Does updating my website more often help it rank higher on Google?

Not by itself, and not as a trick. Google has said freshness is one of many signals it can weigh, mostly for topics where recency genuinely matters - it will not rescue a thin page or outrank a well-established competitor just because you edited a sentence this morning. What updating reliably does is keep the page accurate, which affects whether a visitor who finds you actually trusts you enough to call - a more direct and more controllable win than chasing a ranking signal.

What happens if I never update my website?

Nothing happens all at once - that's exactly the problem. The hours drift out of sync with a schedule you changed last spring, the service list stops matching what you actually do today, the photos are from a truck you no longer own. None of it looks broken, so nobody tells you. A visitor just quietly notices the mismatch, assumes the business behind it is as inattentive as the page, and calls the next name on the list instead.

How does RunCabin make it easy to keep a website updated?

You change it by asking - no login, no page builder, no support ticket. Tell RunCabin's AI assistant 'change our Saturday hours to 8 to 2' or 'add the new deck job to the gallery,' and it reads the live page, makes the edit, and publishes it back to the same address. Starting at $499 to build, then $39.99 a month for hosting, with no long contract.

RunCabin Blog · Getting found

How often should I update my website?

Q: How often should I update my website?

Two different rhythms, not one. Run a quick accuracy check roughly once a month - hours, prices, phone number, and service list - to catch anything that quietly went stale. Separately, make a real update the moment something actually changes in the business: a new price, a new service, a finished job worth showing, a new review. The second kind matters more than the first, and it should happen the same week the change happens, not get batched into a quarterly to-do list.

October 22, 2026 · 8 min read

Short answer: on two different clocks, not one. Run a quick accuracy check roughly once a month - hours, prices, phone number, the service list. Separately, make a real update the moment anything actually changes in the business - a new price, a finished job, a review worth showing off. The second kind is the one that matters, and it should happen the same week the change happens in real life, not whenever you next get around to the website.

Nobody plans to let their website go stale. It happens one skipped edit at a time - a price that changed in March and never made it to the site, a phone number that got dropped when you switched carriers, a photo of a truck you sold two trucks ago. None of it looks broken. That's exactly why it is so easy to leave alone, and exactly why it quietly costs jobs.

"How often" is really two different questions

People ask this expecting a single number - monthly, quarterly, once a year - but a website isn't one thing that needs refreshing on a schedule. It's a mix of facts that change on their own timelines and facts that should basically never be wrong. Splitting those two apart is the whole trick.

The accuracy pass. A routine check that nothing has quietly drifted out of date, even though nothing prompted you to look.
The event-driven update. A specific thing happened in the business, and the website needs to say so.

Treat them differently and the whole question gets easier. The accuracy pass can live on a calendar reminder. The event-driven update can't - it has to happen close to the event, or it stops being useful.

The accuracy pass: what to check about once a month

This takes ten minutes if you do it from your own phone, pretending to be a customer who has never called you before. Look for:

Hours, including holiday hours. The single most common mismatch - a schedule changed for the season or for staffing, and the website is still running the old one. We've written more on keeping holiday hours current specifically, because this one has its own seasonal spike.
Prices, or whatever you say about them. If you list a starting price, is it still the price you'd actually quote today? If you say "prices subject to change," is that line still doing its job, or did a real increase happen without the site catching up?
Phone number and contact form. Especially after switching carriers, adding a call-tracking number, or changing who answers. A dead or wrong number on your own website is the single most expensive typo a local business can have.
The service list. Does it match what you're actually taking calls for this month? A landscaper's site still listing spring cleanups in November is telling a searcher the wrong thing at the wrong moment.
Anything marked "temporary." A holiday banner, a "we're currently closed for storm cleanup" notice, an "under construction" section - these have a way of becoming permanent by accident. If it's been up longer than the event that caused it, take it down.
The copyright year and any expired badges. Small, but it's the kind of detail a careful customer notices, and it signals nobody's been minding the site in a while.

None of this requires a redesign. It's a checklist, not a project - the point is to catch small drift before a customer catches it for you.

The event-driven update: what to change the moment it happens

This is the half that actually moves the needle, and it works best close to the event, not batched into the monthly pass:

A finished job worth showing. The best time to add a photo to your gallery is the day you finish the work, while the lighting is good and the memory is fresh - not three months later when you can't remember which job it was.
A new review. If a customer just left you a great one, it's worth more on your own site today than it will be buried on page three of your reviews in six months.
A price change. The moment your real prices move, your website's prices should move with them - a mismatch here is the fastest way to start a call on the wrong foot.
A new service, certification, or license renewal. If you added a service line or renewed a license, the site should reflect it before the next customer asks.
A seasonal turnover. If your trade runs on a calendar - mowing to leaf cleanup to snow removal - the swap should happen when the season actually turns, not weeks later. We cover this one at length in does a seasonal business need a website that changes with the season.

Does any of this actually help with Google?

Partly, and it's worth being precise about which part. Google has publicly described freshness as one signal among many it can weigh, and it matters most for topics where recency is genuinely part of the question - not for a plumber's hours page. Editing a sentence on your homepage every week will not out-rank an established competitor's well-built site, and nothing here should be read as a ranking trick.

What keeping the site accurate reliably does is more direct than a ranking boost: it keeps the page from giving a visitor a reason to doubt you right when they're deciding whether to call. A visitor who shows up and finds the wrong hours, an old price, or a dead phone number doesn't file a complaint - they just quietly go to the next search result. That's a conversion problem you can fix today, not a ranking problem you'd need months to confirm.

Why most small-business sites go stale anyway

Nobody sets out to neglect their website. It happens because most ways of having one make every single edit a small chore:

DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy) - you have to remember the login, find the right page in the editor, and hope the change doesn't break the layout on mobile. After a full day of actual paying work, that always loses to everything else on the list.
Managed home-services companies - the site is built and maintained by someone else's team, so a one-line hours change means opening a support ticket and waiting, same as a full redesign would.
A freelancer or agency - fine for the original build, but every future edit routes through another person's schedule and sometimes their invoice, which is a bad fit for something as small as a phone number fix.

None of that is a reason to skip the updates. It's the actual reason most sites skip them - the friction is higher than the fix deserves, so the fix just doesn't happen.

Where RunCabin fits

We built RunCabin's done-for-you websites to make the small edits actually small. You change the site by asking - "change our Saturday hours to 8 to 2," "add this week's deck job to the gallery," "update the quote to reflect our new pricing" - and the AI assistant reads the live page, makes the change, and publishes it back to the same address. There's no login to remember, no page builder to fight, and no ticket to wait on.

It starts at $499 to build, then $39.99 a month for hosting (or $479.88 a year), with no long contract. The monthly accuracy pass takes the same ten minutes it always would; the difference is that fixing anything it turns up takes a sentence, not an evening.

A website that's easy to keep current

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