“How often should I plan to redesign my website?”

We get that question fairly often and see brands doing major refreshes to their sites an average of every three years with maintenance and smaller improvements in between. 

Typical drivers for the three-year redesign cycle are:

1.  Your website’s content and/or information architecture no longer reflects your business.

Whether it’s new lines of business, a new corporate strategy, significant growth, or better brand messaging, organizational change can lead to significant updates to a website’s content and information architecture, and at a certain point it makes sense to do a full redesign. 

We see this a lot with early-stage companies, and it makes sense — the website you need in your first year of business is not going to be the same as what you need in year three.

2. You’ve done a brand refresh, or your current website design is looking dated. 

An outdated website can undermine your brand’s credibility. Luckily, the past several years have brought many improvements in website design and user experience. 

Interaction design is prevalent on most new websites nowadays with obvious movements like adding embedded video, as well as smaller interactive moments using javascript roll-over effects, text effects, carousels, parallax, and other technical front-end tricks that bring a website to life. See an example of this on the new Fortive website. 

Websites from three or more years ago feel more “static” and it’s about interactivity and movement.

3. You’re in need of a platform and/or technology upgrade.

Anytime you’re making a substantial platform upgrade, it’s an opportune time to rethink the front-end design. If you haven’t already, now is the time to plan your platform move for 2023—whether it’s to Drupal 9, the new Shopify Dawn theme, or Magento 2.4. 

4. You’re getting lots of traffic but have a low conversion rate, or maybe you aren’t getting much traffic at all.

An underperforming website affects customer happiness, increases abandonment, lowers brand experience, impacts SEO, frustrates site admins, and can spark the need for a redesign to fix it.

Perhaps people are finding your website, but not converting into customers because your site isn't loading fast enough, isn’t mobile-friendly, or offers a less-than-ideal user experience. Or maybe your website isn't getting much traffic at all, meaning it could be getting penalized by Google for low performance. 

5. Your website is difficult for you to update or change without professional help.

If you can’t update your website without breaking something, it’s time for a change. Today’s website content management systems (CMS) make it easy for you to make all kinds of updates without having to mess with code. If you’re being held back by a difficult-to-update website, that’s a significant sign that it’s time for a website redesign. You will love having a website that’s easy to manage yourself! 

Final Thoughts

Are you planning a website redesign? Please reach out if you have any questions or want help with estimating what it might cost to update your website. We’re here to help.