When to redesign your website, and how often you actually need to

The short answer

There is no schedule. A website does not expire.

The advice that you should redesign every two or three years comes from two places: agencies who need a reason to come back, and a period when browsers and screen sizes changed faster than they do now. Neither is a fact about your business.

Redesign when something specific is broken that design can fix. If nothing specific is broken, or if the broken thing is not design, a redesign is an expensive way to change nothing.

How often should a website be redesigned?

On the schedule your business changes, not on a calendar.

I have seen sites doing fine at eight years old, and sites that needed replacing after fourteen months. The difference was never age. It was whether the site still matched what the business actually sells and how someone actually buys.

Three questions decide it:

• Has what you sell changed?
• Has who you sell it to changed?
• Has the way someone buys from you changed?

If all three answers are no, the site is probably fine and the problem is somewhere else. If any answer is yes, that is worth looking at, and it usually turns out to be content and structure rather than visual design.

Five reasons that justify a redesign

What you sell has changed. You started as one thing and now you do another. The site describes a business that no longer exists, and no amount of editing fixes a structure built around the old one.

Nobody can edit it. Changing a price means emailing a developer and waiting. That is not a design problem in the visual sense, but it is a build problem, and it compounds every month. A site you cannot change is a site that slowly stops being true.

It fails on a phone.Not "it looks a bit tight". Fails: buttons that cannot be tapped, forms that cannot be completed, text that requires zooming. More than half your visitors are on a phone and you are asking them to work for it.

The structure is wrong. Pages exist but nothing links to them, so neither people nor search engines find them. This is more common than it sounds, and it is invisible from the homepage. It looks like a content problem and it is an architecture problem.

It is losing you deals in the room. Not in the abstract. A prospect opened it during a call and you felt the need to explain it. That is a real cost and it is worth money to remove.

Five reasons that do not

"It looks dated." Looking dated costs almost nothing if the site works. Buyers of services do not choose a supplier on visual fashion. They choose on whether they believe you can do the job, and belief comes from specifics, proof and clarity, none of which require a redesign.

"We are not getting leads." This is the most common reason given and it is almost never a design problem. Before you spend anything on design, check whether the form actually sends, whether anyone replies, and how long that takes. I have found sites where the contact form had been silently failing for months. The design was fine. Nothing was arriving.

"A competitor's site looks better." You do not know whether their site works. You know it looks good in a browser tab. Those are different things, and one of them is measurable.

"Traffic is falling." That is a search problem, and a redesign is the most reliable way to make it worse. Rebuilding a site changes URLs, structure and content at once, and if that is done carelessly you lose the rankings you still had. If traffic is the problem, fix the search side first and rebuild second.

"We rebranded." A rebrand is colours, type and logo. That is a skin, and a skin is days of work, not weeks. It becomes a rebuild only if you let it.

How to tell which one you have

Twenty minutes, no tools, no agency.

Submit your own contact form. Use a real address. Time how long until a human replies. If nothing arrives, stop reading: you have found it.

Open the site on your phone, on mobile data, not office wifi. Count the seconds until you can read something. Then try to do the one thing you most want a visitor to do.

Search your own business name plus the service you sell. If you cannot find yourself, a redesign will not change that. That is a different job.

Count the clicks from the homepage to the single action that makes you money. If it is more than two, the problem is structure.

Ask the last three people who enquired how they found you and what nearly stopped them. Three answers from real buyers beat any opinion about the design, including mine.

Most people who do this find something in the first ten minutes, and it is rarely the visual design.

What to do instead, when it is not a redesign

If the site is sound and the problem is that things quietly break, that is maintenance and monitoring, not a rebuild.

If the site is sound and the problem is that the work around it is manual, that is the system behind the site: where enquiries go, who is told, what happens next, what happens if nobody replies.

If you are not sure which of the two it is, that is what an audit is for, and it should cost you a fraction of a rebuild.

If it really is a redesign

Then two questions matter, and both have answers you can check before you commit.

What it costs depends on how much of the system comes with it, and I have written the ranges out in full on what a website redesign actually costs.

How long it takes, in my case: five working days for the audit, two for the plan, and two to six weeks for the rebuild itself. Those numbers are published because I am held to them.

And one condition worth insisting on with anyone you hire: the work should be built on your accounts, so that when it is finished you keep the access, the code and the ability to change it without them. A rebuild that leaves you more dependent than before has solved the wrong problem.

How I would check

I do a written teardown of a site in 48 hours, without a call. You get the findings whether or not you do anything with them, and whether or not you work with me.

If it turns out you do not need a redesign, that is what the teardown will say, and it will say what to do instead.

See what that looked like for one client, or start with the audit.

Questions people ask

How often should a website be redesigned?

There is no correct interval. Redesign when what you sell, who you sell it to, or how someone buys from you has changed enough that the current structure no longer fits. That might be two years or eight.

When is it time to redesign your website?

When something specific is broken that design can fix: the site describes a business you no longer run, nobody can edit it, it fails on a phone, its structure hides pages, or it costs you credibility in front of buyers.

Why do a website redesign at all?

To remove a specific obstacle you can name. If you cannot name it in one sentence, a redesign will not remove it.

Does a website redesign hurt SEO?

It can, badly, and the damage is usually done by changing URLs and content at the same time without a plan. It is avoidable, and worth reading about before you start.

Is my site too old?

Age on its own is not a reason. A site built well eight years ago that still matches the business is in better shape than one built last year around a service you have since stopped offering.