We treat our websites a lot like we treat our cars. Some people are scrupulous about keeping their car clean and well-maintained, some do the absolute bare minimum necessary to keep it roadworthy. Some want to be behind the wheel of a new car every other year, and others will eke that last bit of life out of a vehicle for as long as possible to avoid having to replace it.

Depending on what your goals are for your website and how well it’s functioning for you, you may be able to get away with what you’ve got for a while longer… or it may be time to consider a fresh new design and build. Here’s what to look for.

Design Trends

Much like the world of fashion, web design goes through trends that can date your website to a particular era. Some fonts and layouts are the web equivalent of ‘80s shoulder pads, others are timeless classics. Look at your site with a critical eye – or better yet, have some of your customers and clients give you feedback. Does it still accurately reflect your brand and style, and does it inspire the sort of reaction in people that you want to inspire?

If your audience isn’t looking for anything cutting-edge and doesn’t need to be dazzled, you might be able to stick with your current site for a few more years – perhaps with a light design refresh to replace those tired old stock images and make better use of screen space.

But if you need your audience to see you as modern and professional, expect to redesign your site every two to four years.

Screen Width

How well does your site use the available screen space? A site built several years ago may only appear as a narrow vertical strip on today’s wider desktop screens. 1920×1080 screens have surpassed the old standard of 1366×768. So although a narrow site will still work on a wide screen, it’ll look puny, and fail to make an impression.

If your site is very old, it may not even be navigable on a smartphone. With 60% of web traffic coming from mobile phones these days, you don’t want to be slamming the door shut in your customer’s face with a site that isn’t mobile-friendly.

Website Stability and Security

Is your website stable? Are you struggling with a slow site or unreliable features and functionality?

Sometimes people who manage a WordPress site add on plugins as a quick band-aid for anything that needs changing or fixing, rather than looking at the big picture of the website, what else is running, and how these changes could be handled more efficiently. Given time, all those extra plugins add unnecessary bloat. Occasionally, they conflict with each other, causing unexpected bugs and annoying errors.

Over the years, some WordPress plugins and themes are abandoned by their authors, even after bugs and security vulnerabilities are found, leaving you with unstable code and weaknesses that can be exploited. Rarely, a plugin might be removed from the WordPress repository for a policy violation – but it’s still active on your site.

In addition to a regular update routine, It’s important to do an occasional audit of your plugins to make sure everything is “up to code”, and confirm that you’re using the most appropriate tools to achieve the goals your website was made to accomplish.

Growing Pains for Large Sites

A website might start off small and humble, and then over the years, people add more and more content in piecemeal fashion. Over time, it becomes a useful resource for a steady stream of daily visitors. But without giving careful thought to the structure of all that information, the site can become unwieldy to edit and hard to navigate. It may be time for a fresh look at your content structure, whether it’s as efficient as it can be, and whether it makes sense for your users.

Rather than trying to shoehorn all your data into a commercially-available theme, you might consider having a custom theme built. While it’s a more substantial investment, a custom theme will allow you to edit your information in a streamlined, customized interface that works for your particular needs, and then seamlessly display it to your users in a consistent format – no more patchwork pages!

Get a Professional Opinion

Not sure whether you can squeeze a little more life out of your site, or whether it’s time to tear it down and build from scratch? Reach out and ask me to have a look at it. I’ll give you an honest assessment and some suggestions for how to work with what you’ve got, and what you might gain from a new approach.