The alternative to website redesigns is to start with a website that performs from day one and make constant, gradual improvements to get better results every year.
So, instead of completely redesigning your website every 2-5 years, you make smaller changes more often – eg: every month or quarter.
This solves all of the problems with website redesigns:
- It’s cheaper: Constant improvements list to data cost less to implement and they spread the expense over time – no more horrendous bills every few years.
- It’s less complicated: Smaller changes are faster to implement and significantly reduce the risk of bugs and other technical issues.
- Debugging: If anything does go wrong with a small change, it’s easy to identify the issue and fix it quickly.
- Testing: By making smaller changes, you can run accurate tests to know exactly what impact they make.
- Constant improvement: Instead of website performance dropping every year, you can constantly improve results.
- Less disruption: Smaller changes mean returning visitors are never caught out by complete redesigns.
- Goal-driven: You can set specific goals for every design change (eg: increase conversion rates) and only implement changes that get the results you need.
- Informative: Smaller changes produce clear outcomes, which you can analyse and use to inform future design choices.
- Data-driven: This data-driven approach to design optimisation means you’re making calculated, high-impact decisions – no more guesswork.
- Low stakes: Even when you’re testing high-impact changes, you’re only testing one change at a time – so you’re never gambling everything on a complete redesign.
Adopting a strategy of continual improvement lifts you out of the dead-end cycle of website redesigns. It replaces overhauls with smaller, data-driven changes that allow you to measure success with accuracy.
You spend less on more, high-impact changes and build a long-term strategy of informed decisions that help you make increasingly better design choices over time – based on data, not guesswork.
Examples: Website redesigns vs continual improvements
To put this all into context, let’s increase revenue with upselling and cross-selling on shopify look at a couple of examples of major brands taking two different approaches to web design and optimisation. First, we’ve M&S taking the website redesign path and, then, Amazon adopting the tactic of continual improvements.
M&S redesign plunged sales by -8.1%
In 2014, British retailer Marks & american samoa business directory Spencer redesigned its entire website to the princely sum of £150 million. The bill itself wasn’t the problem, though. As many companies experience when they overhaul their websites, performance tanked when they launched the new version in February 2014.
In the first three months after launch, M&S online sales fell by 8.1% with negative reviews flooding in from disgruntled customers.