How Often Should a Business Redesign Its Website?

The common answer is every three to five years. That's a reasonable average and a bad decision rule. Plenty of eight-year-old sites still produce work, and plenty of two-year-old sites never did.

Redesign when the numbers say so

• Traffic is flat or declining year over year
• Mobile conversion rate is materially worse than desktop
• Pages take more than three seconds to load on a phone
• You've added services or markets the site doesn't cover
• The site can't be edited without a developer

Refresh instead of rebuild

If the structure is sound and the site is fast, a visual refresh plus new content often outperforms a full rebuild at a fraction of the cost. Rebuild when the foundation — architecture, speed, platform — is the problem.

The compounding argument

Sites that get small, continuous improvements rarely need dramatic redesigns. Ongoing work is cheaper than a rescue every four years.