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One of the most common questions we hear from companies and organizations is “how often should I update my website?”. Before we can answer the question we need to take a step back and get some clarification. From a web designer or web publishers point of view “updating your web site” really means a site redesign, programming, change, architecture change or some other large modification. The question that people really want to ask is “how often should I put up new content on my website?”.
The simple answer is as often as possible. Okay, that wasn’t very helpful, you were really looking for a number of times per week, month or year. First you need to look at old content and make sure it hasn’t gone out of date. If it has you should fix it first for two reasons, it’s usually easier to fix something as opposed to writing from scratch, and secondly you want to make sure you aren’t giving out any bad, misleading, or inaccurate information that may create a problem, legal or otherwise for you down the road. Generally we recommend reviewing all of your content once every three to six months.
Now we can move on to new content, and how often you should be adding it to your website. The answer is a often as your resources allow. For many news sites or blogs new content goes up several times a day. For some sites that’s not only physically difficult, but from a practicality standpoint not feasible or necessary. On the aggressive end of the spectrum adding one new page per day would be a top goal to aim for. A more realistic goal is to add one new page per week. At the other end of the spectrum one new page a month should really be considered the bare minimum.
The next question is is adding all of this content going to cost me money? The answer is it depends. You can write the copy for your website yourself and only you can decide if that’s an economical use of your time or not. For many organizations using a ghost writer makes more sense. In the early days of the web every time you added a new page to your site you had to pay the designer to update all the links and publish the new page. While many websites are still built using this publishing model, it’s not really a long term viable solution. Many designers are now using Content Management systems (CMS) to allow them to make updates and have multiple authors and editors. These publishing systems make it east to add content but come with tools like spell checking and scheduled publishing for future posts. So you could have a ghost writer write 12 new pages for you all at once and then slowly trickle them out once a week over the next three months.
Some general rules of thumb are, be consistent try to publish new pages every Tuesday, or the first Wednesday of the month. Add content slowly, adding 1 page per week for a whole year is better than adding 52 new pages all in one week. Be as topical and up to date as possible, everyone wants to know what’s hot and interesting right now, not what I need to do in six months in the future.
