Updating a website often goes beyond adding a few paragraphs of copy or building a landing page. Web image updates are also essential for enhancing the user experience without losing valuable work hours.
The easiest decision when updating your site’s imagery stems from seasonal changes. Journeying from summer to fall and winter to spring comes with separate sets of design possibilities.
Adding new photos to a header or slider signifies to your customers that you care about how they view your site. A straightforward update can also improve search engine optimization standings, although not in the ways that you may think.
If updating a website improved SEO, then everyone would ditch long-form copy and start publishing anything new that came to mind. Image updates will not necessarily improve SEO, but they can make it look like your site is mostly unchanged on the backend.
You want to create a seamless transition from an old image to the new one without losing the power of its alt tags, page download speed, or mobile responsiveness. Valorous Circle employs this practice once every other month with our header image. It’s a simple way to update the site without harming its usability.
Google is becoming less reliant on meta descriptions and instead is focusing on what’s actually in your body content. Changing the written content of your site, or having to rearrange it to make way for new images, could damage your ranking, so it’s best to avoid significant disruptions with new photos outside of the size and scope of your original.
When choosing new images to use on your site, make sure they all fall in line with your overall theme. Adding stock images is an excellent use of any license agreement, but not all stock images are the same. Achieving a level of consistency with your new photos is essential.
There are many free photo sites on the internet, but nothing will beat taking a picture yourself or hiring a local agency/photographer to do so. Updating plugins, keywords, and landing pages often receive the most web attention and are essential to the functionality of your site.
