When is it time for a website redesign?

Without beating around the bush, you should update your website every 3-4 years, give or take. That’s just a loose benchmark, and certain situations and individual companies don’t conform to that schedule. But if you’re looking for a frame of reference, the design agency First Scribe puts it at every “3 years, 3 months, 3 days, 3 hours and 3 minutes on the dot.”

This rule is pretty consistent with the current rate of both design and SEO trends. Anything longer than this, and your website starts to appear old to the casual internet-user.

Now, most companies don’t reach this deadline in time, and a lot of companies can’t because they lack the resources. So, we’ve come up with a list of 7 red flags to let you know you can’t postpone redesigning your website any longer.

1. The tech is out of date.
Is your site mobile responsive? Five years ago, you could have gotten away with using the same site design on desktop and mobile, but no longer. And that’s our point. Every few years, how people browse the internet—the tools they use to interact with it—change and evolve. Your site must evolve with it, or the people will simply stop using it. Just ask the 8 out of 10 people who will stop engaging with a site if the content isn’t displayed well on their device.

A good example at the moment is Flash. In the early 2000s, Flash, too, was the bleeding edge of technology, and so for years after that many sites relied on it. But Flash was designed in the desktop era, and when mobile became dominant, using Flash was just holding sites back. When browsers stopped supporting it, sites started throwing it away like old meat. In other words, if your site still uses Flash or any other obsolete tech, you should consider a website redesign.

Having to click every time you want to use a Flash player is an annoyance modern users won’t tolerate for long.

2. Your template site restricts your future goals.
Template sites are a godsend to small businesses who have limited resources when they’re starting out, but a goldfish can only grow as big as its bowl. At some point, your prosperity will require you to get your own roomier website, one that can scale appropriately.

Leaving your template site behind—or at least expanding it—brings you a wide variety of advantages: Hosting better web apps, richer graphics, unrestrained creativity with your designs or simply adding more pages, which is a necessity for ecommerce sites expanding their product ranges. You can even use your own payment gateways to avoid paying commission fees to your online landlord.

3. You’re targeting a new market.
A website redesign is often a business decision: targeting a new market means new visuals and new usability to appease them. Imagine going from targeting Millennials to targeting Baby-boomers. You’d have to get rid of all your emojis and usage of the word “cray.”

Different demographics, locales and cultures all have different preferences for visuals, text tone, interfaces, interactions, search keywords and even something as massive as your site’s infrastructure. If the shift in market is big enough, you need a website redesign to match. Something like their average income affects which devices they use to browse, for example.

4. You’re rebranding.
Maybe it’s not them, it’s you. Maybe you want to change your brand values or you realized you’ll garner more business if you appear more approachable. As a reflection of your brand personality, your site needs to change alongside you.

Even minor changes like a brand color scheme may require a full-fledged site redesign. The subtle aesthetic change can benefit greatly from consistency, and if your site doesn’t echo your brand new brand, it’ll seem outdated by default.

5. You can’t update it regularly.
The days where you had to know code to post on your site are over. The rise of WordPress and other content management systems (CMSs) shows there’s a vast market of people who want to be able to control what’s on their website.

Google and other search engines have caught on to this wave. Sites that update frequently—like blogs—are rewarded by higher rankings, so redesigning your website to enable faster posting actually benefits to SEO.

If you’re still living in fear that changing something on your site will send it crashing down like Jenga, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to get a CMS these days. Not to mention practical.

6. You want to stay current with modern design trends.
Redesigning a website isn’t always about necessity. Sometimes it’s more superficial. Just like wearing outdated clothes (unironically) can be a turn-off, so too do people think twice about doing business with an outdated site.

Steeped in visuals, web design is far from immune to the whimsies of stylistic trends. Every few years we see aesthetic fads ebb and flow, which is why everyone avoids skeuomorphism even though it was all the rage in the early 2010s. And if you want to come across as a modern company, you have to look the part.

7. You’re not meeting your business goals.
Last, and possibly most important, your website isn’t doing its job. If you’re not meeting your target conversion rate or traffic, if your bounce rate is too high and your email signups too low, maybe the problem is the design itself.

We mentioned this in the first section but it bears repeating: good web design can influence conversions and attract new visitors. If your site is underperforming, you need to revisit and replace your design choices from the ground up.

What kind of redesign do you need?

Redesigning your website isn’t always as easy as going from Point A to Point B. You may want to go to Point C instead, or perhaps somewhere between Points D and E.

Before the groundbreaking of your new website, it’s crucial to know what kind of redesign you want, what your goals are and what you can afford with your budget. Let’s take a look at some common types of redesigns.

Periodic update

This is your standard website redesign, recommended for all websites every few years. This would be like taking your car for a regular tune-up, if the tech for car parts became obsolete within five years.

Periodic updates keep your site continually looking and performing the best it can. This kind of redesign centers around keeping design trends up-to-date—both visuals and usability, such as whatever gesture controls are popular at the moment—and refreshing your SEO strategy to reflect changes within your company and the world at large.

Not everyone has the resources to do a large-scale website redesign every few years, but the good news is these don’t have to break the bank. Periodic updates usually have only minor changes, but the longer you wait to update, the more expensive it becomes. To return to the car analogy, it’s cheaper to perform periodic tune-ups than it is to replace broken parts.

Strategic refocusing

This type of redesign deals more with changes in your brand, namely targeting a new market, modifying your image or showcasing a big change like promoting an event or a new spokesperson.

Some companies may never need to shift their website focus like this, but when they do it can be sudden and on a tight schedule. How intensive the website redesign is depends on how big the shift is, so costs vary.

Data- or customer-based redesigns

These are like strategic refocusing, except the changes are dictated by the customers or customer data. One example might be that you notice feedback with customers complaining that it’s hard to find things on your site. Another example might be a rapidly declining conversion rate in your analytics.

The key to understanding your customers is regular user testing, and not just for redesigning your website. Rely on as little guesswork as possible, and instead concentrate on empirical data that tells you precisely what needs to change, and how. Just like with the A/B tests we mentioned in the first section, the right design choices reveal themselves through testing.

This doesn’t just apply to visuals and usability—user data can also tell you which devices your patrons are using most so you know which ones to prioritize. Data analysis can be surprising, especially if a large segment of your visitors are using a device your site isn’t equipped for.