How often should you actually update your website content?

There's no magic number, and anyone who hands you one is selling a calendar. The honest answer to how often you should update your website is that it depends on the page, and the update should be triggered by evidence, not a date on a content plan.

Some pages need a look every month. Some can sit for a year and still earn their keep. The skill is knowing which is which, and not confusing motion with progress. This is how I decide what to touch, when, and why.

Which mistake are you making with your website?

Most owners fall into one of two traps, and both come from the same myth. The first is launch it and forget it. The site goes up, everyone moves on, and two years later the hours are wrong, the pricing is stale, and half the team on the About page has moved on.

The second is the opposite. Someone said Google likes fresh content, so you commit to posting every week. By month two you're out of ideas, the posts say nothing, and the traffic never moves. You burned real hours to feed a machine that was never hungry.

Both come from believing that freshness itself is the ranking factor. It isn't. Publishing noise on a schedule isn't maintenance, and neither is silence. The goal isn't more updates or fewer. It's the right update to the right page at the right time.

Is fresh content actually a Google ranking factor?

Only sometimes, and only when the update is real. Freshness is a conditional signal, not a blanket one. Google applies it through something called Query Deserves Freshness, which leans toward recent content for searches that expect it, and mostly ignores recency for everything else (Search Engine Land).

Think about the difference. "Best patio heaters 2026" and "is my street closed today" both deserve fresh results, so recency carries weight. "How does a heat pump work" doesn't change month to month, so depth and accuracy beat a new timestamp. Most pages on a local business site sit in that second bucket. Updating them on a clock does nothing for rankings.

And the date field isn't a lever. Google's John Mueller has said plainly that changing the published date won't make a page rank differently if the content didn't meaningfully change, and warned against artificially freshening a page "without adding significant information or some other compelling reason" (Search Engine Journal). The lever is whether you added real value, not whether the stamp says today.

So freshness is a real thing, but a narrow one. It rewards genuine improvement on pages where recency matters. It ignores date-fiddling everywhere. That means the reason to update most of your site isn't rankings at all. It's the reader, and the facts they're about to act on.

Which parts of your website go stale first?

The facts your customers act on, and those cost you leads the day they go wrong. Hours, address, phone number, services, prices, and photos all decay in the real world, not the algorithm. A customer who drives to your old address or shows up to a closed door doesn't care where you rank.

The numbers on this are blunt. In BrightLocal's research, 62% of consumers said they would avoid using a business after finding incorrect information about it online. More than half lose trust when opening hours are wrong, 24% have shown up too early or too late because of it, and 22% have gone to the wrong location from a bad address. Around half lose faith in a business over out-of-date photos, and 30% would just go to a competitor if they couldn't find you (BrightLocal).

This is the one part of updating that's a schedule, not a trigger, because facts don't wait for your monitoring to catch up. Give the site, your Google Business Profile, and your main listings a 15-minute pass once a month. Check hours, seasonal changes, staff, prices, and whether the photos still look like the business today. It's the cheapest, highest-return update you'll ever make, and most owners skip it for years. Your contact page in particular is worth a hard look, since that's where a wrong detail turns a ready buyer away.

How do you know when a page needs refreshing?

Let it tell you. Refresh a page when it starts sliding, not when the calendar hits a date. This is the difference between maintenance that works and busywork that doesn't: the trigger is a number going the wrong way, not a reminder in your task manager.

Here's the part owners miss. Content doesn't hold its traffic forever. Animalz measured an average organic traffic decay of about 1.21% a week on content that's left alone, which sounds tiny until you compound it. A page pulling 1,000 visits a month drifts toward 530 in a year if nobody touches it (Animalz). The leak is slow enough that you never notice it in a given week, which is exactly why it works its way through your best pages unseen.

So the trigger is your own data. Watch Google Search Console for pages whose average position or clicks are sliding, and watch your analytics for pages losing conversions. When a page that matters starts dropping, that's your signal to refresh it, and the sooner you catch it the smaller the job. If you aren't sure what to watch, our guide on how to tell if your SEO is working covers the numbers that actually matter.

A real refresh isn't a date change. It's updating the data and examples, adding the sections searchers now expect, tightening the intro so it answers faster, fixing broken or missing internal links, and then updating the date because you genuinely changed the page. Animalz found quarterly refreshes outperform annual ones by a wide margin, so catching decline early beats an annual spring clean of everything at once.

Should you update old pages or write new ones?

Update the winners first. It's usually the higher-return move, and the math isn't close. Most of your traffic and leads already come from a small number of existing pages, so improving one of those compounds on authority you already have instead of starting a new page from zero.

HubSpot put real numbers on this. When they analyzed their own blog, 76% of monthly views and 92% of monthly leads came from old posts, not new ones. So they started deliberately updating those old posts, and lifted their monthly organic views by an average of 106% while more than doubling the leads those posts generated (HubSpot). Orbit Media sees the same pattern across its annual survey: bloggers who update old content are about twice as likely to report strong results (Orbit Media).

A new page starts at zero. It has no history, no links, and no track record with Google, so it takes months to rank if it ranks at all. An old winner has all of that already, which is why a sharp refresh often beats a brand-new post that no one has found yet.

That doesn't mean stop publishing. It means publish for a reason. Write a new page when there's a real buyer question your site doesn't answer yet, not to hit a number on a content calendar. A post should exist because it answers that question better than the alternatives. If you want a steady, sustainable pace of new content without the burnout, that's exactly what our Search Roadmap is built for. It decides what to publish from your own search data instead of a calendar, then writes it. This piece on whether your local business should have a blog covers when new content is worth it.

What update schedule should each page actually follow?

Match the cadence to the page's job. A pricing page and an evergreen how-to aren't on the same clock, and treating them the same is how owners either neglect the important pages or exhaust themselves on the ones that don't need it. Here's the schedule I give owners.

Read down that table and you'll notice it is really two systems running at once. Facts run on a fixed schedule because they can't be allowed to go wrong. Rankings run on evidence, so you refresh a page when its numbers slip, whenever that happens. New content runs on demand, at a pace you can hold for a year without hating it. None of that is "post weekly," and none of it is "set it and forget it." For the full routine, our guide on website maintenance for a small business lays out the recurring checklist.

Frequently asked questions

Your website is inventory. Restock what sells.

Stop treating your site like a monument you unveil once, or a treadmill you have to run forever. It's inventory. Some items sell every day and need restocking. Some sit on the shelf for a year and that's fine, because they still bring the right person in when they search.

So check what's selling, fix what's wrong before it costs you a customer, refresh what's slipping while the job is still small, and add new only when it earns a spot. It isn't glamorous work, and it beats both extremes handily. If you want a clear read on which of your pages are quietly slipping and which are worth the refresh, start with the free audit and we'll show you where to spend the effort first.