Dear website owners,

At some point in the past, you decided your business, idea or other venture would benefit from having a website to announce your presence to the world. You had a website created just for you, and suddenly you became part of the largest communication revolution since the printing press.

On the day your website launched, you announced to your customers that your business was on the cutting edge of technology: modern, advanced and deserving of their business. While this is great, do you know if your website still says the same thing?

The words on your website may not change, but as your website ages, the Internet evolves around it. The tastes of viewers and customers change with web design trends and as the technology becomes more advanced. Over time, your website will become outdated, and it will reflect on your business.

Take a look at the two pictures below. The first is of a McDonald’s restaurant before their recent renovation, and the second is a McDonald’s restaurant after renovation.

If random customers were to choose between these two restaurants, they would more often choose the newer one. When customers see a good design, they believe it’s a reflection of the quality of the business. If a business cares to make sure its image is modern and beautiful, it’s more likely that the business also cares about the quality of its service, product, and the happiness of the customer.

Conversely, if a business has a poor exterior image, a customer will be inclined to think that the business is outdated, dirty and has a lower quality of service, regardless of actual quality of the business. So even though both of these restaurants sell the same food, the customer will be inclined to choose the one with the better design.

It’s the same with websites. Even if your outdated website functions properly and displays all of your information, the old design will give customers a bad impression and turn them away. It’s extremely important that you update the design of your website to maintain the good image of your business. But this raises the following question: How often should you redesign your website?

The web design field evolves extremely quickly. Consider that only a few years ago did people start viewing websites on their phones and tablets. Today, nearly one third of all website traffic is from mobile devices.

With this shift, suddenly the web design world was forced to change.  Designs had to become responsive to the device they were viewed on, some technologies such as Adobe Flash became unusable and obsolete, and any website not adapting to this change became outdated.

With this in mind, and with my experience as a web developer/designer, I believe a website should be redesigned approximately every three years, with five years being a hard limit.

Keeping your website’s design up to date will improve customers’ impressions of your business, improve your customers’ experience on your website, increase traffic, decrease bounce rate and ultimately increase business. For additional reading, see this list of website redesign case studies.

Thank you for making the stride to keep the Internet a beautiful place.

Tyler Johnson
Website Developer