When Do You Need to Redesign Your Website?

One of the most common questions I'm asked is, "How often do I need to redesign my website?" Although it would be simple to give a one-size-fits-all rule like, "Every 4 years," the truth is it's more complex than that. Let's take a look at the criteria to decide when your site needs a redesign.

When Your Company Rebrands

If your business gets a new logo, color scheme, fonts, or other aspects of your brand identity, you should redesign your site to match.

Your Design is Dated

If your site looks old or doesn't fit modern design conventions, people may think that if you can't keep up with the times with your website, then your products, services, or other aspects of your business may also be outdated.

Redesigning your site to look fresh and conform to modern design conventions will help your business seem current. For example, modern websites have larger images, less text, and a larger font size than the websites of yesteryear.

Your Site Doesn't Meet Modern Technology Requirements

If your site has fallen behind technology requirements, it's time to redesign. For example, when smartphones and tablets became popular several years ago, and more people used them for web browsing, websites needed to be redesigned to be mobile-friendly. Sites that weren't resigned were harder to use on a mobile device, and customers went from appreciating the minority of mobile-friendly sites to being annoyed by the minority of sites that weren't mobile-friendly.

To Change Customer Flow

You may need to redesign if you want to improve the path your visitors take through your site. Maybe your analytics show opportunities for improvement, or people have complained about having difficulty navigating your site.

To Change Website Software

You may decide that you want to use different software to power your site. For example, many of our clients have wanted to switch to WordPress to make it easier to edit their sites, or to have access to certain plugins to add functionality to their sites, or to have better SEO tools. In these cases we've rebuilt these sites in WordPress. 

Sometimes the client wants the WordPress site to look similar to their current site, and sometimes they take the opportunity to visually redesign their site.

Not to Change Content

One reason people give for wanting a redesign isn't a good one: to change content (text, images, video). If your site's content is stale, you can fix that without a redesign; simply replace the outdated content.

Now, if the content changes affect the visual (how your site looks) or functional (how it works) aspects of your site, that may require a visual redesign. For example, if you want to use larger imagery throughout your site, you may need to redesign the site to fit that larger imagery.

Evolution, Not Revolution

Many businesses do a big, expensive redesign every 3 to 5 years. After the redesign, they let the site get stale, and their dissatisfaction (and the dissatisfaction of their visitors) builds until they reach the point of being willing to do another big, expensive redesign. In the meantime, between redesigns, the site isn't serving the business well!

Instead of this revolutionary approach (periodic major redesigns), we recommend an evolutionary approach (frequent minor improvements). This ensures that your site serves your prospects and customers and your business well all the time, not only for a few months after each major redesign. 

It also spreads out and levels out your investments in your website, which is easier on your cash flow and easier to budget for.

Itching to Redesign?

If your site feels stale, we'd be happy to evaluate it and let you know what we recommend. If your site was recently redesigned and you want to keep it feeling fresh and working well for prospects and customers, we can help you create a plan based on your business goals. Contact us today!

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