Why you should be continually investing in your website

Your website is a business investment, here’s why

It’s important to have a website that evolves to align with your business needs over time. That being said, investing in your website in this way doesn’t have to be excessively expensive or time-consuming. It actually brings greater value, efficiency and return on investment.

Most companies will invest a lot of money in getting a website right the first time. But change is inevitable, and your business is bound to grow and expand in new directions over time. In order to maintain a competitive edge in the market, your website will need to do the same.

It’s more cost-effective in the long run

Investing heavily in a sophisticated website is one thing, but technology changes so rapidly that what was cutting-edge when your site launched will eventually become outdated or obsolete.

Finding the right agency to work with over time can help set you up for success long after your site has launched.

A couple of years after a website launch, many companies will decide to again commission a new website build, but the truth is, this isn’t always necessary — often, you need your existing website to work harder. 

Having a digital partner you can work with over time can prove to be more cost-effective and deliver better results in the long run.

A website that is well-maintained, adapted to the latest devices and easily visible on search engines and social media will deliver a better overall user experience. This will ultimately lead to more repeat visitors and higher conversions.

Achieving this goal doesn’t mean you have to invest in an entire rebuild of your website. Investing in smaller changes over time means your website is less likely to require a drastic rebuild in the first place.

It will be easier to optimise over time

In the past, changing your business model may have required creating a new site from scratch. The good news is that the growth of content management systems (CMS) means adding new content to your website doesn’t require you or your staff to be coders. 

We like working with WordPress for this very reason. It’s user-friendly and easy to update. It means you’re not blocked when you want to make changes. 

If you’re working with a digital partner like Atomic Smash, you’ll be supporting to design, build and test out different layouts and campaigns to see what results in the most conversions.

You can enable faster growth in new directions

Another advantage of this approach is that it enables you to respond to rapid changes in the market in a relatively short timeframe. In an ideal world, changes in your business model would be carefully considered and implemented over time.

However, there will be occasions where sudden and dramatic events impact the market and force businesses to adapt their business models accordingly. 

A recent example is the Covid-19 pandemic, which meant that many businesses who relied on foot traffic in physical stores were forced to move online during lockdown. Although the eCommerce industry had been growing steadily over time, the pandemic accelerated the trend. 

We helped many of our clients update their websites to reflect changing business needs during this time. We also created new websites that spoke to the changing needs of their audiences and shifts in business priorities. 

One of these new site builds was for Spike Island, a centre for contemporary art in Bristol that also serves as a creative hub and community space. After shutting their doors during the pandemic, they decided to diversify their web content by commissioning digital art and launching an online store. 

We worked with Spike Island to identify what their audience needed from their website and delivered a bespoke WordPress and WooCommerce site that showcased their rich archives and streamlined internal workflows. 

Focusing on accessibility and site speed and limiting the number of plugins not only made for a better user journey, it also left plenty of space for customisation in the future. 

Another notable example is the SS Great Britain. As a Bristol-based tourist attraction, non-profit and museum with great historical significance for the city, they relied heavily on their physical space.

Prior to the pandemic, their website had been focused on supporting in-person visitors by offering ticketing and information to help plan visits.

After the UK went into lockdown, this was no longer a viable option. Instead, they chose to change the focus of their website from supporting in-person visits to becoming a more developed educational hub that showcased the vast array of historical content in their archives for online visitors.

Staying competitive in the market isn’t just about making big dramatic changes to your website.

Routine maintenance tasks like improving your website’s loading speed, ensuring your website is technically optimised for search engines and staying on top of page errors, (as well as writing useful content) all contribute to your site’s search engine rankings.

This means that when potential visitors are searching for content relevant to their needs, they will see your website first and be more likely to click on it. 

Once they’re on your website, it’s important to consider their journey and provide the most seamless experience you can. This means making important information easy to find, providing value to users in the form of engaging, informative content and reducing the number of clicks required for conversions. 

This was particularly important for our clients ForrestBrown, who are the UK’s leading specialist R&D tax credit consultancy.

To maintain their position as market leaders and a source of expertise, they needed ongoing search engine optimisation (SEO) to ensure that their site ranked highly in searches.

We were able to improve their rankings by streamlining their code, which contributed to increased speed.

You can gain valuable insights to inform your strategy

Every decision you make about your website should be informed by the data you have available to you. By integrating analytics tools into your website (and collecting user consent for this), you can track user behaviour and use these insights to adapt your site accordingly. 

The longer you gather data for, the more you will be able to track patterns and historical trends over time and see the short and long-term impacts of changes you make.

At the same time, just because you’ve been using certain metrics to measure your site’s performance doesn’t mean that they will always be useful to you. 

Technological advances and increasing public awareness about how data is used mean that certain metrics may not be as easy to gather data on as they used to be.

This is the reasoning behind the move towards cookie-less analytics. Google Analytics, one of the most popular analytics tools on the market right now, has taken this approach when designing its next-generation solution, Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

This was a key component of the work we did for The Career Portal, a network of industry-specific education platforms.

We provided advice on creating an analytics setup that respected users’ privacy while also complying with GDPR requirements. We also helped them optimise their analytics in advance of their transition to GA4.

Streamline your workflow with the latest integrations

As customers increasingly switch between multiple sales channels before making a purchase, it’s becoming more important for businesses to adopt an omnichannel approach to ensure that potential customers can find them on whatever platform they are spending time on. 

However, adopting a multichannel approach has its challenges. One thing to consider is how all these different channels talk to each other.

When creating an omnichannel business strategy, it’s important to think about how various workflows are integrated in order to create the most frictionless experience possible. 

In practical terms, this could look like integrating product pages into your social media accounts so users can view your products and purchase them without having to leave the platform, or investing in a CRM so that your staff in different locations have access to all the information they need to support a customer who reaches out to them. 

There are plenty of reasons why you should commit to improving and evolving your website over time, a few of which we’ve covered in this post. To recap:

1. It’s more cost-effective and delivers results
2. You can change direction with ease
3. You can optimise your site over time to reach more customers
4. It can give you more conversions and a competitive edge 
5. You can streamline workflows and create a better user experience

Whether you need a new website or you want your existing one to work harder for you, our Always Evolving service model can help you work this out. We believe in building client relationships over time – we’ll work with you to understand your needs and check in afterwards to see if you need different things.