Congratulations! You’ve put in the effort and completed the arduous task of redesigning your website. But, how do you know if it were as effective as you hoped it would be? While it’s true that traditional methods such as tracking sales conversions and visitor traffic can be useful metrics for evaluating the success of your site redesign, there are other metrics that can give you a more comprehensive understanding of its overall impact.
To help you assess the effectiveness of your redesign, here are five metrics that you should track:
User Engagement
User engagement metrics such as time spent on a site, pages per session, and bounce rate are important indicators of the success of your website redesign. If users are spending more time on your website and visiting more pages, it means that they are engaged with your content. A lower bounce rate indicates that visitors are finding what they’re looking for on your website and are more likely to stay longer.
Attentive reached out to Big Drop to redesign and redevelop its existing website. Big Drop set out to highlight the true value of Attentive’s enterprise-level platform and its unique selling proposition to prospects and clients. The website was built to be mobile responsive, and optimized for its content to both make information easily digestible and present content in a way that encouraged discovery, interest, evaluation, and conversion. This led to a 28% increase in engagement and an 11% increase in conversion.
Like children, it’s hard to pick a favorite measurement or have a top choice among these, but User Engagement may be the exception to the rule as it is really the baseline from which many other metrics follow. Poor engagement yields poor ranking which can yield poor traffic which yields poorer conversion rates (and, at this point, responsiveness is the least of your worries). If you choose one standard to measure success use the one that really informs the others and invest in the strategy to realize better, deeper levels of enthusiasm and action among your target audience.”
– James Weiss, Big Drop’s Senior Director
Search Engine Rankings
A website redesign can have a significant impact on search engine rankings. If the redesign is done correctly, it can result in higher search engine rankings, which can also lead to increased traffic and, therefore, conversions. It’s important to track your website’s search engine rankings before and after the redesign to determine its success. You can use tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs to do so. Check out our article on The Ultimate Guide to Achieving Position Zero.
Traffic
One of the most important metrics to track is the website traffic before and after the redesign. You can use Google Analytics to track the number of visitors to your website. A successful redesign should result in increased traffic to the website. However, it’s important to note that a sudden increase in traffic does not always mean success. It’s important to analyze the quality of the traffic by looking at the bounce rate, average session duration, and pages per session. If the bounce rate is high, it means that visitors are leaving your website after only visiting one page, which is not good for your website’s effectiveness.
When redesigning and redeveloping one of our client’s sites, Dataiku, we focused on integrating video, a simplified layout, and mobile-first optimizations. The outcome led to an 85% increase in traffic and a 13% decrease in bounce rates.
Mobile Responsiveness
With the growing amount of mobile users, having a mobile-responsive website is imperative. A good redesign should provide a mobile-responsive website that offers a consistent user experience across all devices regardless of connection. You may use Google Analytics to track the percentage of mobile visitors to your website as well as the mobile bounce rate – the lower the better in this case for your redesign. Here’s how to Level Up with Mobile-First Design.
And, of course, last, but not least…
Conversion Rates
The conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who take the desired action, such as filling out a form, making a purchase, or subscribing to a newsletter. It’s crucial to track the conversion rate to determine the success of your website redesign. Simply use Google Analytics to track your conversion rate by setting up conversion goals. A successful redesign should result in an increase in the conversion rate.
Support.com is a great example. Within their engagement, Big Drop ensured that the new digital presence would establish credibility, keep prospective clients engaged, and increase enthusiasm among employees for the company’s homesourcing strategy. This led to a 15% increase in conversion rates and a 17% increase in engagement.
In Conclusion
Measuring the success of your website redesign is crucial to determine if the investment in the redesign is paying off or not. Thankfully, there are myriad marketing tools available today that can simplify this process and assist your team in achieving their redesign goals.
Our team has a few favorite marketing tools that we find particularly useful, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Tag Manager. Additionally, heat-mapping tools can provide valuable insights into what aspects of your website are working well and what could use some improvement. This list is by no means comprehensive, but we recommend that you regularly review these core metrics and measurements to track your progress and identify areas for improvement.
Redesigning a website is an ongoing process that requires continuous optimization over several years until such time when a redesign is necessary again. By clearly defining your objectives and continually comparing your website’s performance against them, you can identify opportunities for improvement and drive continued success.
If you’re seeking a team with experience in designing user-friendly websites that deliver results, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team at Big Drop.