Many small business owners don't have the time to update their websites and are understandably reluctant to spend a lot of money on it - unless it's clearly bringing in work. Do you have to update it? How can you do it?

Why is it a good idea?

If your website just says what you do and how get in touch, you might not think it's worth updating it. But there are many reasons why you should:

• Google puts websites that change regularly above those that don't.
• Google ranks mobile-friendly websites higher than others.
• Adding testimonials, case studies and references influence people to contact you.
• Old-style websites tend to put people off

Can you update your website?

Often businesses get into an unsatisfactory situation because they can't easily change their websites. They may have been built by people who're longer in business, or who charge for every update. Often small business owners have websites that were built by friends as a favour, but those friends are unwilling to provide the level of support you'd get from a professional.

If you are stuck you can now take control and do it yourself, even if you don't consider yourself a techie.

Template sites

Template and wizard-based systems help non-technical people build websites - even complex ones with shops and check-out facilities.

Often these systems are provided by website hosting companies - for example Go Daddy offers website hosting with a point-and-click website building tool, although support in the UK is not well rated. Check to see if your hosting company offers something first.

If not, turn to one of the website builders companies.

Wix

The most popular system by a long way, Wix hosts over 92 million websites. As with most of these services you can set up a website for free, but to make more use of it you'll need to subscribe.

For example a free site will have a Wix-based web address rather than your own (e.g. yourname.wix.com/yourcompany instead of www.yourcompany.com). Subscription options and payments vary but start from well under a fiver a month.

Similar services

There are many other competitors, here are some of the best known that are easy to use:

• Weebly - generally considered the easiest to use
• Squarespace - more design oriented
• 1&1 MyWebsite - UK-based and geared toward trades
• Wordpress - more complex, this blogging platform helps you to make very frequent updates and there are thousands of templates to apply to control the look and feel
• Shopify - specifically aimed at online shops

Find out more:

There are plenty of websites that review and rate these tools. The vast majority are US-based but we found WebsiteToolTester.com which is European-based, so much more relevant to our market, and gives prices in pounds.

Here you can compare the different systems, the price plans and what you get for each one - it's a great place to start.

WebsiteToolTester.com

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