I wrote couple of answers about this awhile back which may be of interest to you:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fs8qr/how_much_more_advanced_was_a_british/

and

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2709jm/how_would_a_britishhms_frigate_built_in_1715/

The very simple answer to your question is that large ships became larger, and carried heavier guns, over that time period, but there were a variety of other technological changes. I'm going to quote from the second answer above extensively, because it gets to the meat of your question:

During the civil wars of the 1640s, the parliamentary forces fought mostly with armored merchantmen and did not make much use of the "great ships" that Charles I had built. After the third civil war started in 1649, English shipping was attacked by fast cruisers from Dunkirk and other Channel ports. The Dunkirker ships were called "frigates," but were very different than what we think of as classic frigates of the Age of Sail; they were very small, lightly built, with very minimal armament and large crews. They were designed essentially for commerce raiding and high-speed operations against weak targets.

The word, though, became applied to bigger ships that the English navy would build, and also became a verb (in French, "to frigate" meant to build long, low ships) and an adjective, so it loses a bit of descriptive meaning. In any case, in 1650 the English navy launched the Speaker, a two-gundeck ship originally built to carry 44 long guns and carrying 60 by 1655. The Speaker is arguably the ancestor of the two-decked ship through the 1750s.

The reason why I'm bringing this all up is that the shift from the shorter, handier ships of the Elizabethan era to these longer, lower ships with broadside armament meant a change in tactics, where ships would no longer approach and fire off all their guns before withdrawing, but would rather lie in line of battle and batter each other.

The drawback of building ships to this model is that the second (and in some cases, third) gundeck led the English to over-arm the ships, which made them top-heavy. This led to problems of the lower gundecks being submerged in any kind of weather, and also the ship heeling and not being stiff enough to get the full driving force out of its sails. New ships were sometimes "girdled" with extra planking at the waterline in an effort to increase buoyancy; this did not improve sailing qualities. These defects were serious in the North Sea and worse in the Atlantic, and were compound when Parliament became involved in ship design and voted in the 1690s money to build ships to an (unrealistic) specified tonnage and gun rating (80 guns at only 1,100 tons), which proved to be inadequate in practice.

...

Now, technical improvements: u/unclebourbon mentioned coppering. Copper sheathing replaced earlier experiments with lead sheathing that had been conducted starting in the 1670s. (Edit: Copper sheathing did not immediately replace lead sheathing, it was not until 1781 that the entire fleet was coppered.) These failed not because of anything wrong with the premise, but because of electrolytic corrosion, which was not underwood at the time (the lead and iron parts of the ship combined with seawater to form a slight current which ate away at the iron).

A more obvious technical development of the 1690s was the invention of the steering wheel, which replaced the whipstaff attached to the ship's tiller. It doubled the potential range of movement of the rudder and allowed for many more men to combine their efforts to steer a ship in heavy weather.

Now, to get to the real meat of your question, which is frigate design between 1715 and 1780: it's complicated. I'm going to have to gently disagree with u/on1879 on one point: the British did not copy the Hebe (or other ships); even if they had wanted to build exact copies of ships or even if shipwrights told their superiors they had built exact copies, British ships were always more heavily timbered than French ships and fastened with treenails, not iron nails. There were also substantial internal differences due to the British preference for increased stowage, and the decks/hatchways/magazines/etc. would have been changed to meet those needs. It's much more correct to say that British "true frigate" design was influenced by the capture of the French Medee in 1744, but that British frigates were built with British needs in mind. (The Medee was lightly built, like many French ships, and was not bought into service.) The shipwrights of the 1740s were comparing French designs with older British designs, such as the yacht Royal Caroline, and were building cruisers with 11-12 gun ports per side. These were initially built with a 22-24 gun battery of 9-pounders, and became larger over time, with 28-gun 9-pounder frigates being replaced by 32-gun 12-pounder frigates and the very large 36-38 gun 18-pounder frigates by the 1770s, in time for the first American wars.

To put those changes in perspective, it's useful to examine the change in armament of the ships. A 22-gun 9-pounder frigate would throw a broadside weighing 99 lbs (11 guns/side * 9 pound balls). The 32-gun 12-pounders would throw almost twice as much iron per broadside (192 lbs), while the 38-gun 18-pounder would throw 342 lb at once. All these ships were built with the idea in mind that they would be fast, weatherly and carry enough stores for a long cruise.

tl;dr: Wheels replace tillers, guns become heavier, ships become larger, copper sheathing is in wide use

To add to the question, isn't it quite true that this isn't the case? Surely a 2000 ship would destroy a 1900 ship, and a 1900 ship a 1800 ship, but before those two centuries wasn't the growth of naval power much more gradual? Clearly an armada from 1800 would win against one from 1600, but it wouldn't being as crushingly sure as the earlier examples