On the fence about updating your website? Take a look at four reasons why you should below. We’re assuming that you’ve already implemented website analytics and are tracking data. We’re also assuming that the overall market conditions, such as COVID-19, are not heavily impacting your business.

1. Your Website Traffic Is Decreasing

The first sign that it’s time to update your website is from decreasing web traffic. It could result from your competitors outranking you on search due to stale content and/or your website bad SEO. In other words, search engines like Google and Bing consider your content as not interesting for customers. From a paid media perspective, your ads may be losing traffic due to poor landing page design and/or content. From a social media perspective, your customers may not even care about the content built around your service or product offerings!

Regardless of what’s causing your traffic to decrease, you and your team can address it because it stems from something wrong with your website. Therefore, diagnose the traffic reasoning(s) and fix your website accordingly.

2. Your Website Conversions Are Dropping

A decrease in conversions usually goes hand-in-hand with a decrease in website traffic. When you notice conversions decreasing month over month on your website, there’s definitely something going on. It can be from several things: a broken website link, an expired website security license, or weak website content. If you’ve got analytics implemented correctly, you’ll know which page is dropping off with conversions and which parts of your website are engaging for your customers. As a result, you’ll be able to build a better website for your customers.

3. Your Search Rank is Dropping

If you’re appearing lower and lower on search engine results pages (SERPS) for target keywords, it’s time to rethink your site. Lower SERPS ranking usually results in decreases to website traffic and conversions. Lower SERPS is also correlated with content; bad content can result in bad search rankings. .

So how do you know whether your SERPS rank is dropping each month? There are many tools that you can use to monitor your ranking in search, such as Moz and Semrush, but they can be pricey. A digital agency can help you pull these reports, and provide insights and action items for your website to improve your SERPS ranking.

4. Your Company’s Growth has Plateaued

We get it, you’ve perfected your operating model at the current company size. It’s a safe space to be. However, if you’re eager for exponential growth, it’s time to think differently! Have you considered supplementing your marketing needs with third-party marketing support? They can bring a different perspective for improving and attacking your website. Or maybe it’s time to expand your current content for a richer customer experience. With more content, you’ll encourage more conversations from customers, allowing for a bigger share of search results on Google and Bing. That’s why you should give updating your website a try for addressing your stagnant company growth!

The Bottom Line / TLDR

Building and maintaining the best website is a challenge. Understand that it’s not always an obvious answer. Look for signs in your website’s conversions, traffic, and search rank, and company growth to understand whether you should update your website. Reach out to the Uplancer team to get further details on whether you should do something about your website today!

As marketing and website development professionals, we’re all wondering this question. There are plenty of no-code solutions out there that will handle most of the technical aspects of website development. However, when you dive into it, artificial intelligence (AI) is far from guessing and getting your brand identity correct. When it’s pulling the best and worst ideas from all across the world, you’ll get something in between. We consider those ideas mediocre at best! Keep on reading to understand why we’re not concerned about AI and how we leverage it for website development.

Website Copy is King

With the advent of chatGPT and copy.ai, you’ve got plenty of tools to write the next content piece for your company. The issue is if everyone is using the same tools, how will you differentiate your prompts/content from someone else’s prompts/content? For example, the prompt, “write an article about growth marketing” will result in a similar output as the prompt, “write an article about growth marketing backed by data analytics”. You can keep adding more adjectives to the prompt but the core writing will look and sound the same. Don’t believe me? Give it a try!

As a result, the need for a more authentic voice is needed more than ever during this AI age. A voice that fully represents you and your brand. AI is a great starting point, not an ending point. Use it to generate initial content ideas and build on top of those ideas.

Website Design Needs to be Unique

AI-generated designs suffer the same problems as AI-generated copy; they output similar styles and layouts and get lost in the AI sea of sameness. Don’t get me wrong, using AI is great for initial design concepts and for getting past design blocks, by providing different design ideas and perspectives. However, if you’re relying on it to do everything design-wise, it’s only a matter of time before you start looking like your competitors who are doing the same thing! 

One thing to keep in mind is that there is such a thing as being overly unique. Take, for example, a gravel company. This company may not be well received if its brand is too flashy or too modern since it may come off as too gimmicky or cheap. This is an extreme example of why context matters in every industry. Oftentimes, we have to remind our client partners of this when they get carried away with being overly unique!

Up and Running in a Matter of Minutes

The nice thing about AI is that it has made our lives easier. It will write copy, pick out images, and design the layout of different web pages for us. It does it all, reducing the time that’s needed for us to build and deploy a website from scratch. That doesn’t mean AI does a good job. Therefore, if you’re using AI, make sure to use it only as a starting point.

Legal Concerns with AI

AI is changing every aspect of our lives for better and for worse. From a legal perspective, we don’t know the fate of AI. Currently, many AI models leverage content from copyrighted sources from all across the world. So is the generated content legal for use and is not plagiarized? We have no idea and is up for legislation for many governments. 

The Bottom Line / TLDR

Long story short, we don’t believe AI will replace website development any time soon. Many starting points of a website can be built using AI. However, care must be taken with AI. Revise the generated content to ensure that your brand is front and center and that your designs and copy are unique. It’s a great tool to have even with its disadvantages.

Unsure of how to leverage AI in your current marketing efforts? Reach out to Uplancer and we’ll help build out your AI capabilities to maintain a lasting website. Looking for more? Check out our other services!

If you’re unfamiliar with WordPress plugins, they are the bread and butter of WordPress and can make your website so much easier to manage. Just don’t overdo it because too many plugins can slow your site down, make your site feel buggy, or even crash your website. Too few and you’ll find yourself wasting a lot of time with your website.

There’s a balance. Check out our top five plugins that we implement nearly every time and we can’t live without.

Akismet WordPress Plugin

If your site is live, I can guarantee that you’ve got bots crawling your pages and filling out your forms. Your inbox is likely filled with them. Fortunately for WordPress, Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that prevents excessive bots from abusing your site. It blocks submissions that are known to be bots. If you’ve got a paid media campaign running, this is one plugin that you’ll want to prevent false conversion and targeting for your ads.

WP SMTP Mail WordPress Plugin

If you’ve got contact forms, then expect to be notified when a customer fills out one of your website forms. Enter WP Mail SMTP. It’s a free plugin that can quickly automate email notifications to be triggered anytime someone fills out a form. It integrates with your email service provider to send emails to your inbox.

This plugin is a must when launching your site. There are limits to the number of email triggers per month but you’ll likely not reach it in the early stages of your site. If you do, there’s a pro version that will increase that limit.

All-in-One Migration WordPress Plugin

If you’re thinking about a way to backup and restore your website, this is the plugin for you. You’ll never know when an update can completely corrupt and/or crash your website, which fixing could take weeks! With backups, restoring your site only takes minutes, reducing disruptions to your digital presence and business.

Depending on your plugin configurations, you can automate daily backups in the cloud provider of your choice for later use. All-in-One also offers other plugins, but for us, this is the most useful and is a lifesaver. Just make sure when you’re restoring your site, to allocate enough server computing power to quickly process the import. Otherwise, you may face a corrupted website or incomplete website restore.

Flamingo WordPress Plugin

Have you ever wondered whether a contact form was submitted but ended up getting lost in the process? This plugin automatically stores all form submissions on the server database before anything is done. Behind the scenes, it stores metadata, such as the submission page, time, and contact form details, among other things. You can review all form submissions within your WordPress instance. You’ll find that this plugin comes in handy and provides the peace of mind that lead details aren’t getting lost.

Make Paths Relative WordPress Plugin

This plugin forces all website pathing to ignore the domain portion of a web address (example.com) and to reference everything after the domain. I’ll try to explain how this can be a problem. Without relative paths, moving content or templates from staging.com to production.com would retain all staging.com links in the content and templates. Therefore, any staging content that makes it to production would maintain the staging link, and clicking any link would redirect away from production.com to staging.com.

This plugin is super handy when you’re dealing with multiple environments, restoring your website, moving your website from one domain to another, or if you’re working on website optimizations. So, it’s useful for every website imaginable! As a bonus, it’s also easy to install.

The Bottom Line / TLDR

Plugins make WordPress worth using. Akismet is a great one for blocking spam while WP SMTP Mail unlocks email notifications. Make sure to install All-in-One Migration to back up and restore your website. You’ll also want to look into Flamingo for storing all contact form submissions in your database and Make Paths Relative for easier management of URL paths.

Unsure whether you need the above plugins or need help implementing them safely on your website? Reach out to Uplancer for a free consultation! We do everything digital, the common sense way.

When building out website content, it can be extremely difficult to guess what content customers will like. The good thing is whether you’re a sales leader or work closely with sales, you’ve got access to a blueprint for content creation. Take the guesswork out for website content and ask yourself five questions.

What Are Your Customer’s Major Pain Points?

Uncovering customer pain points typically occurs throughout many meetings and conversations. You’ll hear a bunch of complaints, nos, and doubts. At the end of those conversations, you should intimately know your customer’s pain points and identify the root problem. You may find that the pain points you’ve identified are hardly a pain point for the majority of your customers. Or that the pain points are a side effect of something entirely different!

Regardless, once you’ve understood your customer’s pain points, start building content around them. Discuss the impact that they have on your customers. Additionally, remember all the complaints, nos, and doubts that you’ve uncovered? Build content around those too! Pain points are easy talking points and can help solidify a good foundation for your content. Make sure to revisit pain points often with your customers because they will likely change over time.

Why Are You the Best Option for Your Customer?

Once you know your customer’s major pain points, you’ll need to figure out why your solution is the best one for your customers. The first thing you’ll need to do is identify your ideal customer. For instance, your customers may only care about addressing the root problem, while others may only have a budget for a temporary fix. There are other elements, such as price, quality, and speed, that are important for customers. Customer segmentation can help you identify your ideal customers and the characteristics associated with them.

Once you know your ideal customers, you’ll need to figure out what your competitors are doing. Competitors aren’t serving every customer out there and if they are, they are bound to fail. Through a competitor analysis, you can identify the competitive landscape and opportunities that exist within the market that you serve.

The last thing you’ll need to do is to tease out the strengths and weaknesses of your company. A simple Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis can help you do so. A SWOT gives a detailed look at your company, highlighting what you’re good at and not good at, opportunities within the market, and potential threats out there to your business.

By building content around your customers, competitors, and company, you’ll position your website to be a more engaging platform for customers. As a reminder, building content is a never-ending process. Your customers and competitors change, and so will you. Periodically scrutinize why your solution is still the best.

What’s Your Buyer Journey?

In other words, how does your customer get a hold of your solution? For instance, the process for customer acquisition through a discovery call is much different than customer acquisition for an out-of-the-box SaaS solution. Customers need to know what they’re getting into and you don’t want them feeling lost.

That’s why you should walk them through every step of the buyer journey. Your content should address any concerns or doubts that they may have. By understanding the implementation of your solution and building content around it, customers will have a better experience with your brand.

Is Your Content Backed by Data?

With modern-day decisions, data should always be used when possible. If you haven’t done so already, benchmark your efforts by implementing an analytics package, such as Google Analytics, to your website. You’ll get real-time data that measures the effectiveness of your content. You’ll know which content should be axed and which should be expanded upon. As a result, you’ll keep your website content fresh and consistently targeted towards your customers.

Do Your Customers Even Care?

This is the final and most common sense question that tidies up all of your website content. If the answer is no, then don’t waste any time making that content. From our perspective, we always try to give our client partners knowledge, resources, and/or perspective as a takeaway. When you frame your content around what you can do for your customers, you’ll notice better customer engagement with your website.

The Bottom Line / TLDR

Building engaging website content requires a lot of planning and thought. However, it does get a lot easier when you know the right questions to ask. Use the above questions to help guide your content direction decisions. Reach out to Uplancer for help. We are a team of marketing experts and web developers ready to support your website content efforts.

If you’re familiar with WordPress, then you definitely know about plugins. Plugins are bolt-on website solutions that quickly unlock functionality with little to no effort on your website. Want a data table for your site? Install a plugin. Want basic Google Analytics? Install a plugin. With the right plugins, life is easier for website management and enhancements, especially for content contributors, developers, and business owners. However, there are a few pitfalls to be aware of when building and managing your WordPress site with plugins.

Less WordPress Plugins is More

When your website is essentially a giant conglomerate of WordPress plugins, you’re definitely going to have a bad time. An excessive number of plugins installed on your website can slow down the overall navigation across your website. At some point, it may prevent customers from converting on your website. Many plugins are multipurpose and can overlap other plugins, causing certain functionalities to run multiple times. As a result, your overall site performance is degraded, which negatively impacts your SEO and web ranking.

Conflicting WordPress Plugins

Without a proper implementation strategy for your website plugins, you may experience plugins conflicting with one another. What can happen is by installing Plugin A, you overwrite parts of your website that Plugin B needs to function. As a result. Plugin A can disable Plugin B or even worse, crash your whole website. That’s why extreme caution must be taken when installing plugins. The last thing you want to happen is your contact form submissions failing and losing a bunch of leads.

Cost Benefits of Plugins

It’s not easy knowing whether a plugin was worth the installation. According to WordPress, there are tens of thousands of plugins available for your website. Many offer a freemium model where a free or paid version is exactly what you need for your website. However, you may find that there isn’t a plugin for the job and customer code is the only way.

A good requirement for your website should identify problems that you’ll need to address. Once you’ve established the requirements, connect with your developer team to identify plugins that could work and budget out the costs for installing and managing them. Additionally, tools like PageSpeed can confirm whether your website performance was negatively impacted by a newly installed plugin.

The Bottom Line / TLDR

Plugins are the way to go for most modern websites. However, care must be taken when implementing them. If you’ve got a few in mind, make sure that you’re not overloading your website with them and that they don’t conflict with each other. Also, thoroughly review prospective plugins to better understand your options and if plugins aren’t an option, consider custom code.

Connect with Uplancer for a free consultation in optimizing your WordPress site and/or plugins. We can also help with identifying and installing plugin solutions and building custom code for your website. Get in touch with us today!

To get the most out of your website, make sure to complete our basics, intermediate, and advanced guides that dissect the different stages of a website. If you’ve completed all three guides, then your website is ready to take on decent web traffic! However, this is just the start. So, what’s next?

The simple answer is lasting maintenance. Your customer base and technology are constantly changing year over year. If you treat your website as a one-time investment, you’ll eventually grow out of touch with customers. At Uplancer, we truly believe that to maintain a great site, you’ll need to constantly tweak your website to meet your customer’s digital expectations. Take a closer look into what that truly means below.

Continuous Improvement

The hallmark of a great website is that it provides the best customer experience. The tried and true way is to base all decisions for your website on qualitative and quantitative data. That means leveraging as much of your website analytics as possible to understand what your customers are doing on your site. That also means you’ll need to understand what’s resonating with them.

You’ll provide the best customer experience when you implement continuous improvements. This requires a standardized improvement process. Typically, you’ll need a way to collect feedback from your customers (quantitative or qualitative), benchmark that feedback against key performance indicators, assign and execute action items, and monitor the results to see whether your changes improved your site. By reviewing your data and making adjustments periodically, you’ll keep pace with your customers.

Organic Website Content

Organic content refers to building articles around your key service offerings or around your organizational needs. Your goal is to capture visitors who stumble upon your site while searching keywords. This is something an SEO expert can help craft a strategy around. This approach is an ongoing process that requires several months to see significant results in sales.

With organic content, planning and strategy are required, so don’t write just to write. From a website perspective, you’ll need to understand the layout and how it comes into play in the overall site architecture. At times, you may even realize keywords where you can compete.

Building content is a never-ending process. Like continuous improvement, your customers and their preferences are changing, so maintain your content to keep up with their content expectations.

Incorporate Paid Media

You’ve gotta spend money to make money – treat paid media as your best friend. It’s a tool that accomplishes two things: 1) bridges the stopgap between the launch of your site and when your organic content starts to work, which may take more than six months and 2) keeps your sales funnel full for future business. The question is, how much budget should you set aside?

Connect with an SEO expert to confirm that you’ve got a way to track users across your webpage if they are accessing your ads from a search engine. Otherwise, you’ll report incorrect data which can alter website management.

Deeper Website Customization

One major limitation of using a CMS is its effect on your website performance. Perhaps you’ve optimized everything, including using the bare minimum plugins, custom code, and third-party services, and yet, your website is clunky. According to Google, a site that takes more than a second and a half to load faces a 32% increase in bounce rate (the rate at which someone leaves your site without doing anything). That’s some serious loss of traffic given all the hard work that you’ve done.

If you’re facing slow page loads without any resolution in sight, then it’s probably time to consider rebuilding your site. Moving away from a traditional CMS site and into a custom-coded site might be the most cost-effective solution. Get a free consultation and connect with us today.

The Bottom Line

Building a website isn’t a one-time thing. Make sure that you’ve got data collection and are making decisions based on concrete facts and data. Connect with our team today to get you the ultimate experience for your website!

Once you’ve got the basics and intermediate down for your website, this article is next on your agenda. It’s part of our Your Website series where we dive into the basic, intermediate, and advanced guide for building a lasting website. At the advanced stage, you’ll find yourself locking in on some of the more granular enhancements and controls for your site. Take a look at three that we’ve identified below.

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) is an extension of your caching. In a nutshell, your content is loaded at various locations across the globe and when customers access your site, they access your website through those locations. In other words, they don’t interact with or load data from your hosting and as a result, your website performance is significantly improved. There are additional advantages with a CDN, such as protection from network attackers and faster content delivery time.

CDN providers, such as AWS CloudFront, can be integrated with your website – note, these types of integrations can be a large lift. Caution must be taken to properly set up your caching policies to avoid your website from crashing or causing functionality issues with other services that your site is using. For example, your analytics may not fire on every page, losing you valuable customer data.

Optimize for Website Performance

This is where Page Speed becomes your best friend. By benchmarking your site with Page Speed, you’ll receive a report detailing issues under four reports: performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. As part of the reports, you’ll receive some common workarounds to resolve issues. It’s your job to address them and by fixing them, your site is greatly improved, resulting in a better customer experience. An optimized site also results in a better search position as compared to your competitors. In fact, SEO also impacts your paid media budget by reducing overall ad spend in the long run.

Website optimizations require larger upfront investments. However, once you’ve put the elbow grease in, you’ll find that maintaining and improving these performance optimizations become simpler tasks later.

Optimize for Website Content

At this later stage, you’ll likely have actionable results from all of your data analytics efforts. That means a deep understanding of your customers’ website habits, which can be used to identify enhancements for improving conversions. For example, your latest promotions may have experienced an increase in activity on the landing page. However, your sales are not increasing. Perhaps that’s an indication to use a more relevant call to action or the buyer journey is broken. Or you could uncover that customers leave after four seconds, indicating that some of your content may need to change.

Whatever insights you’ve uncovered will get your website one step closer to an optimal customer experience. Therefore, constantly challenge your website’s content and back up all potential enhancement decisions with data and insights.

The Bottom Line

At the advanced stage, you’ll realize that it’s mostly fine-tuning what you’ve already got. You’re not adding more complexity to your website. So long as you’ve got the right tools implemented, you’ll gain insights for improving your customers’ website experience. Connect with us today to discuss your website and optimize it for better conversions.