You know that feeling when you go to share your website link, and you hesitate just a little? When something stops you from sending it confidently? That gut feeling you get telling you something’s off? That’s usually the first sign that it’s time to refresh your website.
Maybe the photos are from three years ago. Maybe the copy doesn’t sound like you anymore. Maybe the whole thing just feels a little… off. Not broken, not terrible – just not quite right for where your business is today.
Here’s the good news: a website refresh is not a website rebuild or redesign. You don’t need to start from scratch, hire someone, or block off two or more weeks in your calendar. A refresh is intentional, targeted work on the parts of your site that are holding you back – and it can make an enormous difference in how your site looks, how it performs, and how you feel about sending people there.
This guide walks you through every area worth looking at: your copy, your visuals, your layout and structure, and the technical basics that affect how your site loads and ranks. Work through it at your own pace – tackle everything in a weekend, or chip away at it one section at a time. Either approach works. The important thing is actually doing it.
Let’s get into it.
Table of Contents
- Before You Touch Anything: Do a Quick Audit First
- Part One: Refresh Your Copy and Messaging
- Part Two: Refresh Your Visual Design and Imagery
- Part Three: Refresh Your Layout and Page Structure
- Part Four: Refresh Your Technical Basics
- Your Website Refresh Checklist
- One More Thing Before You Go on How to Refresh Your Website
Before You Touch Anything: Do a Quick Audit First
The most common mistake people make when refreshing their website is jumping straight into making changes without first understanding what actually needs to change. You end up tweaking things that are fine and missing the things that are genuinely holding you back.
Before you start, spend 20-30 minutes walking through your own website like a visitor would. Click through every page. Read the copy out loud. Look at every image. Check the navigation. And ask yourself these questions honestly:
- Is it immediately clear on the homepage what I do and who it is for?
- Does the copy sound like me, right now, or like a version of me from two or three years ago?
- Do the photos represent my work, my brand, and my current aesthetic?
- Can someone find what they’re looking for in under three clicks?
- Does the site load quickly on my phone?
- Is there a clear, obvious next step on every page?
Make note of everything that makes you hesitate or feel awkward. Those are your priorities. Not every section of this guide will apply to your situation equally – focus your energy on the areas where your audit reveals the most friction.
If you feel stuck about the audit or want external eyes on it, we offer brand and website audits. And the above is only a few things we cover inside. Check out our Brand and Website Audit service to find out how we can help you out.
Part One: Refresh Your Copy and Messaging
Copy and verbiage are the most underestimated parts of a website refresh. Most people look at their site and think “it needs new photos” or “it needs a new design,” but the truth is that weak, outdated, or generic copy does more damage to how your website performs than almost anything visual. Your words are what convince someone to stay, to trust you, and to take action. If your copy isn’t working, nothing else can fully compensate for it.
Start with your homepage headline
Your homepage headline is the very first line someone reads when they land on your site. Your homepage headline has one job: tell them clearly what you do and for whom. It doesn’t need to be poetic. It needs to be clear and actionable. If someone can’t understand what you offer within five seconds of landing on your homepage, they leave.
A simple formula that works: what you do + who you do it for + the outcome they get. Something like “Elementor website templates for photographers who want to look professional without the professional price tag.” Clear, specific, and immediately relevant to the right person.
Rewrite your about page in your current voice
About pages go stale faster than any other page on a website, because your business and voice evolve, but the page rarely gets updated to match. Read yours out loud right now.
- Does it sound like you?
- Does it reflect what you actually do today and who you currently serve?
- Does it tell a story or just list your credentials?
The best and effective about page is written in first person, feel genuinely personal, and make the reader feel seen rather than just informed. They also have a clear call to action at the bottom, not just a bio that stops abruptly. If yours has been sitting untouched for a year or more, it’s worth a full rewrite. Check our article on How to create an effective about page for insights and guidance.
Update your services copy to reflect what you actually offer
This one poses a challenge for a lot of people. Services pages often describe what a business offered when the site was first built, not what it offers today. If your packages have changed, your pricing has shifted, or your process has evolved, your services page needs to keep up. Go through every offering listed and make sure it’s current, accurate, and still something you actually want to be selling.
Also, check that each service is written from the client’s perspective, not yours. Instead of listing what the package includes, lead with what the client gets and how their situation changes because of it. Features tell, benefits sell. It’s always the outcome that sells, nothing else.
Add or update social proof throughout
Testimonials, client results, portfolio work, and press mentions are all trust signals that make a real difference to a first-time visitor who doesn’t know you yet. If you haven’t updated your testimonials in a while, now is the time to reach out to recent clients and ask for a fresh one. If your portfolio hasn’t been updated to show your current work and aesthetic, that’s a gap worth closing.
Place social proof close to your calls to action, not just on a dedicated testimonials page. The closer a testimonial appears to the moment someone is deciding whether to take action, the more effective it usually is.
Audit every call to action on every page
Every single page on your website should have a clear, specific next step. Not just a contact page buried in the navigation, but an actual prompt telling the visitor what to do next and why. Go through every page and ask: what do I want someone to do when they finish reading this? Then make sure that the action is clearly available, visually prominent, and written in specific language. “Book a discovery call” converts better than “Contact me.” “Browse the templates” converts better than “Shop now.” Specific beats generic, every time.
Part Two: Refresh Your Visual Design and Imagery
Visuals are usually the most obvious thing that dates a website. Photos from three years ago, a font pairing that felt current in 2021, a color palette that no longer matches where your brand has gone — these things are more noticeable to your visitors than you might realize, even when they can’t articulate exactly what feels off.
Replace outdated or low-quality photography
Photography is the single biggest visual upgrade you can make to a website. Old, pixelated, poorly lit, or generic stock photos make your entire site feel dated – even if everything else is well-designed. Fresh, high-quality imagery that actually represents your brand and your work changes everything.
If a professional brand photoshoot isn’t in the budget right now, that’s completely fine. Curated stock photo libraries like Unsplash and Pexels have genuinely beautiful free options. Whatever you use, make sure every photo on your site feels consistent in tone, lighting, and style. A visual mismatch between pages is one of the things that makes a site feel unpolished, even when the design itself is solid.
Revisit your homepage hero image and headline together
Your hero section is the first thing every visitor sees. It sets the tone for the entire site. The image and the headline need to work together as a unit, not just sit next to each other. The image should support the message, and the message should be immediately clear without requiring any scrolling.
If your hero image is a generic landscape or an abstract graphic that has nothing to do with what you offer, replace it. Your hero should either show your work, show you (for personal brands), or create an immediate emotional atmosphere that’s consistent with your brand’s identity.
Check your typography for consistency
Fonts date a website almost as quickly as photography does. If you’re still using an overly decorative script font that was everywhere in 2019, or a body font that feels heavy and hard to read, a typography update can make your site feel significantly more current without touching your brand colors or layout at all.
A clean, modern serif paired with a simple sans-serif for body text is a combination that works for almost every creative brand and holds up well over time. What you’re looking for is a pairing that feels intentional, readable at every size, and consistent across every page of your site. If you’re not sure where to start, Google Fonts has a huge library of free options, and many are specifically designed to pair well together.
Audit your color palette for consistency
Inconsistent color usage is one of the most common issues on websites that have been updated piecemeal over time. A button that’s one shade of your brand color here, a slightly different shade there, a heading in a color that doesn’t match anything else – these inconsistencies signal a lack of attention to detail, even if nobody can specifically identify them.
Go through your site and make sure your brand colors are applied consistently across every page. If your palette has, over time, evolved and you’re working with three or four slightly different versions of the same color, now is the time to standardize. Pick your hex codes, document them, and apply them consistently everywhere.
Part Three: Refresh Your Layout and Page Structure
Layout problems are often invisible to the person who built the site because they know how everything is organized. But to a first-time visitor, a confusing structure or cluttered layout creates friction that leads to bouncing (leaving) without taking any action. This section is about making your site easier to navigate and more intentional in how it guides people toward what you want them to do.
Simplify your navigation
If your navigation menu has more than five or six items, it’s doing too much. Every item in your navigation is a decision your visitor has to make, and the more decisions you force on someone, the less likely they are to make any of them. Go through your navigation and ask honestly: does this page need to be here, at the top level, visible on every single page of my site?
Move less critical pages to your footer. Group related pages under a single dropdown if necessary. And make sure the pages that are in your navigation are named clearly and descriptively — not creatively. “Work With Me” is clearer than “Collaborate,” and “Photography Templates” is clearer than “The Shop.” Clarity beats cleverness in navigation, always.
Map the journey from landing to conversion
Pick your most important conversion goal (a shop purchase, a booking, an email sign-up) and trace the path a visitor would need to take to get there, starting from your homepage. How many clicks does it take? How many times do they have to go looking for information before they feel ready to act? Every unnecessary step in that path is a place where someone can get lost or lose momentum.
Ideally, a visitor should be able to understand what you offer, feel confident you’re the right fit, and take action in three clicks or fewer. If your current structure requires more than that, look for ways to surface key information earlier – on the homepage, in the navigation, or in a well-placed sidebar or callout section.
Declutter pages that have grown too long or too crowded
Pages that have been updated incrementally over time tend to accumulate content until they become overwhelming. Sections get added without old sections being removed. Copy gets expanded without anything getting cut. The result is a page that exhausts visitors before they reach the most important parts.
Go through your longest pages and be ruthless about what actually needs to be there. If a section isn’t directly helping someone understand your offer, trust you, or decide to take action, ask whether it needs to exist at that point in the page. White space is not wasted space – it gives the eye breathing space, somewhere to rest, and makes the content that remains feel more considered and easier to digest and absorb.
Consider a new template if the foundation itself needs work
Sometimes you get to the layout section of a refresh and realize the problem isn’t any one element — it’s the foundation. The template or theme you’re working with has structural limitations that no amount of copy or imagery updates can fully fix. The sections don’t flow well. The page structure doesn’t match how your business actually works. The design language feels dated in a way that individual tweaks can’t resolve.
If that’s where you land, a new Elementor template is often the most efficient solution — faster than a full custom redesign, far less expensive, and specifically designed to give you a strong structural foundation to build on. The templates we design at the Flying Muse are built for exactly this situation: a photographer or creative entrepreneur who knows what they want their site to do and needs a clean, well-structured starting point to work from. [link to shop]
Part Four: Refresh Your Technical Basics
Technical issues are the silent killers of website performance. A site can look beautiful and have great copy, but if it loads slowly, breaks on mobile, or has dead links sending visitors nowhere, it’s actively working against you. This section covers the technical basics that are worth checking and fixing during any website refresh.
Test your site speed and fix what’s slowing it down
Page speed directly affects both user experience and your Google rankings. Studies consistently show that a significant portion of visitors will leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load – and on mobile, that threshold is even lower. Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights (free, at pagespeed.web.dev) and look at what it flags.
The most common culprit by far is unoptimized images. Large image files that haven’t been compressed before uploading can add seconds to your load time without any visible quality benefit. If you haven’t compressed the images on your site, tools like TinyPNG or ShortPixel can reduce file sizes dramatically (sometimes by 70-80%) with no noticeable impact on how the images look. On WordPress with Elementor, a plugin like Smush or ShortPixel can handle this automatically for everything in your Media Library.
Pro Tip: Test if the plugin slows your website. If it does, you can handle compression off-site and upload only compressed images.
Check every page on mobile
Pull up every page on your phone and actually look at it. Not the desktop version – the mobile version, on your actual device. Check that text is readable without zooming, that buttons are large enough to tap comfortably, that images aren’t cropped in awkward ways, and that the navigation works cleanly on a small screen. This is especially important if you’ve made any recent changes to your site, because mobile and desktop layouts don’t always update in sync when you’re working in a page builder.
Over 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices for most creative businesses. If your mobile experience is poor, the majority of your visitors are having a poor experience. This one is non-negotiable.
Find and fix broken links
Broken links (links that lead to a 404 error page or a page that no longer exists) are a frustrating experience for visitors and a signal to Google that your site isn’t well maintained. They accumulate over time as pages get renamed, content gets deleted, or external sites you’ve linked to change their URL structure.
The Broken Link Checker Chrome extension will scan your site and surface any broken links quickly. On WordPress, the Broken Link Checker plugin does the same thing automatically in the background. Once you have a list, either update the links to point to the correct destination or remove them if they’re no longer relevant.
Update your SEO basics on key pages
You don’t need to overhaul your entire SEO strategy during a refresh, but it’s worth checking a few fundamentals on your most important pages. Using Yoast SEO or Rank Math on WordPress, check that each key page has a unique meta title and meta description that accurately describes the page content and includes a relevant keyword naturally. If your meta descriptions are blank or were auto-generated years ago, updating them takes 10 minutes and can meaningfully improve your click-through rate from search results.
Also, check that every image on your site has alt text, which is a brief text description of what the image shows. Alt text helps Google understand your images and improves accessibility for visitors using screen readers. In WordPress, you can add or update alt text for any image directly in the Media Library.
Remove outdated content and pages
Old promotions, past events, discontinued services, outdated blog posts with wrong information, team pages featuring people who no longer work with you – any content that’s no longer accurate or relevant makes your site look less credible and harder to maintain. Go through every page and remove or update anything that isn’t current. If you’re retiring a page entirely, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the most relevant live page so any traffic or links pointing to it don’t land on a dead end.
Your Website Refresh Checklist
Use this as your working list. Not everything will apply to every site. Focus on what your audit identified as the biggest gaps.
Copy and Messaging
- Homepage headline is clear, specific, and speaks to the right audience
- The About page is current, personal, and ends with a clear call to action
- Services page reflects current offerings with client-focused copy
- Testimonials and portfolio are up to date and placed near calls to action
- Every page has a clear, specific call to action
Visual Design and Imagery
- All photography is current, high-quality, and consistent in style
- Hero section image and headline work together and are immediately compelling
- Typography is up to date, readable, and consistent across all pages
- Brand colors are consistent (same hex codes used throughout)
Layout and Structure
- Navigation has 5-6 items maximum and uses clear, descriptive page names
- Path from homepage to main conversion is 3 clicks or fewer
- Long pages have been edited for clarity, and unnecessary sections have been removed
- Template or theme structure still supports current business needs
Technical Basics
- PageSpeed Insights score checked and main issues addressed
- All images compressed before uploading (or retroactively via plugin)
- Every page was checked on mobile for readability, layout, and usability
- Broken links found and fixed or removed
- Meta titles and descriptions updated on key pages
- Alt text added to all images
- Outdated content removed and 301 redirects set up where needed
One More Thing Before You Go on How to Refresh Your Website
A refresh and a redesign are two very different things, and it’s worth knowing which one you actually need before you start. A refresh works when your brand is solid, your platform is serving you well, and it’s specific elements (copy, photos, layout tweaks, technical issues) that need updating. If you work through this guide and realize the problems run deeper than any of those things can fix, you might actually be looking at a redesign rather than a refresh.
I wrote a full guide on exactly how to make that call: When Should I Redesign My Website? It walks you through the specific signs that a refresh won’t provide and what the right next step looks like, depending on where your business is. [link to when should I redesign my website article]
And if you work through your refresh and realize the foundation itself (the template or theme your website is designed with) is a part of what’s holding you back, I’d love for you to take a look at the Elementor templates in our shop. Every one is designed from scratch for photographers and creative entrepreneurs, with the kind of structure and design intentionality that makes a real refresh actually stick. [link to shop]
Now close this tab, open your website, and start the audit. You’ve got this. Can’t wait to see what your site looks like on the other side!
~ Sandra
