There is no schedule, and anybody quoting you one is selling a project rather than answering the question. A website needs rebuilding when something measurable breaks: it fails on phones, it loads slowly, nobody can edit it, crawlers cannot read it, or the business it describes has changed. Blue Crane Works, in Hamilton, Ontario, checks those five and will tell you when the answer is that yours is fine.
Why is there no "every three years" rule?
Because no search engine, standards body or regulator publishes one, and we are not going to invent a number to sound authoritative. The figures you will see quoted in agency articles are marketing, not research, and they exist because a rule of thumb sells rebuilds on a timer.
A site built well in 2019 that still loads fast, works on a phone and can be edited does not need replacing in 2026. A site built badly last year might. Age is a poor proxy for whether something is broken, so use the things you can actually measure.
So how do I know if mine needs it?
| Trigger | How to test it | Rebuild, or fix? |
|---|---|---|
| It fails on a phone | Open it on your own phone. Do you pinch to zoom? Does the menu work? | Usually a rebuild. Responsive layout is structural. |
| It is slow | Load it on mobile data, not your office wifi, with the cache cleared. | Often fixable: images, fonts and scripts are the usual culprits. |
| Nobody can edit it | Try changing your own phone number. How long did it take? | Rebuild. A site you cannot update will drift out of date permanently. |
| Crawlers cannot read it | View source and look for your own sentences, not just script tags. | Rebuild if the content is painted in by JavaScript. Bing names this one outright. |
| The business has changed | Does it describe what you actually sell, where you actually work? | Usually content, not code. Fix it this week. |
Three of those five are content or configuration problems wearing a design costume. That is the useful part of asking the question this way: it stops a fixable site being thrown away.
Only the fourth trigger has a vendor rule behind it rather than our judgement, and it is worth quoting because it is the one owners never think of as a design problem. Bing's Webmaster Guidelines list "hiding critical content behind client-side rendering" as a thing to avoid, and state the consequence plainly: "content that cannot be reliably rendered may not be indexed or selected for grounding results." Google's JavaScript SEO guidance is gentler but points the same way, recommending server-side or pre-rendering because "not all bots can run JavaScript." A site that fails this is not dated, it is invisible, and no amount of new styling fixes it.
The other four triggers are our own judgement from doing this work, not vendor rules, and we are labelling them that way rather than dressing them up as standards.
How much does a website redesign cost?
We will only quote our own numbers, because anyone publishing an industry average is averaging work that has nothing in common. Ours is $0 up front and $100 a month on a twelve-month term, which includes the build, hosting, changes and the technical visibility work, with add-ons at $50 a month each. The thinking behind that price, and how the two other ways of buying a website are priced, is in what does a business website cost in Hamilton.
The cost nobody puts on a quote is the second rebuild. A site bought as a one-off project has no mechanism for staying current, so it decays until it needs replacing again, and the replacement is quoted as a fresh project.
Is a redesign the same as maintenance?
No, and conflating them is how sites end up needing the big rebuild. Maintenance is the small continuous work: content that matches the business, software kept current, broken links fixed, images kept small, new pages added when there is something to say. A redesign is what you pay for when maintenance has not happened for years.
A managed site is a bet that the first is cheaper than the second. It usually is, and it also means the question at the top of this page stops being relevant, because nothing accumulates far enough to force a rebuild.
What if it only needs fixing, not rebuilding?
Then we will say so. That is a real answer we give, and the technical half of it is free to check: our checker tells you in about ten seconds whether crawlers and AI assistants can actually read your site, which is trigger four on the table above. If it comes back clean and your site works on a phone, you probably need content, not a rebuild.
Does an old website hurt me with AI assistants?
Only through the things on the table, not through age itself. An assistant does not know or care when your site was built. Google states there are no additional requirements to appear in its AI features beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, and that you "don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup" to get there. What matters is whether the crawler can fetch the page, whether the words are in the HTML, and whether anything on the page answers the question being asked. An old, plain, fast, readable site can do very well; a brand new one that paints its text in with JavaScript can be invisible. The six reasons a business is missing from ChatGPT answers covers that in full.
Want this checked and fixed on your site?
The AI Visibility Pass runs every check in this article against your live site, fixes what it finds, and hands you the proof. Fixed quote, written guarantee. On a managed website it is included from launch.
See the AI Visibility Pass Managed websites, $100 a month