How often should I add new content or blog posts?

Only as often as you can keep it up. A page that stops dead after three posts looks worse than no blog at all, because the last date on it becomes the last sign of life on your site. If writing isn’t realistic, put that effort into keeping your service pages accurate and your reviews current instead.

Does updating my website help me show up on Google?

Indirectly, and not the way people hope. Republishing the same page with a new date does nothing. What helps is having accurate, genuinely useful pages, matching hours and phone numbers between your site and your Google listing, a site that loads quickly and works on a phone, and no broken links. Those are maintenance jobs, not tricks.

How often should I change my website design?

Every three to five years is a sensible default for most small businesses, and there’s no prize for going sooner. Redesign when something is genuinely wrong — it doesn’t work on a phone, it doesn’t describe what you do now, people can’t find how to contact you. Boredom isn’t a reason; you see your own site far more often than any customer does.

What if my website hasn’t been touched in years?

Start with facts, not looks. Fix the phone number, the hours, the prices and the contact form, in that order, and confirm a message actually reaches your inbox. Then find out what it’s built on and whether its updates and backups are being handled. Once it’s accurate and safe, you can decide calmly whether it also needs to look different.

How Often Should You Update Your Website?

Content, security and design updates run on completely different clocks. Here’s a realistic schedule for each — and the things that go stale fastest.

July 26, 20268 min read

There isn’t one answer, because updating your website means three completely different jobs. Content — hours, prices, photos, staff — should change the day the real thing changes. The technical updates underneath should happen continuously, in the background, whether you notice or not. A design refresh belongs on a much slower clock: every three to five years, if that.

Most advice mashes those together and tells you to update regularly, which is useless. So here’s what each one actually needs, and a calendar you have some chance of keeping.

Three different jobs, three different clocks

Kind of update	How often
Content — hours, prices, photos, staff, services	The day it changes in real life. Plus a five-minute look once a month to catch what you forgot.
Technical — platform, plugins, certificates, backups	Ongoing, and quickly after a security fix is released. This shouldn’t be something you do by hand on a Sunday.
Design — layout, colors, fonts, how it’s organized	Every three to five years, or when the business genuinely changes. Not annually, and not because you’re bored of it.

Almost every website problem a small business has is a content problem being treated as a design problem. The site doesn’t need to look different. It needs to be true.

Content: change it the day the fact changes

There’s no schedule for this one, and that’s the point. If you close early on Christmas Eve, the site should say so the week before, not in January. If you raised your call-out fee in March, the site shouldn’t still be quoting February. Content updates are event-driven: something changes in the business, so it changes on the website that afternoon.

The reason to take this seriously isn’t tidiness. Sooner or later a customer makes a real decision based on a page you forgot about — drives across town on a day you’re shut, or turns up expecting a price you stopped charging. Then you’re either eating the difference or having an argument you didn’t need. Wrong information is worse than no information, because people act on it.

The monthly check is only there as a net. Anything you already knew about should have been changed the day you knew.

The technical stuff: ongoing, and mostly invisible

This is the part with an actual technical answer, and it depends on how your site was built.

If you’re on a hosted builder — Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and the like — the platform handles this for you. There’s nothing to install and no versions to worry about. That’s most of what you’re paying them for.

If you’re on WordPress, or anything else with plugins, somebody has to apply updates. Security fixes should go on within days of release, not months. Everything else can go on a monthly rhythm. The uncomfortable truth is that most small business sites get hacked through a known hole in an out-of-date plugin — one that had a fix available long before anyone got in. Attacks are automated and indiscriminate; nobody chose your bakery.

The rest of the technical list runs quietly in the background: your SSL certificate renewing so visitors never see a security warning, backups being taken on a schedule, and someone checking that the site still loads. None of it is interesting. All of it is the difference between a bad afternoon and a bad month.

Design: every three to five years

Redesigns are expensive, disruptive and usually driven by boredom rather than evidence. You look at your own website more than any customer ever will, so it gets stale to you long before it gets stale to them.

Real reasons to redesign:

It doesn’t work properly on a phone. This is the only one that’s genuinely urgent, because that’s where most people will see it.
It doesn’t represent the business you are now — different services, different customers, different name.
Someone can’t find your phone number or your prices within a few seconds of landing on it.
It’s slow enough that you notice the wait yourself.
You avoid sending people the link.

And the counterweight, because nobody says this out loud: a plain site from 2019 with correct hours, correct prices and a working contact form beats a beautiful new site with last year’s information on it. If your budget is limited, spend it on being accurate before you spend it on being pretty.

A maintenance calendar you’ll actually keep

Here’s the whole thing, ordered by how often it needs doing. Five minutes a month covers most of the risk.

Every month, ten minutes: open your own site on your phone, as a stranger would. Check the hours, the phone number, the prices and any promo banner. Send yourself a message through the contact form and confirm it actually arrives. Look at the year in the footer.
Every quarter, half an hour: check your staff and services lists are still true. Click every link in your menu and every button on the homepage. Search your business name on Google and make sure the hours and phone number there match the ones on your site. Reread the page most people land on, out loud, and see if it still sounds like you.
Twice a year: review who has access to your website, email and domain — including anyone who’s left. Confirm a backup can actually be restored. Plan seasonal hours before the season, not during it.
Once a year: compare every price on the site to what you actually charge. Clear out expired promotions and past events. Update the copyright year. Check when your domain renews and that the card on file still works. Refresh photos that no longer look like your team, your vans or your work.
Every three to five years: take an honest look at whether the design still represents the business — and whether it works properly on a phone.

What goes stale fastest

These are the ones that make a business look shut, careless or gone. In rough order of how quickly they cause damage:

Phone numbers and email addresses. The most expensive mistake on this list, and the easiest to miss, because you never call your own business.
Holiday and seasonal hours. Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Fourth of July, the week you close in August. People check before they drive, and if the page is silent they assume you’re open.
Prices you raised months ago. Every visitor who reads the old number arrives with the wrong expectation, and you get to be the bad guy.
Staff who have left. Awkward for you, awkward for them, and confusing for a customer asking to speak to someone who’s been gone a year.
Promotions with a date on them. A Spring Special that ends April 30 still sitting there in July tells everyone that nobody is home.
The copyright year in the footer. Trivial, and one of the first things people glance at to decide whether a business is still trading.
Links out to things you’ve stopped using — an abandoned Facebook page, an old booking system, a menu PDF from two versions ago.

None of these are hard. That’s what makes them so common. Every one of them takes under a minute to fix and none of them ever make it to the top of the list on a working day, so they sit there for months — and each one quietly tells a stranger that your business might not be running anymore.

If you can keep to the monthly check yourself, do it. It’s ten minutes and it’s free. The reason most owners don’t isn’t laziness — it’s the login you can’t remember, an editor you never learned, or a designer who takes a week and charges an hour’s minimum to change one line. If that’s the wall you keep hitting, the fix isn’t more discipline. It’s making the change cost you nothing more than asking for it.

Common questions

How often should I add new content or blog posts?: Only as often as you can keep it up. A page that stops dead after three posts looks worse than no blog at all, because the last date on it becomes the last sign of life on your site. If writing isn’t realistic, put that effort into keeping your service pages accurate and your reviews current instead.
Does updating my website help me show up on Google?: Indirectly, and not the way people hope. Republishing the same page with a new date does nothing. What helps is having accurate, genuinely useful pages, matching hours and phone numbers between your site and your Google listing, a site that loads quickly and works on a phone, and no broken links. Those are maintenance jobs, not tricks.
How often should I change my website design?: Every three to five years is a sensible default for most small businesses, and there’s no prize for going sooner. Redesign when something is genuinely wrong — it doesn’t work on a phone, it doesn’t describe what you do now, people can’t find how to contact you. Boredom isn’t a reason; you see your own site far more often than any customer does.
What if my website hasn’t been touched in years?: Start with facts, not looks. Fix the phone number, the hours, the prices and the contact form, in that order, and confirm a message actually reaches your inbox. Then find out what it’s built on and whether its updates and backups are being handled. Once it’s accurate and safe, you can decide calmly whether it also needs to look different.