Clients and prospects often ask me, "How often should we redesign our website?" Some are prompted to think about this when they see their competitors launch a new site. Others are sick of looking at their own websites and assume everyone who visits their site must also be bored by it. Let's consider how often a website should be redesigned.
The most common advice I've found is that websites should be redesigned every 2-3 years. Other common time frames given are every 3-4 years, 2-5 years, and 3-5 years. Who's right?
Let's look at some data.
The truth is there's no set schedule. It depends on your business, your target audience, technology changes, and other factors. How, then, do you decide when your site needs a redesign? Let's look at a few indicators.
How do you know when your site needs a complete redesign (or at least a partial refresh; we'll look at the differences later)? Ask yourself these questions.
If so, listen to them, and gather more details. Be glad that they're willing to let you know what they don't like, rather than silently going to your competitors.
Is your sales team embarrassed to send prospects to it? Are other team members frustrated by it? If so, listen to them, and gather more details about how you can improve it.
Your site exists to support your marketing and sales goals. If it's not doing its job well, you could be losing a lot of business.
If visitors have difficulty navigating your site or seeing or hearing your content, they'll become frustrated and less likely to buy from you.
If very few visitors are converting (taking a step toward buying from you, such as completing a form or calling your phone number), your site isn't doing its job as a marketing tool.
If a huge percentage of visitors leave your site after viewing only 1 page, your site's design, content, and/or functionality isn't engaging enough.
It could be because your site is difficult for bots to crawl, is slow, or is showing errors.
If only a few services or products are missing, it shouldn't take much effort to add them. If entire lines are missing, you may need to rearchitect your site.
If so, visitors may choose your competitors over you.
If it doesn't comply with relevant regulations such as privacy and accessibility regulations, that could cause legal, financial, and reputational damage.
If your site isn't keeping pace with trends and design changes within your industry, visitors may assume your business is outdated, too. Or they may assume your business isn't doing well financially, and is unable to afford a decent website.
For many sites, more than half of visits are from mobile devices such as phones. If your site is difficult or impossible to use on mobile devices, you could be losing a lot of business.
People are impatient, and they expect sites to function quickly. Visitors frustrated by slow sites often go to a faster site.
If the logo, colors, and fonts on your site don't match those on your building, vehicles, social media, printed materials, etc., visitors may be confused.
There are several layers of software involved in most websites, such as web server software, a content management system (CMS), and plugins. Outdated software that can't be updated can leave your site vulnerable to security breaches that could cause legal, financial, and reputational damage.
Sites may integrate with CRMs, chatbots, email marketing services, etc. If your site can't integrate with the tools you use, it could hurt your marketing and sales efforts.
Browsers try to support older sites, but they can only do so for so long. If your site doesn't look or work right in modern browsers, you could be losing a lot of business.
If your team is frustrated each time they edit your site's content, they'll be less likely to want to do it. If your CMS lacks capabilities, it could hurt your marketing and sales efforts.
If you answered "Yes" to one or more of these questions, you could benefit from a redesign or refresh.
Changing your site doesn't have to be a complete redesign. There are several levels of changes:
Any time you redesign or refresh your site, ensure that it has the flexibility for you to make incremental changes or continuous improvement minor changes until your next redesign or refresh. Think beyond today’s tech; what might you want in 1-2 years?
Be careful to not redesign or refresh your site too frequently, or visitors could think your business is unstable and can't figure out what it wants to be and do.
Also, visitors won't have a chance to get used to the site and learn how to use it. Additionally, search engines can take weeks or months to process architectural changes to sites and adjust rankings.
Additionally, you need time to collect analytics to understand how people are using the site, and data from at least several months is better than data from a few weeks.
If you asked yourself the questions above and decided it's time to redesign or refresh your site, or you need help evaluating your site, contact us.
