them will not finish it. If your prices move too often to keep up, give a “from” price or a range, and change that once a year.

Services. A service you stopped offering brings in calls you have to turn away. A service you started offering last year, and never added, brings in nothing at all, because nobody searches for what your site does not mention. Each real service deserves its own page, and this is the one kind of new page that does help you rank.

Hours and contact details. These drift. An old mobile number, a Saturday opening you dropped, an email address belonging to somebody who left. They also have to match your Google listing, which we covered in six Google Business Profile mistakes.

Areas you cover. If you have started taking work in a new town, say so, ideally on a page about working there. If you have stopped, take it off.

Photos of real work. A gallery of jobs from 2019 tells a visitor the business may have been busier then than now. A few photos from the last few months, of jobs in towns they recognise, does the opposite. This is the one item on the list where adding something steadily pays, and it costs you nothing but a phone in daylight.

The changes that do nothing

A blog for its own sake. A post a week about nothing in particular adds thin pages to your site. Google has been clear for some years that it wants pages written to help a person, and a stack of four-hundred-word posts nobody reads counts against a small site more than it helps. If you have something useful to say to customers, write it. If you are writing because somebody said to, stop.

Redesigning every couple of years. A new look is worth doing when the old one is slow, hard to use on a phone, or embarrassing to send people to. Done for its own sake, a rebuild risks changing addresses that Google had already ranked, and that can cost you months of searches if nobody sets up the redirects.

Rotating banners and “news” panels. A homepage slider promoting an offer that ended in August does more damage than no slider at all.

A schedule a busy owner can keep

Once a month, ten minutes. Open your own site on your phone. Read the home page, the prices and the contact page as if you were a customer. Ring the number. Anything wrong, fix it or send it to whoever looks after the site.

Once a quarter, an hour. Add a handful of photos of recent jobs. Send yourself a message through the contact form and check it arrives. Look at the services list against what you sold in the last three months.

Once a year, an afternoon. Prices, the areas you cover, staff names and photos, the year in the footer, and any accreditations that have lapsed or been renewed. It is also the time to ask whether the site still looks like the business you run now.

That is the whole list. A site checked on that schedule will be more accurate than most of its competitors, and accuracy is what a customer judges you on.

The maintenance nobody sees

There is a second kind of updating that has nothing to do with words or photos. WordPress, its plugins and its theme all need updating, often weekly, for security rather than for Google. That one does need a steady schedule, and it is the one most often left undone, because nothing on the site looks different when it is done and nothing looks wrong until the day it is hacked. Our care plan handles that side for £49 a month, so the only updating left to you is the part only you know about.

In short

Change your website when something about your business changes, and check it on a schedule so you notice when it has. Leave the weekly blog to businesses with something to say every week.

If you would like a second pair of eyes on what is out of date, which pages are worth adding and what is safe to leave alone, our free website review covers that, along with how the site does on Google today.