When you’re at the dealership signing the papers on your new car, the last things you want to think about are future oil changes, routine maintenance, manufacturer recalls, brake pads, and so on. But part of you knows that’s what you’re in for and that keeping up with this maintenance will extend the lifetime of the vehicle. When it comes to a website, the exact same principles apply.

While it can be a bit of a surprise for most people who don’t work on website development, the average lifespan of websites is 2.7 years. In fact, experts recommend planning to update your website every 2 years.

But why is that? What exactly causes a website to “get old”? Unlike the brake pads on your car, it’s harder to notice the signs of wear and tear on your website. So as a developer who spends a lot of time building and maintaining websites, I thought I’d share about what goes into keeping your website updated and how to decide when it’s time for a bigger upgrade.

How your website wears down

Although not immediately obvious, your website is made up of tons and tons of smaller pieces of technology — and each element has a shelf life.

This is actually a good thing, with a good reason — each element that goes into making up a website is constantly being improved upon to function better over time. The technical pieces include things like:

• The host server’s configuration
• The platform the site is based on (like WordPress, Magento or others)
• Underlying programming languages used to create custom styles and interactive functionality
• Pre-built integrations and plugins for things like payment processors, SEO tools and language management

These elements are regularly iterated upon — and some of these updates actually quite urgent and necessary for mitigating security risks.

In addition to security updates, sometimes developers make improvements to the way the building blocks of your website behave and perform. While less urgent than the security patches, if you ignore these kinds of updates for too long, the rest of your technology becomes a house of cards that is always behind the times.

This is kind of similar to the evolution of things like stereo equipment — at first you needed one type of cable, then the tech changes and there’s a new one, so you have a connector that bridges the two. But over time, it’s just not worth it to have eight connectors in place to hold together two old pieces of equipment.

What an aging website looks like in practice

As a practical example, let’s say you run a website that has an appointment booking system. It’s built on WordPress, you use some complementary software called WooCommerce to process orders and payments, and WooCommerce uses the best-in-class tool PayPal to manage these payments. Great!

Then one day, PayPal needs to do a security patch, so now there’s a new version. Okay…

That new version is no longer compatible with WooCommerce. Oh no.

So, you go to update WooCommerce — but THAT requires an update to your underlying platform, WordPress. ARGH!

These incompatibilities can be a headache, and much like a car — the older it gets, the more maintenance it needs and the more expensive it all becomes.

At Rain, we take care of routine maintenance for your site, so you don’t have to worry about the nuts and bolts of it. When large, breaking changes do occur, we have years of experience and expertise to diagnose whether it’s better to invest time into updating the old site to work properly with the new tech, or whether it would be more cost-effective to build a new site with the newest tech as its starting point.

Assessing the lifespan of your website

In order to extend the lifetime of your site, it’s important to prioritize security updates and follow up with extensive Quality Assurance (QA) testing. At Rain, we do this regularly and refer to this routine maintenance as “Quarterly QA”. It’s a scheduled and structured process where we dedicate time to updating as much of the underlying technology as possible, and then checking your site for any resulting issues. If any issues are identified, we can then assess and determine the best course of action. Is there a known bug in the new version? Are there fundamental incompatibilities with the new updates? Can we fix the issue with a small fix of our own? The answers to these questions directly affect the remaining lifespan of your website.

A lot can change in two years

Taking the time to keep your website updated and secure, you can ensure that it remains functional and provides a positive experience as long as possible. However, when thinking about the best possible website experience for your users (and often for the backend management of it, too) —it’s good to keep in mind how quickly new tech emerges, especially in the website space, over two years. With such a fundamental reliance on websites and digital tools, people working behind the scenes are continually finding smarter, faster ways of doing pretty much everything to help serve you and your audience better.

Is your website in need of an update? Reach out and we can help determine the best path forward.