Lab websites tend to drift into one of two states: never touched since the initial build, gradually looking more dated every year, or redesigned reflexively every time someone gets frustrated with it, which usually means every year or two. Neither is really about the website’s actual condition. A better way to decide is a short list of concrete signs, rather than a vague sense that the site “looks old.”
The mobile experience is the clearest signal
A site that’s hard to navigate on a phone — text too small, navigation that doesn’t collapse properly, images that break the layout — is a strong sign a redesign is overdue, not just an update. Most visitors to a lab site now arrive on a phone, often from a social media link, and a broken mobile experience turns that visit into a bounce before the visitor sees anything else. This is different from most content issues, which can be patched incrementally; a mobile-hostile layout usually needs structural changes.
If updates have become genuinely hard to make, that’s structural, not cosmetic
The test here isn’t how the site looks, it’s how much friction there is in doing the routine things: adding a new member, updating a publication list, swapping a photo. If every small update requires digging through unfamiliar code or fighting a platform that was never quite set up right, that’s a sign the underlying structure is the problem, not just the visual design sitting on top of it. A site that’s easy to maintain but visually a bit dated is a much smaller problem than one that’s hard to touch at all.
A visually current site that’s just missing content doesn’t need a redesign
It’s easy to look at a site with stale content — an old member list, a publications page missing the last two years — and conclude the whole thing needs rebuilding. Usually it just needs the update it should have been getting regularly. Confusing an update problem for a redesign problem leads to expensive, time-consuming projects that solve something other than what was actually wrong.
Don’t start a redesign right before a grant deadline
A full redesign is a multi-week project with real risk of something breaking at an inconvenient moment — exactly the wrong timing right before a renewal deadline when the site needs to look reliable, not be mid-rebuild. A grant-season checklist pass covers what actually matters in that window, and it’s a much safer use of the time available than starting structural work with a hard deadline looming.
Decide who’s doing it before deciding to do it
A redesign is a real project, and it’s worth being honest about who has the time and skill to execute it well before committing to the idea. A lab member with genuine design sense and some spare time can do a good job; a grad student assigned the task on top of an already full plate usually produces something that takes months and still doesn’t look finished. A freelancer or a service built specifically for this kind of site is often the faster, less painful path once it’s clear nobody in the lab has the bandwidth to own it properly.
The honest cadence is longer than most labs assume
Between real redesigns, most labs are better served by steady, smaller updates — new content added as it happens, a periodic look at what the analytics are actually showing, the occasional fix to something that’s started to feel clunky. Done consistently, that rhythm can stretch the gap between full redesigns to four to six years without the site ever feeling embarrassingly out of date in the meantime.
Common questions
How often should a lab website be fully redesigned, as opposed to just updated?
Roughly every four to six years for most labs, assuming regular smaller updates happen in between. A site that's never been touched structurally in a decade usually needs a redesign; a site redesigned every year is probably solving the wrong problem with the wrong tool.
What's the difference between needing an update and needing a redesign?
An update is swapping in new publications, new photos, current members — routine maintenance that should happen continuously. A redesign is a structural change: new navigation, a new visual system, a rebuilt information architecture. Most labs that feel their site is 'outdated' actually just need updates, not a redesign.
Is a redesign a good use of time right before a grant renewal?
Usually not a full redesign — that's a multi-week project with real risk of things breaking under deadline pressure. A grant renewal is a better moment for a focused update pass, covered in more detail in a related checklist, than for starting a structural rebuild.
Who should actually do the redesign — a lab member, a hired designer, or a service?
It depends on how much design and development time the lab has to spare. A lab member with real design sense can do it if they have the bandwidth; otherwise, a freelancer or a service built for this kind of project is usually faster and produces a more polished result than a stretched grad student's side project.