Many entrepreneurs might find themselves getting comfortable after their website has been created, with the misguided understanding that it will take care of itself. But updating your website is just as important as building it in the first place.

Even in the short term, many changes occur within your business. Your website should be change accordingly to reflect any and all modifications. While this is crucial to ensuring your sales remain on the rise and that site traffic remains steady, it’s also good for the ultimate livelihood of your business. Here’s a closer look at what I mean.

Updating your website for freshness

Is the text throughout the website too wordy? Are product descriptions using relevant keywords?

Luckily, there’s a (somewhat) quick fix available, and that means a writing rehaul on your content.

Most businesses will bring on a copywriter (whether in-house or outsourced through an agency or freelancer) to make adjustments that cover these areas.

Make sure your website loads within 3 seconds

Seriously, 57 percent of site visitors will leave if a website takes longer than three seconds to load. These precious seconds can mean the difference between getting a shopper to checkout versus having them abandon their cart entirely.

The best way to go about fixing this issue is to improve your site’s scalability by hosting the site on a cloud platform and shrinking image files to increase your website’s overall speed. Doing this has the potential opportunity to increase sales by 24 percent, so it’s worth looking into if slow load times continue to be an issue for your site.

Have you reviewed your images lately?

For most websites, great visuals are a key component for engaging with visitors. Companies that specialize in selling products like candy or clothing know that an aesthetically pleasing shot is usually the ticket to converting a visitor into making a purchase. They like what they see, and they’re compelled to buy it as a result, which gives your business a healthy revenue boost.

However, many shoppers are much less likely to buy if the image quality is grainy or out of focus.

If some require a higher resolution, it’s time to reshoot. Beyond making sure the image itself is high quality, you may also want to shoot each product in a couple different “poses” for an increase in sales.

A few different approaches to try on for size include the flat lay, as popularized by Instagram, that creates a full, proportional look of the product.

You might also want to shoot videos to accompany the images on your page. For instance, a video shot for a coat company may show models walking in the coat and close-ups of the fabric and material. This gives viewers the ability to examine how the product might look on them and compel them to buy.

Show off your good reputation

No matter if your company has long been established or is new to the start-up world. It’s important to build and maintain trust with consumers. New visitors to your site might have a hard time figuring out. If they can trust you yet, which is why it’s key to showcase your brand’s good reputation upfront.

One of the easiest, most common ways to go about doing this is to feature press and customer reviews. The same goes for customer reviews, which consumers trust 70 percent of the time if they come from friends. Many websites offer the ability to write reviews directly on the same page of their product. With customers encouraged to rate on a star system. Also, share photos of the products they purchased along with their commentary. You can always let your customers know that they’re welcome to review you on Yelp or Facebook. Reviews featured on sites have the potential to increase sales by 18 percent. If you don’t already have this function enabled on your site, it’s worth taking the time to make the update.