Website Redesign: When Does Your Site Need One?

You had a website built 3 years ago and paid a lot of money for it. The site worked, and it still works up to a point, but it looks old, it is falling further behind the times and your website needs a redesign. Did the company that built your website do a bad job?

Does my website need a redesign?

Of course not. How good a job a company did when it built a website is judged against the conditions at a given point in time. A website built today may need improvements in 7–8 months (new modules, design changes and so on). Websites move hand in hand with how fast technology develops, and that tells us that over a long enough period websites can gain features that would otherwise have been impossible because of hardware limits (for example, server memory now costs less and every server has more of it, fibre optics have been rolled out everywhere, or 4G and now 5G networks are available). As a result, websites can now display new features very quickly (for example, graphics on the page that need a lot of memory and processing power).

Website or e-shop redesign

So, based on all of the above, we can conclude that website trends and what websites can do are both changing very fast.

When should I redesign my website or build a new one?

Large e-shops have developers who improve the shop day by day and keep adding features, so there is always a logical progression (for example, they might add a zoom feature to the product page).

But when it comes to corporate websites or websites of small and medium-sized businesses, the ideal time to redesign a website is every 3 to 4 years. Redesigning the site depends on what has happened in technology over those 4 years (for example, there was a time when responsive design was not widely known, whereas today no website can do without it).

What will I gain from redesigning my website?

A fresh website with a reasonable number of new features, without overdoing it, gives potential customers confidence (whether they will buy through the website or visit your business in person) and doesn’t make them suspect a dubious business (one that isn’t serious or wants to cheat its customers). A website is an advertising tool, and it advertises your business every single day (for example, if you give someone a card with your business’s website, they will visit it to read more, so with the right website you are more likely to win that potential customer).