How to Measure Success of a Website Redesign

So you have worked on your website redesign. The website looks better than before and now you need to know if it meets the primary redesign objectives which, in a nutshell, refer to improvement in site-wide performance.

However, gathering new website data post-redesign is bound to take anywhere from few weeks to a couple of months. But you can still measure your redesign’s success along the way. Marketers gather historic data of important metrics and compare them with new, incoming figures. Analyzing these metrics allows continuous testing of website redesign and refining it for optimal user behavior.

In this blog, we have compiled different methods to measure your redesign’s success when you start collecting data from the redesigned website. Let’s discuss them in detail:

1. Analyzing improvement in Conversion Rate — the chief metric to compare

Making a website more beautiful than before is worth little significance if it doesn’t improve the metric of the most importance: Conversion Rate. An increase in the conversion rate is the principal objective of any website redesign. And ideally, that should be the case for anybody intending to grow their online business. But what is a conversion for your particular business?

Conversions may have different meanings for different websites. For eCommerce stores, it represents sale of a product and for a service-based website, it may be closing a deal with a prospect client. Likewise, it may be getting a new attendee for your webinar if your website is focused around generating leads. Put simply, a conversion is any action that is crucial for your business, whether that’s closing a sale, getting email subscribers, having visitors contact you or having them sign up for a membership program.

Thus, it literally pays to have your website redesign optimized around desired conversions. You can start comparing immediate results although they are often less reliable if your website doesn’t get a constant inflow of visitors. Experts suggest to wait till 3 months for data to mature for a more robust comparison and polish the redesign as necessary.

2. Looking into other important metrics to measure engagement-specific improvements

While conversion is your website’s ultimate goal, there are engagement metrics that aid in that goal’s achievement when optimized. These KPIs are noticeable before there’s a change in conversions, and thus serve as prime indicators to measure success of website redesign.

Think of better page engagement as more people visiting your shop and finding your offering interesting. Furthermore, it means more people recognize your brand and view it in a better light because of a more compelling redesign. That’s why achieving these KPIs is so important to thrive in the long haul with effective brand building.

Here are metrics that should go up after a website redesign:

1. Number of sessions for every user
2. Pages per session
3. Organic traffic to the website
4. Average page time
5. Average session duration

Similarly, there are metrics that should go down, namely Bounce Rate and Page Load Time, which can negatively impact engagement. These can be reduced by working on page load speed using tools like Google’s page speed tester, Image optimizers and HTML compressors. Doing this can improve Google search ranking, as search bots account for page load speed, and result in increased organic traffic. Thus, the success of your website redesign also depends on page load speed across different device types.

Remember, better engagement would lead to more conversions on your website. Make sure you have gathered 1 to 2 month’s data of these metrics after the redesign. You can then optimize the engagement accordingly if there’s a scope.

3. Ensure using the right metric to determine success of each webpage

Every webpage in your website serves a different purpose and so their success should be measured how well they are performing their function after the redesign. Your product pages should be judged on conversions, some pages on CTA clicks, and navigation pages by the percentage of users passing through them in the funnel.

You can classify pages in different groups and evaluate their success against their purpose. This can be a tedious task but it helps ensure that every cog in the conversion process has been tweaked to its best ability.

4. Measuring changes in the buying journey by evaluating conversion funnel

A visitor may go through different stages of a funnel before making a purchase decision. This involves navigating the website, engaging with the webpage, and interacting on it. Therefore, a website redesign should be aimed at effectively pushing the buyer through the funnel at every step. This can be done by mapping out buyer journey — exactly how you want your would-be customers to act on your website — and tracking clicks as they move to next stage in the funnel.

A good example of this is monitoring the number of clicks from the product page to the cart page, and from cart page to the checkout initiation page. Only tracking conversions and page engagement doesn’t provide this essential data. You can compare the data of a previous and updated website to measure the success of redesign and keep adjusting the page to the buyer. As a result, lesser visitors will result in a bounce which in turn will increase conversions.

5. Using advanced tools like heat maps to further allow continuous testing

Tools like LuckyOrange and HotJar provide heat maps of buyer journey on the website. They track the navigations and interactions on a webpage and record videos for you to clearly understand where the visitors are dropping off.

For instance, let’s say you want visitors to scroll down to the bottom of the homepage and fill a form. However, you find 80% of them bounce from a particular point on the homepage. This clearly depicts where the problem might lie, and what change you can make in the redesigned section to convert better.

If you’d like, there are other advanced analytics tools that expert suggest. These include VWO, Optimizely, Google Analytics, Kissmetrics amongst many others.

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Confused about whether your website redesign has been successful or not? We would be happy to offer a free consultation, where we explain the roadmap you can adopt to create an optimal website for your business.