As a travel operator your website is one of your primary marketing tools. Yet it is a tool that will become blunt over time unless it is properly maintained.

It’s all too easy to become complacent once you have a nice looking website that is generating leads. But, the web is an ever evolving environment where those who stand still soon get left behind. As the web evolves so too must your online presence, particularly your website.

Here are three reasons why continual development of you website is good for business:

1. Always stay relevant

While your fresh new travel website looks professional and modern today, it sadly won’t stay that way. Web design is just like anything else – looks (and features) go out of fashion and become dated. For a business that needs to portray professionalism and responsiveness to their would-be-travellers, an up-to-date website is vital.

You don’t have to wait until your website is out-of-date and then get it completely re-designed. In fact, you should avoid getting to that point in the first place. A good idea would be to have a half-yearly or yearly assessment of your website, alongside your developers, to see how it could be improved, whether that be in appearance, user experience (UX), SEO or features.

Following this practice will ensure your website always remains at the cutting edge, something your potential travellers will notice.

2. Stay secure

It’s not just the aesthetics of your website that become out dated with time, so too can the security.

This is especially true for those who have a website built on a third party platform such as Wordpress or Joomla. Such platforms quickly become vulnerable to hacks as malicious programmers find ways to exploit the publically available code. Patches to fix the security flaw are released within updates – failure to continually update your platform (and all extensions and plugins) will leave your website susceptible to hackers.

The vulnerability of websites built using the likes of Wordpress is one of the reasons we don’t use them. Instead, we have our own in-house developed platform that doesn’t require any updates on the part of our clients. Yet, even if the website itself is secure the server it is hosted on will also need regular patches applied to the software it runs. It’s therefore important you choose a reputable host.

As a company that requires the trust of its customers, a secure website is a must.

3. Stay high in Google

Most travel operators now know the importance of optimising their website content for search engines to ensure they rank well for their particular search words. Yet, the regular updates made to search engine algorithms means constant monitoring is required to ensure you stay above your competitors.

Google has already updated its algorithm several times this year alone, including a major change where Google announced it is now performing ‘mobile-first indexing’. This essentially means Google will now use the content of the mobile version of your website instead of the desktop version when crawling your site.

Having on board an SEO expert you can trust is as important as ever to ensure you out rank your competition.

If you want a team you can trust on your side to keep your website performing at its best, please get in touch to learn how we can help.