How often should you update your winery website?

Keeping your website fresh is key to its success. Visitors won’t return if the content is stale and dated.

So how often should you update your site? As often as possible! (Sorry for the smart ass answer.) In reality the answer varies from website to website and depends on your audience and your goals.

Let’s look at the different sections of your site.

Ecommerce:
Update your specials and offerings as often as you want customers to return to your site. For wine retailers you probably want customers returning every week or two weeks. For wineries it's probably more realistic for customers to return once a month.

You also want to ensure your product content is as accurate as possible. New products should be offered on the site at the same time they are offered in your tasting room or store. Product ratings, reviews, awards, and other details should be updated as soon as possible.

At a minimum, you should review your store once a month.

General Content:
Some content might not be important to update as often. For time sensitive information (such as events, allocation information, etc) a strategy should be in place to ensure this information is kept up to date (Most content management systems allow for content to be added or removed from a site on specific dates). If the most recent winery events that appear on your page are several months (or years) old, your web visitors will get a sense that you're not enthused or not paying attention to details.

You should probably review your general content at least once a month.

Blog:
If your goal is daily or weekly visitors then you need daily or weekly blog content. With blogging it’s important to have consistent updates if you want long term readership.

Design:
The design of your site needs to be updated a lot less frequently than the content. Your design should be updated if it's starting to look stale, if you’re missing features, if it's falling short when compared to your competitors; or anytime you update your brand, logo, or business cards.

Design changes should be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Repeat visitors need to feel like your site is changing for the better and should be able to figure out any design changes.

For most wineries and wine stores, we suggest the design of your website should be rrefeshed every one and half to two years (again this often should be evolutionary and minor rather than full scale redesigns).

If you feel like you need to update your website... you're probably right.  What do you think?