Did you know that the lifespan of an average website is usually 3 – 6 years. Website redesigns can take significant time, money and other resources, so the deciding factors in when to redesign a website should be less about the age of a website and more about whether it’s currently working to bring in leads, clients, and business.
One way to get a lot more mileage out of your website is to develop a habit of making incremental changes to your website’s text and images as they are needed. Since WordPress stores the text and images in its database, when your site starts to look dated. You can refresh the site by changing the theme, and your content will still be there. Customizing the new theme to go with your brand will take much less effort than having to start a site from scratch.
In 2009, the year I started New Tricks and the kids went off to college, my husband and I took down their Outcast and the Red Hot Chili Peppers posters, redecorated their rooms, and started the Urban Oasis Bed and Breakfast. We weren’t sure how we’d like having strangers staying in our house. But, our place is so big that aside from breakfast, most of the time we wouldn’t even be aware that anyone else was there. It was pre-Airbnb so aI built a blog-style website and began taking reservations for our three extra ensuite bedrooms.
Over the years, I’d joke that the Urban Oasis website was my step-child website since I gave it much less attention than I did to New Tricks, where I was blogging every week. However, I did keep the Urban Oasis site current and in good working order.
In 2014, after five years, the website started to look more than a bit dated, so I changed to another blog-style theme, made a few tweaks, and it went right on working to bring in business like a champ.
Over the next four years, when all of the new websites were full-width with epic-sized photographs, I rationalized continuing to have a dated boxed-in blog-style website by telling myself that the more laid back (stodgy) site design worked to attract the older, more affluent guests that we wanted and we stayed as busy as we wanted to be. Both of these things were actually true. But, there came a time just a few months back, when I couldn’t stand that tired old website one more minute.
The website wasn’t showing people what they could expect when they visited the Urban Oasis. After nine years of a blog-style design, it was time for a whole new look!
We brought in a photographer and were thrilled to get up-to-date images that included the new furnishings we’ve added over the years. Then we designed a new website that showed us at our best. I was happy with this until The Real World rented our house for the 32nd season. We renovated before moving back in which then necessitated having another website refresh. We love the new more sophisticated Urban Oasis!
The new, more sophisticated Urban Oasis’ website refresh.
How will you know when it’s time to refresh or redesign your website? Anyone of the following situations will be a clue!
- You need a state of the art website for your prospective clients to trust the quality of the work you do.
- Your site has been hacked and is not technically stable.
- You want your website to be easier to use and navigate.
- You built your current site on Weebly, Wix, or Squarespace which is limiting your ability to add the features and functionality you need and that are available from WordPress.
- Your website is not mobile responsive, and it doesn’t make sense for you to create responsive code for the old site when you can have a new theme that will come with the responsive code you need.
- Your team is having trouble adding fresh content to your site.
- People aren’t visiting your pages and those who do arrive, don’t stay.
- The site isn’t working to attract your target visitor and convert them into customers.
- You’re launching new products or services and need new landing pages.
- You’re embarrassed by your site and can’t stand it one more minute.
