The honest answer is a schedule, not a frequency: some things the moment they change, some things monthly, some things once a year — and none of it is the constant-tinkering treadmill you've been made to feel guilty about skipping. Here's the schedule, and why a stale site quietly costs more than most owners think.
Hours, prices, services you've added or dropped, phone number, staff changes the public sees — these update the day they change, everywhere at once: website, Google profile, listings. Wrong facts are the most expensive staleness there is: a customer who drives to a closed shop, a caller quoted a price two raises old, an AI assistant confidently repeating your 2023 menu — because machines re-serve what your pages state, right or wrong. This category is non-negotiable and takes minutes; it just needs to be someone's actual job.
Fresh photos of recent work, the newest reviews or testimonials, this season's availability — the signals that tell both visitors and machines the business is alive. A site whose newest project is three years old reads as a business whose best days were. This isn't blogging: it's ten minutes of “here's what we did recently.” For visual trades it's the single highest-return update there is, because your recent work is the exact evidence a comparing customer is looking for.
Once a year, read your own site like a stranger: Does the homepage still describe what you actually sell? Do pages load fast on a phone? Do links work? Does every claim still hold — the team photo, the “family owned since,” the service area? Is anything embarrassing on the phone screen where most visitors now are? This annual hour is what separates “maintained” from the slow rot that ends in a $10,000 emergency rebuild. And the freshness that actually matters to search engines isn't cosmetic churn — Google's Search Essentials rewards pages that are accurate, useful, and readable, not pages that were touched recently. Update when reality changes, and make the site tell the truth.
Accuracy and usefulness help; cosmetic churn doesn't. Search engines reward pages that answer real questions correctly — so update when facts change, add pages when you can answer new questions, and skip the ritual weekly tweak that changes nothing a searcher cares about.
Read it like a stranger on a phone: wrong hours or prices anywhere, newest photo years old, services you no longer offer, slow load, anything that makes you wince. If a first-time visitor would doubt the business is current, the site is costing you quietly.
Updating is keeping facts, proof, and content true — ongoing and cheap. A redesign rebuilds structure and look — occasional and priced accordingly. Most sites die of skipped updates, not old design; keep the facts true and redesigns get further apart.
One named person — owner, staffer, or a maintenance arrangement — with the job defined: facts same-day, proof monthly, the annual review on the calendar. “Whoever remembers” is how sites end up quoting 2022 prices in 2026.