Website updates are crucial to a site’s health, but oftentimes, dental practices can’t keep up with the required maintenance. Unfortunately, ignoring your website is akin to a patient ignoring their dental hygiene routine. Over time, wear and tear emerge as your digital presence suffers from usability issues or falls behind SEO updates among other things.
Eventually, your digital presence may be unable to rank in Google searches. Worse, your pages could provide inaccurate or out-of-date information. Either scenario results in fewer visitors, as they are turned away by an unresponsive, inaccurate site.
Of course, your website doesn’t have to suffer this fate. A good web design and SEO content partner like New Wine Digital can help to reinvigorate your online presence. With the right management and content strategy, you can update your website and show off your professional expertise as a practice.
Updates to Website Content
Website content updates are a regular part of website maintenance. While some content might be evergreen content that is always relevant and fresh for readers, most content will inevitably need to be refreshed or replaced. Otherwise, it can end up staining the website’s teeth as it were, and ruining its usability and effectiveness.
A strategy for fresh and consistent content may include publishing blog posts regularly, rewriting home page and service page content, or updating old blog posts that perform well in Google searches but require new information. Another option may be to outright replace blogs that don’t perform well in Google rankings or that list services you no longer offer.
Primarily, content updates serve two purposes. They first serve to present a professional, modern digital persona to patients who expect a dental practice to be at the forefront of innovation. Second, they ensure that patients do not receive misinformation about the practice’s services or the realities of dental health. It’s much easier to prevent the spread of misinformation through active work rather than to deal with its side effects that might cause patients to distrust you.
Update Your Website Plugins
Website plugins are effectively specialized applications that provide special functions and features to a website, similar to apps for a smartphone. Like apps, however, you often need to update or remove plugins during website updates for your site’s health.
The reasons for updating or removing a plugin vary. Generally, new plugin updates will increase functionality or provide additional features. That’s an obvious benefit to keeping an eye on plugins, but only if developers still support them.
At times, developers may decide to no longer support plugins, ending development on them. This means that these older plugins will begin to lose functionality and become exploitable gaps in your site’s security. As such, it’s important to replace old plugins, as criminals can use them to harm your business and your patients.
Improving Your WordPress Theme
Finally, WordPress themes make web design easier and help prevent design mistakes, but even they require consistent updating for the health of your website. Updating WordPress themes will ensure that your website incorporates modern design trends that best highlight your practice’s professional service. Additionally, updated WordPress themes are more compatible with updated plugins, allowing you to incorporate new features that can serve your patients.
Most importantly, however, using an old version of a WordPress theme may introduce security risks to your website. Because older themes receive no updates, criminals who wish to harm your business or patients can exploit security gaps. With this in mind, you need to be proactive in preventing these issues from occurring by updating your theme.
Not Sure How To Start Your Website Update?
Your dental office may not have someone on the team who has the necessary skills to maintain your site properly. That’s why it’s helpful to partner with a web design and digital marketing firm that specializes in serving dental practices. Here at New Wine Digital, we’ve helped design and maintain modern dental office websites for many happy clients. Contact us today by phone at 480-516-1819 or by using our online form.
Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (2/18/2022) Photo by Anete Lūsiņa on Unsplash