Let’s look at how some of those factors might impact the website’s lifetime. 

Technical obsolescence 

In the early days of the internet there was a very fast pace of technical change, and web technology platforms became dated very quickly. Nowadays the pace of change is a bit more predictable. But there is still a lot of change. Think about this timeline for WordPress, for example. WordPress as a platform goes back to 2003, but it wasn’t really a sensible choice for a professional website until around 2013. Today it’s a great choice for quite a wide range of website projects and can robustly handle even some very complex requirements (like multi-language support). But we can see some trends that might lead to WordPress being a less desirable platform choice in the future, with platforms like Webflow and Wix offering some advantages. 

So WordPress has already lasted 10 years or so as a mainstream platform, and we can be pretty confident it will be around quite a while longer. 

In contrast there are a lot of technical platforms that don’t have so much longevity. For instance, if you’d chosen the Nucleus CMS which in 2012 was touted as a serious alternative to WordPress, you’d have seen it become obsolete back in 2014. 

We’d say that if you build a website today on a mainstream, widely supported technology platform you can count on at least a 10-year lifetime. If you chose a more niche platform for some critical component of your website, you run the risk of much earlier obsolescence. So make this technical platform lifetime assessment part of your decision-making about a new website. You might have valid business reasons for selecting a new or niche technology platform, but if you do, recognise that that choice risks limiting the working lifetime of your new site. 

Rebranding and business change 

A rebrand is rarely spontaneous, so your company’s leadership team probably has a good idea of the likely timescales for any future rebranding. If you can be confident there’s no major rebranding in the offing, this probably won’t limit the lifespan of your website. But if your brand is ageing or if there are other reasons why a rebrand is likely, you should assume you’ll need to replace your website when that rebrand happens. 

You might hope to build a website in such a way that it can be rebranded as an update, without completely replacing the site. Sometimes that’s possible, especially if the rebrand is an incremental change. But often a change in branding will undermine the overall design coherence of a website. It’s best to assume that new brand = new website. 

So: if you are expecting a rebrand within a year or two, it’s probably best to defer any commitment to a new website. 

Business change is harder to predict. Some organizations and industries are naturally fast-moving and subject to a lot of change – for instance there may be a lot of mergers and acquisitions. Other industries don’t have the same pace of change. You could look back over the history of your own organisation and similar companies in your industry to make an estimate of how likely it is that a future business change will come along and require a website replacement. For a lot of industries this might set an average 5-10 year lifespan. 

Content structure/workflow changes 

These sorts of changes are often the main internal driving factor for a website replacement. The old site still works, but the marketing team can no longer update it in the way that they want to, or updates are time-consuming and difficult in a way that limits what the marketing team can achieve. 

There can be a lot of reasons why a mismatch develops between desired working practices and the structure and functionality of an existing website. Perhaps your team has adopted a new marketing technology like a marketing automation system. Perhaps there’s been a business change or competitive pressure that requires a new type of content, such as product videos where previously static images were sufficient. Or you’ve moved into new geographic markets and need content in multiple languages. 

No one sets out to build a website that won’t support future content requirements and associated workflows, but it’s hard to anticipate these types of changes too far into the future. You can mitigate the impact of future changes by choosing a mainstream technical platform and building in some flexibility to the backend setup of any new website. But it’s not possible to build in unlimited flexibility to anticipate every possible future requirement, and flexibility comes at a cost – if you insist on a lot of flexibility in the back end of a new website, you’ll pay more for the build and you’ll have more complexity to handle day-to-day, which increases your cost of ownership. 

You’ll perhaps have an idea about the likely pace of future change within your team. Are you early adopters that like to bring in new marketing technologies whenever possible? Are your competitors and your industry very dynamic and constantly bringing in new types of content? Or are things more slow moving? 

Realistically, for most organisations it’s likely that some form of content or workflow change will start to limit the lifetime of a website within perhaps 2-5 years.  

Design obsolescence 

Design trends evolve gradually over time – so a website from 2015 just “looks” a bit dated, even if it still works fine. And there are specific challenges that arise from external technology changes. For example, in 2015 there was arguably no need for a B2B website to support mobile browsing, whereas today that’s essential. And changes in legislation have forced technical changes around cookie consent.

It’s hard to predict whether there will be future technology step changes that will make today’s designs obsolete. Perhaps the way that we interact with websites will change fundamentally because of generative AI. Or some new device like Apple’s Vision Pro will become mainstream and rework the browsing experience. There’s not much we can do today to anticipate uncertain future step changes in design best practices.  

The creeping sense of a site becoming “dated” is a bit easier to predict though. It’s a judgement call, but I’d say it’s realistic to expect around a 3-5 year lifetime for a B2B design. After that time, the chances are your site will start to signal its age to your users. 

You can increase the likely lifetime of your new site by taking this into account in the design process. Most B2B teams will be somewhat conservative in their attitude to design, but you can still aim for a fresh, modern design to avoid limiting the lifetime of your site. There are some evergreen design principles – simplicity always ages better than complexity, for example!