How often should you update your website?

Every month. But only spend an hour on it.

You don’t need a redesign every three years. You don’t need a full content refresh. What you need is an hour, in the diary, once a month, spent on the same few things each time.

The people who answer this question are usually web developers. They tell you when to rebuild, and the recommendation is usually something like: frequently and urgently and now.

But my answer is more about what you need to do to make sure your site is bringing in leads, because that is the most important job your website has.

A website is not a project you finish. It is something you own, and you use all the time (even now). That means it needs to be a living creature that is managed proactively.

What should you actually look at each month?

Start with your numbers.

How many enquiries came through the site last month, from wherever you record them (I hope it’s your lead gen dashboard). Compare it to the month before, and to the same month a year ago. One month on its own tells you almost nothing, because months are lumpy, especially in B2B lead gen. Three or four tell you something.

Then traffic. How many people came, where from, which pages they landed on. You are looking for changes and trends rather than absolute numbers. A source that has appeared from nowhere. One that has dried up. A page suddenly getting attention it never had.

Anything that has moved a lot is worth understanding. Sometimes it is something you did. Sometimes it is something Google did.

What Search Console tells you that analytics does not

Search Console shows you what people were searching when your site appeared. It is free, and it is useful.

Look at the queries first (what people typed into Google that resulted in your site being returned). Are they what you expected, given what each page was built for? Anything showing up that you never planned for is worth noticing, because it is either a page you could write or a page you already have that could be better.

Then look at which pages get clicked and which get shown but ignored. A page appearing often and being clicked rarely usually has a title and description problem rather than a content problem. That is a ten minute fix for a pretty high return.

And check its list of problems. It will tell you if there are pages it cannot read, or anything it has found that needs attention.

Review and fix just one page

Each month, take one page and improve it. One.

Rotate through your most important pages, so over a year each gets proper attention at least once. Your homepage, your service pages, the sector pages that matter most.

Read it as if you had arrived on it cold, knowing nothing about your business. Is it still true? Are the services current, the prices right, the proof recent? Does it still say the thing you would want said to someone deciding whether to trust you with money?

Then improve one part of it. The heading. The opening. The next step. The contact form. The testimonial that is four years old and names someone who has left.

One page a month sounds slow. It is twelve pages a year, properly done, which is more than most B2B sites get in a decade (and this compounding approach is the whole magic of the AI Edit Method for B2B lead generation).

Why an hour a month is enough to maintain your site

An hour might not feel like a lot, which is exactly why you won’t put it off.

The value is in the compounding. Twelve pages improved. Twelve months of noticing which sources produce enquiries and which produce visitors. Twelve chances to catch a broken form in week two rather than month seven.

Set against the alternative, which is leaving it alone until someone says the site looks dated and you spend a great deal of money rebuilding something that was mostly fine, an hour a month is a bargain.

Put it in the diary as a recurring appointment. Same day each month. Treat it like a client meeting, because in effect it is one.

The monthly hour is the last part of a course I have made on building a website that generates leads. It covers the questions to answer before you start, the pages you need, the research behind them, how to write each one, the technical work and the launch. Build a website that generates leads is how you learn to build a website that generates leads.

Heather Baker is the founder of the AI Edit. She is obsessed enough with lead gen to have (reluctantly) learned about schema in her spare time.