The site cannot determine which updates apply to your computer or display those updates unless you change your security settings to allow ActiveX controls and active scripting. The best way to do this without lowering your security settings is to make this site a trusted website. Find Windows Update using your Start Screen. Windows Update is included in the Control Panel. A personalized dashboard delivers an overview of your day, including appointments, latest emails, and up-to-the-minute news from your preferred web and social media sites. You can also upgrade from OX Mail to OX Collaborate for the ability to create, edit and collaborate on shared documents and spreadsheets. Upgrade is a 2018 cyberpunk action film written and directed by Leigh Whannell and starring Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, and Harrison Gilbertson.The film follows a technophobe who is implanted with a chip that allows him to control his body after a mugging leaves him paralyzed.

The new year is the perfect time to take a fresh look at your website. While you probably work with small parts of your website every day, resolving to dig in a little deeper and update your website more broadly will pay dividends for the year ahead!

There are many ways to do this. You may simply need to ensure that everything is up-to-date and functioning correctly, or you might want to make major alterations – like changing the primary keywords that your site targets.

With the above in mind, in this post we’ll introduce seven key strategies to help you update your website for the new year. Let’s begin!

1. Ensure that everything is still working and up to date

The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure everything on your site, both big and small, is still working properly. This means conducting a thorough audit of your site – going through each page if possible – and checking for issues such as:

• Plugins or themes that need to be updated.
• Missing and/or poor-quality images.
• Incorrect and/or outdated user information.
• Broken links (you can address this using a plugin).
• Broken features and/or plugins.
• Formatting and/or style issues.
• Missing and/or out-of-date content.

This may seem like a lot, but it’s important that every page makes a strong impression. While you’re going through your site, this is also a smart time to ensure that your content is properly organized. Finally, remember to create a backup before making changes!

2. Perform A/B testing

After ensuring that everything is up-to-date, you should determine whether your site is as effective as it could be. A/B testing is one of the best ways to do this. In simple terms, the technique involves creating two versions of something and testing them against one another.

For example, let’s say you want people visiting your home page to sign up to an email list. You could create two versions of that page – each with a different type of call to action (such as a button or popup). Then you could have visitors randomly sent to one page or the other and track which gets the most clicks.

For WordPress users, there are plenty of tools that can help with this process. We’d recommend starting with Nelio A/B Testing, a quality plugin that provides an entire suite of testing options.

Nelio AB Testing

Current Version: 5.0.14

Last Updated: January 15, 2021

3. Solicit feedback from your target audience

Along with performing your own testing, you’ll want to find out what your existing audience thinks of your site. When you’ve spent a lot of time working behind the scenes, you can forget what it feels like on the other side. Therefore, it’s a good idea to solicit direct feedback from your regular visitors to help you update your website.

Find out what your audience likes and dislikes, as well as what features or content they value. You’ll also want to determine what problems they come to your site to solve. To encourage this feedback, it’s best to ask for it directly. You can do this via comment threads or forums, an email campaign, or even a dedicated survey or poll.

4. Conduct research on your competition

Keeping tabs on your competition with tools like Ahrefs is a smart way to stay ahead.

It’s easy to spend so much effort on your own site that you lose track of what your competitors are doing. The new year is a smart time to make sure you’re still competitive in your field or niche and see what similar sites have been up to.

Fortunately, there are dedicated tools that can help you conduct this research. Most are focused on helping you compare your site to others via specific metrics.

For example, SimilarWeb displays traffic information for any site and BuzzSumo lets you see which pieces of your competitors’ content were the most successful. Alternatively, check out Ahrefs, which provides details on exactly what you need to do to outrank similar companies.

You can then put the insights you get from your competitor research into action on your own website.

5. Check your own analytics

Beyond checking up on your competitors, it also pays to consider data that’s a little closer to home.

If you’re already tracking your site with analytics, dig into them to figure out things like:

• Which pages on your site are the most popular
• Whether any of your pages have abnormally high bounce rates
• Which pages generate the most engagement

And if you’re not already tracking analytics for your site, consider making the new year the time when you add Google Analytics to WordPress!

6. Update your keywords

Google Keyword Planner is a valuable tool for keyword research.

Keywords are a vital part of any website’s strategy. The right ones help you rank higher in search engines, which means your site will be more visible.

Even if you conducted plenty of keyword research when you first built your site, search volumes can always change. This means it’s possible that the keywords you’re using are no longer bringing in your target audience effectively.

To fix this, you should devote time in the new year to checking your site’s main keywords. Google Keyword Planner is a useful tool for this task. Or, you can turn to a third-party tool called KWFinder that lets you perform a limited number of searches each day for free.

If you find that any keywords have lost popularity or are underperforming, you can alter existing content to target stronger alternatives.

7. Create new (or update existing) content

Finally, a highly beneficial way to update your website is to create brand new content. Even if your site is fairly static, it’s smart to add engaging, high-quality content whenever possible. This can provide a boost to your search rankings and keep readers coming back for more.

Here are a few suggestions for how to use content for maximum effect:

• Start a blog (if you don’t already have one).
• Create videos or infographics to supplement textual content.
• Rewrite key sections of your site, such as your Contact and About pages.

The start of the new year is also a good time to commit to a schedule for posting new content regularly. Your audience will thank you for it!

Update your website in the new year

Even if you regularly make changes to your website, it’s important to take time in the new year to ensure that your site is working as effectively as possible. This means reviewing your site thoroughly, conducting research, and trying out a few alterations.

Once again, here are seven techniques you can use to update your website for the new year:

1. Ensure that everything is up-to-date.
2. Perform A/B testing.
3. Solicit feedback from your target audience.
4. Conduct research on your competition.
5. Check your own analytics.
6. Update your keywords.
7. Create new (or update existing) content.

Is there anything else you do to update your website at the start of a new year? Tell us about it in the comments section below!

* This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links and then purchase the product, we’ll receive a commission. No worries though, you’ll still pay the standard amount so there’s no cost on your part.

Site Upgrade Definition

If you are preparing to upgrade an older website it is important to know that common mistakes during the upgrade process could severely impact your website traffic and search engine rankings.

We specialize in website re-designs and website upgrades of established websites and we regularly see the results of website upgrades gone bad. For example, we recently had a customer who went with an inexperienced firm who just blindly built them a shiny new website and launched it. It sure looked great but their rankings and site traffic took a major hit and the inquiries and leads dried up and that, negatively impacted their business.

Needless to say the customer was livid and hired us to remedy the situation. We actually had to restore their old website to get back their rankings and traffic, which took weeks and then we did a careful planning project to transition from the old website to a new website, in order to minimize the impact of the website upgrade.

Factors That Will Impact Your Rankings

• Updating the Back-End – The greatest risks occur when you are upgrading your website and changing from one back-end platform to another. This is not uncommon. Client may be changing in or out of WordPress or some other platform. This is risky because many times the URL structure of the website changes and this will affect rankings. To get around this, the developer can use 301 Redirects, which tell the search engines, this old url is now locate in this new location. This works but we’ve seen a ranking loss when this occurs.
• Changing Site Structure – Re-locating content into different categories, shuffling around your navigation and changing the folders that content is stored in almost always impacts rankings.
• Deleting / Removing Content – Pruning “old” content can also affect your search visibility, since Google has indexed these pages and often times they are bringing traffic. Think of the amount of content you have as the size of your fishing net. The larger the net, the more fish you’ll catch. Think twice about making your net smaller.
• Editing / Changing Site Content – With a new upgrade often comes the desire to revamp all the content. Be wary. You can enhance the content carefully but you’re best to check search traffic and rankings for each page to make sure you’re not going to impact your best pages. Check your keyword density and don’t change it substantially. Also err on the side of developing LONGER content, not shorter content. Google looks at how much time user’s stay on your pages as a factor of relevancy. Longer engaging content is better.
• Changing Images – Changing images and the names of images can affect the relevancy of a page in a search engine. You can change the images but maintain the image file names and try to maintain the same number of images for your best pages.
• Changing Page Names – Page Titles and page names are very important. Be careful about changing page names for well ranked pages.
• Changing Meta Descriptions – While not strictly a ranking factor, a well written meta description can increase the number of clicks. So if you have pages with high click through rates, maintain the same meta-descriptions.
• Changing Headings & Subheadings – Pages often are comprised of sections, made up of Headings and Subheadings. These are important ranking signals. You want to maintain these if possible or optimize them when such pages aren’t ranked well or driving traffic.
• Changing Canonical – Most customers don’t realize this but there are two choices for your domain name: (1) www.companyname.com and (2) http://companyname.com. As you can see one uses www and the other doesn’t. To find which one you use, just type in your address into a web browser, wait for the page to load and then see what the address bar reads. Whatever it is, STAY with it. Don’t let your web developer accidentally change it, because it can significantly affect your search engine rankings.
• Page Speed – Make sure your pages load quickly. This is becoming an important factor. Under 3 seconds is the target.
• Mobile Optimization – Goes without saying but your site should be mobile optimized. This is a ranking factor on mobile.
• Search Engine Friendly URLs – be sure you are maintaining seo/human friendly url’s that contain relevant keywords in them.
• Internal Linking – most pages should have at least 2-3 links to other relevant content on your website. Maintain these links if you have them already. If not, plan out what those links should be.
• External Linking – Linking to external websites that are relevant to the topic sends signals to Google about your content’s topic and can help rankings.

How to Minimize Your Web Site Upgrade Risks

All of the above factors contribute to your search rankings and traffic. If you’re simply keeping all content as-is, and just upgrading the theme of the website, there’s less risk but inadvertent mistakes are still quite commonly made, so be sure you’re developer is aware of these risks and mentioning them to you as part of the upgrade. If not you may be dealing with an experienced developer.

Website upgrades that will impact 1 or more of the above factors require a bit of upfront planning to determine what is desired, what the goals are for the new website, what content should stay, what should be archived, how the site will be re-structured, what platform will be used, etc. etc. This is called a “Roadmapping Session” and the goal is to map out the path that will do the least damage and which will preserve your search engine rankings.

Why You Need a Roadmapping Session

Particularly if your website is larger (50+ pages) or your website has been around for several years and you’ve built up some decent organic traffic and/or you desire to change 1 or more of the above Ranking Factors, a roadmapping session is what you’ll want. It includes a detailed analysis of your existing search engine rankings as well as a review of the following:

Site Upgrade Evaluation

• your traffic figures for your top landing and exit pages
• your top referring websites
• your inbound links (from other websites)
• your organic sources of traffic
• a site map showing the existing structure and organization of your website
• the existing URL/file path format currently in use for key sections

Site Upgrades

This analysis and review informs everyone of the level of risk present in the website upgrade and helps us develop a roadmap for what we have to do to preserve your traffic and rankings.

Taking Inventory of Your Website’s Assets

Once we understand the SEO/Organic traffic factors, the next step is to do a content and functionality inventory where we complete the following tasks:

• Categorize the content into logical categories and subsections
• Analyze what features and functions the new website will need to mimic the old website’s functionality.
• Make suggestions for any new features you might consider.
• Work with you to map out which content should be featured/active on the new website and what should be archived but still present
• Work on calls to action (CTA) development by improving current CTA’s or suggesting new ones.
• Determine if we will need to mimic the URL paths on the new website so that they match the new website.
• Plan out how the content from the old website can be migrated: manually entered, automated through an export/import or a joint-effort between company and provider.

As you can see, upgrading an established website requires more thought than just diving in and starting the project. For this reason we highly recommend a roadmapping session.

Benefits of a Roadmapping Session for Website Migrations

A Roadmapping Session benefits you by providing:

• A detailed action plan.
• A traffic analysis report.
• A traffic risk assessment.
• A blueprint for mitigating traffic & ranking loss.
• A content migration plan.
• A new website plan, which includes a site map listing active pages, archived pages and main site sections.
• Existing site functionality.
• Suggestions for new site functionality.
• And of course, having completed the analysis, you will then be able to have a detailed estimate for your entire website upgrade.

Roadmapping session give you the confidence to know what you currently have, where the risks are, what’s going to happen, that your project is understood and that your website upgrade will be smooth. And you will also now clearly understand the costs to perform the upgrade.

Site Upgrade Csgo

Professional Website Transition Experts

For sites with 50-250 pages, ClearTech Interactive charges $499 to complete a roadmapping session. If your site is larger it may cost a bit more. You are not required to continue with us after we complete this analysis, but we’re confident you’ll be so impressed you won’t want to go anywhere else!

Upgrade Site Collection To Sharepoint 2013 Powershell

We have been helping customers just like you since 2003. We are here to support you and make the transition to a new modern web platform as smooth and easy as possible.

Site Upgrade Citrix

If you’d like to discuss how to properly transition and rebuild an existing website, please call us at 727-562-5161 or request a call to schedule your roadmapping session today.