We received a question recently from a communications manager we had worked with previously. He asked: 

I was wondering how often you think a website needs to be refreshed. I’ve always heard every three years or so. How often do your clients get theirs redone? Is it every four or five years, maybe even longer?

My answer: There's no specific timeline that would dictate refreshing a website.

When a website's an important part of an organization's operations, it should be updated and monitored constantly. The organization should continuously gather and process feedback about how the site can be improved–both externally through on the site, and internally through staff whose jobs relate to the site. The team should actively solicit conversations with users.

Continuous improvement is ideal for both users and for the organization for several reasons:

• It keeps costs down. A series of small projects is often budgetarily preferable to one lump sum project. 

• It’s good for SEO. Google likes updated pages, but it doesn’t love when all your pages break, necessitating a lot of redirect mapping for a total re-launch.

• It's wise to isolate the impacts of changes. Whether performance soars or tanks, you know what changed caused it. 

But continuous improvement requires continuous resourcing, and for some organizations, that’s not possible. Despite the best intentions, some websites fall victim to a set-it-and-forget-it situation.

So when is a full redesign / rebuild necessary? It’s necessary when:

• Continuous improvement hasn't happened, and you arrive at a point when you need to address many problems at once. An example of this would be a site that had fallen entirely out of date and needs a head-to-toe review.

  • Read: Why Is It So Hard to Make An Old Site Accessible?

• There are aspects of the site's construction or platforming that make it impossible to move forward without a rebuild. An example of this would be a site that's built on a platform that doesn't allow for mobile responsiveness.

• A major rebrand can sometimes merit a total refresh, although you can sometimes get away with restyling and changing key page content.

• Something about the site's information architecture or navigation no longer makes sense and pages need to be significantly reorganized.

Thinking about a website refresh? We'd love to help with the UX strategy, UI design, or User Research.