It provides insight into not just your services and offering, but also who you are, what people can expect from you, and, if your website is thorough enough, what you’ve done in the past (which in itself is important given that history can be an indicator of the future).
While your business model might not change every 3-5 years, your website should. Your audience, and if your business is one of admiration, your recurring audience, expects to see a reflection of your commitment to not just keeping with the times, but also providing users with an exploratory experience – and what kind of new exploration would they find if the website never changes?
First impressions count
For an entirely new audience, something important to keep in mind is that first impressions matter. If your website doesn’t load as quickly as others (newer websites built well usually are fast-loading), if it doesn’t have an appealing aesthetic, if it doesn’t reflect best practice, then they’re not likely to stay on the website for long and that leads them to potentially move on to your competitors.
If you’re still not convinced, here are some interesting statistics that may help you understand the market (and what you’re dealing with via your website):
The impact of technology
It’s not just the design that is a reason for updating your website. Technology is continuously evolving, and it influences the website’s performance (and sometimes this translates to an effect on the design, too). For example, a plugin created by a third-party programmer may not be updated with the leanest code or might be updated in a way where their code conflicts with the code in which the website was written/built. This can easily lead to bugs manifesting themselves in the design by making what used to be a visually appealing carousel into a broken box that refuses to slide into its next image as seamlessly as it used to. At this point, one would either need to custom code the carousel to work with the updated plugin, or it would need to be rebuilt entirely. When multiple components of a site end up having this effect, your website can turn into a Frankenstein of patch work that would very likely eventually need a rebuild purely because of its inconsistency in complementary code.
Another example would be the evolution of browsers and devices in which websites are accessed. Different browsers display websites differently and devices are no different. As these evolve, such as browser algorithms changing, device capabilities and dimensions are renewed and your website needs to accommodate these changes for it to be correspondingly user friendly.
Tweaks vs an overhaul
Not everyone needs an entirely new design, though. Sometimes it’s enough to make just stylistic tweaks, sometimes just restructuring a few pages may be sufficient, and in some cases it’s enough just to replace the imagery and update some wording. At times, it may even be sufficient to rebuild based on the existing design. It all depends on the status of the website, the longevity of your company data, and the status of the industry in which it serves.
