If you ask a group of small business owners how many of them are currently redesigning their website, many of them will raise their hands. It seems as if we’re always working on a website redesign, but how frequently should we really redesign our website?
Search engines love actively maintained website, but this doesn’t mean you have to change your design and layout every six months. For the search engines, consistently adding blog content and refreshing your primary content each year will go a long way to demonstrate activity on your website.
You can use the same site design and layout for up to two years as long as it’s working. This means the site is usable by your visitors, and your most important information is clearly displayed. You may need to do some testing based on your analytics data to tweak conversion funnels, but much of this should be done prior to launching the new design in the first place.
Two years may seem like a long time, but remember this: it takes about three to six months to identify, test, and implement a new site design. Then, you will want to tweak things over the next six to twelve months and really focus on your content marketing strategy so you have your routine around writing blog postings and sending updates to Twitter and Facebook.
You don’t need to create additional work for yourself dealing with a site redesign every six months.
