A web design company, an advertising agency and a software vendor walk into a client’s office. The client asks, “How often should we redesign our site?” The agency replies “two years.” The software guy says “three years.” The website designer says…
This isn’t a joke. I was actually in this meeting. There were eight people from three companies in a conference room and another two more people from another company on speakerphone. My answer at the time was four years, based on that business and their industry. Since then I’ve thought more about the question and the factors that determine the answer.
What is the lifespan of a typical website?
My short answer is 2-5 years, but that’s a pretty big range. Most experts would just say “it depends.” But what does it depend on? Here we’ll look at the reasons why a site lives a long happy life, or if it gets old fast.
Website life expectancy factors
Here are the main factors that I’ll breakdown the factors into two groups: your business and the site itself.
Your Business
- Is your business changing fast? Any fundamental changes coming up?
- Do you run a lot of promotions or events?
- Are you in a creative or technical industry? Times change faster for some than others.
- Do your visitors have high expectations? Do you have to show (or teach) them a lot to get through to them?
Your Site
- Does the site look narrow on your screen?
- Is the design “trendy” or cutting edge?
- Do you rely heavily on search engine traffic?
- Is the site difficult or costly to update?
The more times you answered “yes” to these questions, the more likely the website life span is closer your website’s lifespan is to two years than five years.
Example One:
Classic design for a non-profit with a nice content management tool and a built-in blog. It’s a flexible site for a business that doesn’t change too rapidly, for visitors that who are mostly looking for information.
Lifespan: 5 years
Example Two:
Contemporary website for an interior design company. The site has a Content Management System but it’s not very flexible because the design is more about beauty and impression. Visitors have high expectations and want to be impressed.
Lifespan: 2.5 years
Live fast, redesign young.
If the nature of your business puts you on the shorter end of the scale, you may plan on a major redesign in shorter intervals: every 2 years or so. This cycle will guide design and content decisions. A site that is designed to live a shorter life may have more graphical content (charts, infographics, page-specific headers and animation) and more graphic navigation (buttons instead of text, links). In other words, design may be more about presentation power than flexibility and ease of updating.
Time to pull the plug
Of course, you can keep a website active long after it’s outlived it’s usefulness. But you risk becoming one of those people who say, “I have a site, but please don’t look at it.” You’ve met people like this. They’re so embarrassed that the look and content are so out of date, they truly don’t want anyone to see their website. At this stage, the website is actually hurting the business. Imagine having a marketing piece that you want to hide from the world!
How to extend your site’s lifespan
Now there are ways to take months or even a year off the look of your site*!
- “Page Injections” – New templates. Maybe you really just need a new landing page design or a better contact page with a form and a map. This targeted procedure can focus on trouble spots where the aging is worst.
- “Nip and Tuck” – Tighten up the design with a few style-sheet changes. Refining the type (snip, snip) and making a few tweaks to the color palette (snip, snip) can help bring things up to date.
- “Face Lift” – Home page redesign. This is a slightly more drastic procedure and can actually be a bit pricy.
- “Flash Lift” – If you have a Flash piece, consider a new animation. This is a surgery-free (no coding) option that can really change the look of your site.
*These techniques were not tested on animals.
Bottom Line
When you, your business or your visitors change, your website ages. It’s old as soon as it’s out of sync with your business and is not getting you those measurable results. Keep it as young and fresh as possible, but be ready to make the tough decision to redesign. And when you do, think ahead as far as possible.
By Andy Crestodina. You can also find Andy on Google+ and Twitter.
4043 N Ravenswood Ave Suite 316, Chicago, IL 60613 • 773 348 4581 • 
7 Comments
Andy,
Very good article and insight. I agree with your general conslusions that web site life is dependent on the various factors you elaborate on.
Nice article, Andy.
I’d add to your “Flash Lift” — many sites these days are using javascript-based animations and effects instead of Flash.
For seasonal ecommerce sites, the answer is quarterly. These sites need to move quickly as new products are released (spring wardrobe) or a holiday approaches (Christmas). We frequently do a facelift several times a year for such sites. A small design refresh usually correlates to a bump in sales.
Excellent point, Ben.
I would hope that almost any site has a place to do promotions, especially ecommerce sites. Seasonal ecommerce site owners need to plan ahead for promotions and sync the website updates with email marketing.
Thanks for the input.
Andy,
It’s so amazing how many people are embarrassed by their websites. A website is like an online resume and everyone should have a good one if they want to be taken seriously. Building a site from the ground up with a team that understands SEO, engaging design and all the technical details that goes into it will save you big $$$ in rework down the road.
PS – Our completely redesigned site by OrbitMedia ROCKS!! The CMS system makes it so easy for us to make content changes on the fly. This saves us money and allows us to focus our budget on amazing new functionality, instead of back and forth calls to tweak content.
I’m glad you like your site as much as we do. In my opinion, you’re site is a minor masterpiece of usability. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, take a look:
http://www.therubhub.com
We’re huge fans of The Rub Hub. Thanks for the kind words, Denise!
great post as usual!
Andy, you have some great points here that I didn’t think about. But I think you left out some critical information didn’t you?
A website is either for one of two things
1. Get new customers (most popular) OR
2. Support current customers. I will focus on #1 as this is most important to most people I believe.
If you are considering a website redesign, I think the most important consideration is: IS the website working?
Do I get a steady stream of new customers from it. Has the site been getting more and more traffic over time?
Does the site take a long time to load? (google is now more heavily weighing site load times in ranking them)
Do I have some sort of analyticals on each page so I can see the traffic stats for each page?
True, websites need to be visually pleasing and this may affect how many visitors convert to customers, but if the site doesn’t have the traffic and has no visitors, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is, if no one goes there, you will get no business.