Before You Redesign Your Website, Do This… Video Transcription:
Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. Today I would like to share something with you which I have come across many times. It’s very useful to know before you pay for an expensive redesign of your site.
The job of most websites are to provide an enquiry or a sale, that’s their purpose. But most people like to design a site based on its physical appearance alone. So when considering a redesign, the only question that is asked is do I like the way it looks?
If the answer is no, then the conclusion is it’s time to change the site. But if its main purpose is to get enquires or sales for you. Then a better question I would argue is how good is it, at providing enquiries or sales? Or how well is it doing?
If it’s the case that you have an ugly site but the conversion rate is 20%. I would say change absolutely nothing. If you have the best looking site ever but it converts at 0.1%, it’s most likely time for a change.
The point here is that before you redesign your site, check its conversion rate. This is useful for the previous example as if it’s performing very well, it’s not imperative to change it, you may not want to change it at all. But this is also useful because if you do decide to change it anyway. You have a before and after to examine.
For example, your old site converts at 5%. You redesign the whole thing and the new conversion rate is 2%, is the new site successful?
It is a little more complex than looking at the headline conversion rate as if you had that example, you may want to look into the sources of your traffic to see if they have all fallen, or if it’s just one media which has taken a dip. You also need to consider the timeframe you are looking at, but if all of a sudden after the new site goes up, you start getting more conversions than you were and you can say the metric (in this instance conversion rate) you use to measure that proves it, that is a very successful change.
The analogy which may be useful here is football, your the manager of the team and you say you want to make a substitution, and you need to choose who you will bring on and I ask you what the score is to try and find out more, not checking the conversion rate is like trying to make a substitution without knowing what the score of the game is. How can you make an informed decision without knowing?
In some cases, websites don’t have tracking like analytics setup in order to know this information. It’s free for Google.