Why the website needs to be redesigned? This question might be popping up in your mind. This is because the website conversion rate is not high as it should be. But what is conversion rate and how it is measured.
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Conversion rate is the percentage of number of user who is actually performing the desired action to the number of visitors on the site. It is governed by simple mathematical formula
For e.g. for any online retailer, a successful conversion may be termed as sale of the product whose has shown interest in it either by clicking the advertisements or by clicking the banner or may be newsletter subscription or posting a query about that product etc.
So, in order to increase the conversion rate designing the entire website might not be a bad idea, but while redesigning, it should be done treaded lightly as website redesigning only works if it is properly managed and driven by data.
Sometimes, the decision to redesign the website backfires i.e. if website redesign fails instead of getting higher conversion rate you might end up getting a lower conversion rate. Along with that the redesign is like a rework; you will have to go through the entire process once again which is time consuming and also increases the cost.
This kind of typical scenario happens when designing of the websites are driven on the basis of committee meetings or according to the highest paid person opinion. These redesigning changes though makes no difference to the performance but might improve some things and also some things might go worse as well.
There are various sites who have suffered losses on site traffic just because of redesigning for e.g. Diggs.com suffered a loss of more than 25% in the site traffic after redesigning in 2010. Another example for the same is Marks n Spencer which spent 2 years and an amount of more than 100m Euros but after the launch they suffered a loss of 8%.
Listening to the Customer, taking their opinions about the website designing might be a good idea but paying attention to the feasibility and future prospects of that idea should be done. Because people changes their opinions own radically and since redesigning involves money and time it serious consideration should be given to any thought before its implementation. One great example of this is Walmart who trimmed down the quantity of cluttered stores on the people’s opinion as result of which company suffered a whooping loss of 18.5 million dollars.
Instead of going for radical changes like Amazon did it they improved their layout after through testing as a result of which they knew what will be impact of the change.
Continuous optimization is the safer route because you would be aware what is working, what is not and what will be the effects of the change.
There are various scenarios in which radical and evolutionary approaches should be followed:
When radical design is better:
When technology gets out-dated
Designing of the site is to naïve
When the traffic on site is very low and conversion rate is low.
When Evolutionary Design is better:
No major issues and design is good enough.
When the returning visitor is more for the previous design.
Before redesigning, full analysis should be done on the website. Keeping the parts and functionality that are working properly or the designs which have high volume of returning users. Keeping the same layout, just changing the look and feel of the page and improving parameters may improve the performance of the page.
Since radical designs are risky, mostly they should be avoided generally. But before redesigning full website analysis should be done and focus should more on improving just look and feel of the page. Get in touch with our Fullestop blogs.
