Shelf Life of a Website

Websites have an expiration date.  Just like milk in your fridge, letting a website get past its expiration date may not have too many aesthetic consequences. But, things you typically can’t see are breaking down and not performing their job.

However, websites are a bit more complicated than milk.  Developers build websites using a combination of computer languages, such as HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, etc.  Programmers and designers use these languages to construct every element of a website, making each one as up-to-date as possible.  The problem with this is that servers, and even the languages themselves, change over time.  One at a time, these changes don’t always break things. But, over more time, the changes start to build up until parts of the website break down.

When do I need a new website?

The industry-standard recommendation is to completely rebuild a website every 3 to 4 years.  This helps make sure your site is reasonably up-to-date at any given time and that it incorporates most major changes in frameworks, languages, and hardware. 

This is more important than you may think.  Google and other search engines take changes in website design technologies into account when scoring your website–in some cases, as soon as they happen.  This means that you can miss out on potential sales or get penalized in some other way because the engines are looking for an updated feature that your website doesn’t have.

Speak with your website developer about what you can do to keep your website up and running. Or, contact us online or give us a call at (850) 233-5514 today!