Every marketer knows that regular updates to their business website are essential to increasing online sales, building trust with customers and keeping them engaged with quality content. However, not all can easily update their websites without technical help from in-house developers, IT, or digital agency. This becomes a serious problem for businesses as they have to either spend their technical staff's time or spend more money with their digital agency. And, because of that, businesses don’t update their websites as often as they should, which can lead to poor online conversions and low customer trust.
Have you experienced the same issues? You are certainly not alone. Talking to marketers, we have realised that most of them have experienced difficulties updating their websites, but they don't know what they should be able to do on their website without technical help. This is why we created a list to help you understand if your website or Content Management System (CMS) is set up correctly.
What you should be able to update and modify on your website without needing technical help.
#1 Easily manage, update and publish content
Managing and updating your website's content shouldn't be a struggle. You should be able to create, edit and publish new content within a few clicks. In a user-friendly environment, users can update the content of their website, add images, videos, audio files (e.g. podcasts) and links quickly and easily. Users should also be able to work on SEO elements such as meta title, description and keywords without technical help. The whole process should feel intuitive and smooth.
Additionally, the ability to increase conversions on-page is significant for all businesses. Every piece of content should have a call to action, and your website should make it easy for you to add custom forms for lead capture. From setting up the form to receiving the data, you should be able to have control over the process without needing extra help every step of the way.
#2 Make simple design and copy changes or create new pages
Making design changes such as adding or editing an element in the page, changing colours and images, adding or modifying text or updating widgets such as the list of testimonials or case studies should be very simple. When websites are developed to be easy to update, they make it possible for non-technical professionals to create new pages either from scratch or by duplicating an existing one. If you need a developer to create a new page for your website or you are afraid that you will break it by doing so, your website doesn't work for you.
#3 Quickly and easily manage integrations with 3rd-party systems
Connecting your website with 3rd-party systems such as your email marketing tool, CRM or analytics should be very simple. Collecting subscribers' information from a form on your website and automatically updating your email marketing platform is basic functionality that you should control independently without needing help from someone technical. It is time-consuming and expensive to get a developer to help you with integrations every time you are creating a new landing page for a campaign or a new form on your website. Websites that are set up correctly should be very easy to integrate with 3rd party tools without having to create APIs or write custom code.
#4 Not constantly worry about updating plugins
If you use popular CMSs like WordPress or Joomla, you’ll be familiar with plugins. They are a quick and easy solution to add extra functionality to your website without developing it from scratch. But, if you manage a website with plugins, you know the terror of constantly updating them, having to manage each one of them and requiring support when they don't behave as expected.
Therefore, a good website would ultimately not be based on plugins. And, if you are thinking that there aren’t any other time and cost-efficient alternatives to CMSs like WordPress, we have good news for you. There are platforms, such as our own CMS system, Calls9 Nucleus or low-code/no-code platforms like Webflow, that don't rely on plugins, are extremely easy to update and provide better back-end functionality.
Updating your website doesn't have to be a nightmare. Get in touch!
How we can help
- Website audit: We can help you assess your website's back-end functionality, measure effectiveness and identify areas of improvement. We will identify bottlenecks and problems and provide you with recommendations on fixing the issues and improving your website ease of use.
- Improve your existing website: If you are happy with your existing website, but you need to improve its back-end functionality, so it is easier for you to update it, we can help. We work with most CMSs platforms and can also improve the back-end of your bespoke website to match your needs.
- Build and design your new website in record time: Leveraging our ten years of experience in understanding our customers and what they want to achieve, we create beautiful and functional websites in record time. And, we create websites that you can then update, maintain and edit on your own. We will always be there to support you, but we prefer to develop websites that are so easy to use that you don't need us at all.
