Have you been managing multiple, separate websites & microsites spread all lover CMS platforms? Sharing content across all these sites and microsites may appear a difficult and even an impossible task, more often than not. You may have to waste a lot of time just to figure out the ways that help your entire system work together. This is when web consolidation comes to your rescue. Any reputed website development services provider can help you with your website’s consolidation. However, before we discuss further whether you should consider your website’s consolidation or not, let us learn more about consolidation.
To introduce, consolidation refers to moving multiple, standalone websites to a single system. Website consolidation lets you manage all your websites with just one log-in. You can train your staff on the same platform and minimize the costs associated with website development and maintenance.
Why is consolidation a good choice?
To determine whether website consolidation is a good choice for your business or not, you need to first understand how it may affect your organization. Good website consolidation may help with:
- Deployment of sub-sites within minutes
- Content sharing across websites
- Access to global content and that includes member directories, etc.
- Control for ensuring marketing consistency
- Allowing teams to control their own websites and/or sub-sites as required
- Simplifying maintenance & security updates
Reasons why is it time to consolidate websites?
Before you hire the best web development company to build your website or consolidate it, let us have a quick look at some of the greatest reasons to consider website consolidation for your business. - Improved optimization: When you merge two or more of your websites and microsites, you can add a lot more content to the website that you are keeping. When you add more pages (from the sites that you will merge with another website) to the website that you will finally keep, there is greater scope for more optimization techniques and granular content. If there is little content to move from other websites to the one you are going to keep, it means that you were using the same content on all the sites.
In other words, website consolidation is the right choice to go with especially because all your other websites have either identical or extremely similar content and there is absolutely no point in running multiple websites with the same content. As search engines penalize websites that have uplicate content, you should consider consolidation as a perfect remedy for the situation.
- Less distracted customers: Consolidation will help your customers find a one-stop-shop when they are looking to buy something from your business. They don’t need to explore all your websites in search of what they can easily locate in your consolidated website.
- More opportunities to cross-sell: If you are offering various products and/or services under the same roof, there is an increased opportunity that you can cross-sell other products to your frequent buyers.
- Consolidated brand presence: Customers like to shop from websites that provide them with more options and a wider range of products/services in one place. Your brand adds value to each of the products/services sold at your online store/website.
- No need to host and renew multiple domains: As you consolidate multiple websites to one or two, you are directly saving your money and resources that would otherwise be required to maintain and run all those websites (that your business doesn’t need as much). You save the cost of hosting and renewing multiple domains this way.
- Reduced maintenance efforts and cost: By cutting down the number of websites through consolidation, you may drastically reduce the efforts and resources that you need for maintenance. In short, fewer websites directly interpret into reduced time for updating websites and managing content.
- Optimization efforts are reduced: when you have fewer domains and websites to optimize, your optimization efforts will also be reduced in the same proportion. As a result, you will be able to focus your optimization efforts only on the website(s) that you have finally kept. Focused optimization will help you boost your return on investment as well.
- Retain the value of SEO: Carefully designed and executed website consolidation and migration strategy can help you retain the value of your SEO efforts. Through redirections, you can transfer the domains & backlink authorities to the website(s) you are finally keeping.
You may hire a custom software development and website development company to consolidate your websites and help you enjoy all the above-mentioned benefits and more.
Remember, too many websites with the same goal and content may turn out to be a menace than a blessing for your business. You would never realize the money, efforts, and time you might be wasting unnecessarily on maintaining, upgrading, and optimizing all the websites that eventually deliver zero value to your business.
Bringing down unnecessary websites and sub-sites will help you manage, control, and reduce your overall costs on website development and maintenance. You may take the help of an open-source development company or a custom website builder to consolidate your websites in such a manner that you get optimum value for your money and efforts.
Wrapping up
Are you ready to hire a website development services provider to consolidate your websites into one useful, engaging, optimized, and unique website? Even if you have made up your mind about the website consolidation, make sure you ask a few questions yourself before proceeding further, such as:
- Who are your targeted audiences? Are they from the same, different, or similar user journeys? What benefit do your targeted audiences derive from your consolidated websites?
- Do your targeted audiences often visit a website before making a buying decision even from typical, brick and mortar stores? Do you want them to visit all your websites or want them to come to your one-stop shop for all offerings?
- Are there any regulatory or compliance issues in consolidating your websites?
- Does your business allow you the opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell if websites are consolidated?
In short, consolidation is an excellent choice for businesses that want to put all their information and website content on one platform. If you aren’t willing to go for website consolidation and want to continue the way your multiple websites are, you can still avoid duplicate content by website integration. A trusted and best web development company can help you in this regard.
