How Often Should You Update Your Website?

Websites don't age the way buildings do. They age in specific, checkable ways: accuracy, speed, security and relevance. Here's a rhythm you can actually keep.

Every month: accuracy

• Hours, especially around holidays
• Staff listings and contact details
• Prices, if you publish them
• Test every form by submitting it — silent form failures are extremely common

Every quarter: material

New photographs, a new project or two, recent reviews. This is what keeps a site from feeling frozen, and it's the maintenance most businesses skip because there's nothing new to add. That's a production problem, not a website problem — solve it with a quarterly shoot.

Every six months: performance

Check load speed on a phone. Look at your analytics for pages nobody visits and pages everybody leaves. Read your top three pages on a phone as though you were a customer. Twenty minutes here catches most problems.

Every year: honest review

Does the site describe the business you run now, or the one you ran when it was built? Businesses drift — you drop a service, add a location, move upmarket — and the site is usually the last thing to notice.

Continuously, if you're not hosting it yourself: security

Platform and plugin updates, backups, and certificate renewals. This is invisible right up until it isn't. If nobody is explicitly responsible for it, nobody is doing it.

When to rebuild instead

Rebuild when the structure no longer fits the business — new services that don't have anywhere to live, a name change, a market shift — or when the platform is old enough that changes cost more than they should. Rebuilding because the design feels dated is usually the most expensive way to solve a problem that better photography and clearer wording would have solved.