An Old Website is Like Stale Bread

Here are a few ways how an old website can be just like stale bread. 

Like the old saying goes, “You only get one chance to make a good first impression”. If your website is old, stale, and out-of-date, today's website visitors will be able to recognize that immediately. It’s not going to look good to them and they will navigate away quickly. 

There’s a reason why stale bread is put “on-sale”. Would you pay the same amount for a load of moldy, stale bread as you would for a loaf of bread fresh from the oven? 

Just like the stale bread, an old, outdated website hurts the value of your brand as well as your products or services in the eyes of your website’s visitors. 

Stale, moldy bread is likely to attract bugs. Similarly, old websites without the latest security features are susceptible to a variety of “bugs”, including viruses and SPAM. Visitors know this and avoid websites that may expose them to these “bugs” and/or compromise their information. Keeping the security of your website up to date is very important for many reasons.  

Just like the “sell-by” date you see on perishable food items like bread, websites have dates that can tell a visitor it’s old and stale. 

Have you ever been to a website and clicked on its blog to see articles with publish dates that are over a year old? Blogging is a commitment and can be very effective for generating activity for your business. However, if you published one article years ago, it can also be detrimental.  

The copyright date commonly seen on websites is also another indicator of an outdated website. I frequently see copyright dates that are two and three years old, sometimes even longer than that.      

Unlike stale, moldy bread, the aroma and sight of fresh-from-the-oven bread is hard to resist. It draws you to it and that’s exactly what you want your website to do too. So how do you keep your website fresh? 

Here’s what’s important for a website today and the near future:

In numerous focus group studies that I’ve conducted in the last 10 years, there has been a consistent takeaway from the participants:

What exactly does that mean? It means a lot. 

Here are just a few of the things that impact simplicity. 

A little over five years ago, it was becoming quite clear that a desktop computer or laptop computer would not continue to be the dominant type of device people used to access the internet and websites. Tablets and especially smartphones were becoming more and more popular for surfing the web. Today, smartphones are the number one device for internet use and accessing websites. Therefore, it’s critical that a website automatically “respond” and reformat to the type of device being used. If a website is only designed for desktop/laptop computer use, it’s probably not going to look very inviting on a smartphone nor will it be easy to use. Therefore, website visitors most likely won’t use it.     

A website must be built and maintained so that it is always optimized and friendly for the major search engines like Google to find and crawl its content. Websites should be routinely reviewed and updated to stay up-to-date with the latest SEO requirements and trends. 

It has become important for websites to increase security features. A SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate protects sensitive data transmitted to and from a website. This type of data includes things like user ids, passwords, personal information, credit card or banking information, and similar type of information. SSL certificates encrypt data, making it more difficult for this type of information to be acquired by hackers. Therefore, a SSL certificate is necessary to help gain visitors’ trust. A website with an SSL certificate will be displayed with a security padlock in the address bar of the browser. This will indicate that the connection is secure and will show visitors that their privacy is taken seriously. If your website doesn’t have a certificate, some internet browsers may label it as “unsafe.” A website with a SSL will have “HTTPS” in its URL.  

Security is not only important for the user experience. Search engines like Google are giving preferential treatment to websites that have SSL certificate when it comes to ranking a website. Google likes websites that are secure and will make them more visible to people searching on Google. 

Authentic photography is an essential element for building credibility and trust. Website visitors can easily tell the difference between authentic photography versus stock photography. You don’t want to make a website visitor question whether the product or service is truly your product or service, or whether the people in a photograph are the actual employees or customers of a website, instead of models. If a website contains original photography instead of stock photography that anyone can access and use, it creates more engagement from visitors. They will be more interested in remaining on a website and learning more about a business or organization.

No two website visitors are the same and neither is the way they like to communicate with a business if they are interested in a product or service. To maximize the number of leads from a website, it’s important to give website visitors a variety of ways to communicate including:

I’ve seen the number of leads from a website increase by as much as 25%-30% when all the forms of communication listed above were added to a website that only had a telephone number and email address listed. 

Content incorporates many things. Blog articles, written paragraphs or descriptions on a website, photography, and video are all included in the content of a website. 

For a variety of reasons, content on the internet is very important but many businesses fall victim to using or publishing content that doesn’t follow three important guidelines - Relevance, Authenticity, and Authority. Too many businesses use content that could not be classified as “quality content”. It’s content that says or looks the same as the competition, is poorly written, or is difficult to see or hear. 

Consistently producing quality content takes time and must be carefully planned and executed. The investment of resources to produce quality content yields positive results, keeps a website fresh, and is critical to effective internet marketing.