#29 – How Often Should You Redesign Your Website?

I was talking to a VP of marketing, runs a Shopify plus store. And it was funny because she was telling me that, hey, we did a complete new site redesign. It's now more focused on the brand. It looks really beautiful, but it's hurt our conversion a lot more than we expected. And to me, it's fine. By the way, you can make the decision that, you know what? I want to go with this beautiful design and conversion doesn't matter. I can see somebody making that argument. Would I make that argument? No, I'm not. Because to me, conversion matters. And for the companies I work with, conversion matters.

My name is Khalil Slade, and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba, and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live hour, a show all about a B testing experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like, it's no big deal.

While pretty much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we will talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man. I bring tough questions like, do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high, testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are, but we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live Hour PodC today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Here we are. By the way, for those of you who don't know, when will this episode be actually released?

Let's just say maybe the first week of April.

Okay, first week of April. So for me, I'm fasting today. So today is the first day of fasting. And of course, because it's the first day of fasting, I have, like a million meetings scheduled. I'm like, really? It's just mentally, and it's not like I'm feeling tired or anything like that, but we'll manage. We'll see. Should ask me at the end of the day, but how was your week, Simba?

I had a good week. And guess what? In a week from now, it will be my fourth anniversary at invesp.

Oh, wow, wow, wow, wow. Time flies. Time flies. That just deserves a whole episode. Talking about that. Maybe we'll do that next week briefly, just Talk about the experience and whatnot.

It's been an interesting ride. Like, I remember the very first day when I joined invesp, you know, and the lesson that I've learned, like, in the past four years, there's been so interesting, and it's been quite a journey. So it's been interesting.

That is awesome. I still remember. Yeah, I still remember the interview. And it's funny because, I mean, you recall this because I was hiring for marketing at that point. I was doing most of the marketing myself. And thank God you are not the first marketing hire, because I learned through hiring, unfortunately, I would hire the wrong person. I would. I'm like, this is not a good profile. Oh, I made this mistake. So. So you get more sophisticated as you hire. You know exactly who you're looking for and the kind of person. So outside of this, still learning. It seems like, you know, this week, at least from talking to you earlier, we're getting a lot more into ads.

We launched a few campaigns in the past few weeks. I think, like, we really started working on focusing on ads sometime last year, but this year we've been, like, really, really laser focused on ads. And it's good because, like, I think, like, sometime last week when we first launched the ads, we had, like, a high cpc. But right now, like, as we keep optimizing our Facebook ads, our Google Ads, like, we're just seeing, like, a drop in the CPC of. Which is good.

That's awesome. That is awesome. It's funny. So you're focused a lot more on the Facebook ads. I'm playing with the Google Ads. I like to play with Google Ads, but in my amazing tactics, like ninja style, I managed to kill all of the Google Ads traffic. So now I'm trying to recover from that. I mean, this is funny because it's kind of a conversion optimization lesson, which I ignored because I was not working conversion optimization, which is don't make too many changes because then you don't know what's going on. Correct. I mean, whenever we're looking, testing with a hypothesis, don't make a million changes and then just hope that something's gonna work. Well, of course I broke that rule and I've made too many changes, and I'm like, oh, what is it that caused the problem? But I think I have a very good idea what caused the problem. So I've isolated it. So now I was just making the fixes, actually, just before we jumped in on the CRO live hour studio.

Yeah, that's the life of a CRO Life of a marketer. Always make mistakes, you learn from those, come back, make another mistake, make a comeback again. So yeah, that's how it is.

Marketers, sales, you're always kind of doing that.

So today we are focusing on the topic of website redesign and we have about three questions. I know that you have done like a couple of free designs, both for investment, for figpi. I would like to kind of like pick your mind when it comes to redesign. Like how constant should you redesign your website? Is it like a thing that you should do like every year, after two years, after a few months? What's your take on that?

So there are two schools when it comes to website redesign. There is one school which is the traditional school. You redesign the website and then you put it out there, you're making small modifications to it. But really every couple of years you need a refresh of the website design. Whenever a CMO or VP of marketing is hired, one of the very first things that they do is they'll say, oh, look at the site, it's outdated. Then they go through a redesign process. This is almost consistent, correct? That's what they figure out a way because they need to leave their fingerprints on the website and they think of the website as the front facing area where most people will checkouts to understand more about the business and what the business offers. I tend to belong to the school that design is never done. You're constantly optimizing design, trying to improve things in the design. Now, in theory, that is very close to the first approach, but in it, we're taking a page, we're doing some research on it. Let's say it's a homepage or a product page or a services page, or a contact us page and saying, okay, there's X number of people coming to that page. We expect them to take the following actions on the page. We expect them to either navigate to another page, read a section, fill out a form, do a certain call to action that we have, click on a button that we have. We expect visitors to take maybe sometimes 3, 4 actions, sometimes 20 actions, sometimes 1 action. Then we prioritize those actions that we have on the page and then we say, you know what? Okay, how well does the page design support that action? And then we optimize. So we're constantly optimizing design. So design in this approach never stops. And design in this approach also is always judged by a specific metric that you have. I was talking to a VP of marketing, runs a Shopify plus store, and it was funny because she was telling me that, hey, like, you know, we did a completely complete new site redesign. It's now more focused on the brand, it looks really beautiful, but it's hurt our conversion a lot more than we expected. And to me, it's fine. By the way, you can make the decision that, you know what, I want to go with this beautiful design and conversion doesn't matter. I can see somebody making that argument. Would I make that argument? No, I'm not. Because to me, conversion matters. And for the companies I work with, conversion matters, matters. But every once in a while you'll get somebody who says, no, you know, I like the design this way, all power to you. If you have the ability to make that decision, then all power to you. But going back in the approach of we optimize, we're constantly optimizing, we're constantly optimizing, we're constantly trying to improve design and finding the right balance that delivers better design, but also focusing, laser sharp focus on a specific metric. That's what I'm looking for. Now, this process of constant optimization, there is actually a downside to it because after a little while of optimizing the design, you're optimizing, let's take an E commerce website, you're optimizing the homepage, the collection pages, the product page. It is foreseeable that you end up with a little bit divergent design. You're not going to end up with like, oh, this page looks like XYZ and this page looks like an ABC template. You're not. I mean, if you have a good team working on the sites, they're keeping in mind the whole user flow, user experience, the flow of the website and the brand intent. They'll make sure that you don't end up with pages that are just completely not related to each other. However, after optimizing for a couple of years, there are small, minor tweaks that you have on the website. That's usually when we say after a couple of years, after two to three years, we might actually go for a complete redesign. But that redesign is informed and guided by all the optimization that we've done in the last two to three years. And that's an exercise that we're going through right now with one of the companies, with a couple of the companies that we're working with, where we've done a ton of experimentation, optimization with them. And the question is, what did we learn from the last two, three years of experimentation and how does that inform the new designs that we are producing? So you're not just Randomly saying, you know what, I'm going to throw away all the optimization that I've done in the last couple of years and I'm going to start from scratch. By the way, most of the time companies end up doing that whether they say it or not. That's the reality that happens. Correct. Let's come up with a design. Oh, we're going to hire an award winning brand design agency. It seems like most agencies nowadays are award winning by the way. But anyways, that's a separate thing. I was like, hey, award winning. Because I was sitting talking to people and I don't know, usually people say award winning, but I said, I just make sure that our ads don't have a world class and not award winning. By the way, sorry, I'm going to change topics drastically. I know we're talking design. So if you Google conversion rate optimization service or conversion rate optimization agency, there is a whole bunch of agencies that say number one in the world for conversion optimization. But really the one place that ranks conversion rate optimization companies, at least as of now, is clutch. And we are the only number one. That list. I mean there are companies who are number five and six who say they are number one. And then I know we've launched more a B test than anybody else out there. I know that because I talked to different agencies and just because being in the industry for so long, most likely I know somebody working for that company who will talk to me. So most of the time I know how many experiments, different companies, different agencies have launched. So there is this one agency who saw us like oh, invest saying they launched 25,000 experiments. I'm like, yeah, that's what we've done. So they're claiming to have launched more. So I was talking to somebody from there. She actually had applied for a job with us and I'm like, hey, so I'm impressed. I've never known that there's an agency that had done more experimentation than us. And she's like, no, we haven't. It's about 25% of what we're claiming to be. And I'm like, really? Well, there's no way to validate that, but it's just a small pet piece of mine. Annoying. But I'm like, okay. Anyways, we go back to redesign. Sorry, I had to go off on a tangent because I was working on Google Ads a little earlier and I'm like, don't claim these things if you're not delivering them.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. But what considerations should you keep in mind? When redesigning your website, like, is there like a process? Is there like something that you should follow or stick to? It's one of the questions that we got. I know that you touched a bit on it, so I just want you to kind of like really focus on that.

Yeah, I mean, like, you know, so what considerations? There's two aspects to designing a website. There's the visual representation. But then remember, the design 99% of the time should be there to service the visitors who are coming to the website. So the more you understand about your customer, what appeals to them, what works better for them, the better the redesign process will be. Sometimes you don't have the luxury of knowing a lot about your customers. You're just starting out, you don't know who you're going after very clearly. You have assumptions, then you'll validate them throughout time. But the more you understand about your customers, the more you start creating the design that matches their needs. So that's number one. I start usually by understanding really how I address a couple of things. First, the motivation that motivates the customer to take a particular action and the concerns that they have, the objections that they have, the concerns, the fuds, the fears and uncertainties and doubts. And then I start through the layout process for different areas of the website. Correct. So typically, okay, here's the homepage that I have. And everybody starts with the homepage, Correct. It's like, oh, and the homepage serves two main goals. One is telling people here is who we are. Correct. That's one piquing their interest and then really navigating people to the different areas of the website. And nowadays we don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's an E commerce website. It's been done. It's been done millions of times, corrected. A services page, it's been done millions, millions of times. And there is benefits to matching what people expect. Correct. When I go on e commerce website, there is a standard design that I suspect and expect, but you want to sprinkle a little bit of differences and novelty in it as well, where it's just not, oh, just a copycat from the next site and the previous sites. So you start by delving deep into the visitors and then thinking like, okay, here's how I'm going to structure my homepage. Here's how I'm going to structure the supporting pages. And really for each one of those pages, you have to think again. We've talked about this. You want to think about, okay, what's the visitor looking for? Correct. Why are they here? How can we help them? Actually tell them, yes, you are in the right place. Here's what you are looking for. Yes, we are the best option. And then from our perspective, whenever we're creating a design, what are the primary conversion goals that we have? What are the conversion goals that we have for the particular page? How do you prioritize those 5, 10, 3, 2, 1, whatever it is? And what are the concerns that people have that stop them actually from converting? All these elements need to be worked together at a page level to actually create the final design. And let's talk service for a second or a SaaS company and then we'll talk e commerce. When you think about particular page, top section is about here's what we are, here's what we offer. You're telling the visitor you are in the right place. I am trying to pique your interest. Correct. And then I'm trying to tell you, well, probably giving you some tidbits to say, you know what, here's why you should consider us. That's all what the top section does. Now this is again, by the way, copy is never divorced from design and design is never divorced from copy. You're not going to work one versus the other. I have seen instances where copy is created and designs created and then you try and merge them and then it's just a horrible, horrible idea. Or sometimes designs created first with Lorem Ipsum and then it's like, oh well, create copy to fits with this. I'm like, no, no, no, it's the other way around. We start with cave and then we create design. So that's number one. I just merely told you're in the right place and I intrigued your interest. Correct. That's what the page is doing. Then after that I need to tell you I need to start building the case for two things. One, really assuring you you are in the right place. Correct. So that's where social proof, social elements really come in handy. But I need to really now think about the visitor and how do I build the case that yes, this is the right service for you? So there are two types of visitors that come to a page. Correct. And you think about this from a design perspective. There's the visitor who already understands that they have a problem and there is the visitor who does not even acknowledge that they have a problem. You address them completely differently. And for that there's self identification or need identification. Correct. Where somebody says, oh, this is the problem that I have. So that's kind of the second Section. So I'm building. Because if you're not convinced that you have a problem, I'm not going to be able to convert you. Correct. Now, this problem does not have to be. Well, I'm going to sell you something. No, maybe the problem is, are you looking to learn about, always be updated about the latest and greatest in conversion rate optimization? Oh, yes, I do want to know about that. Oh, well, that's the reason you should be subscribing. Correct. But you acknowledge that there is a problem or there's a benefit. Correct. And you're driving the design is driving people towards that process of conversion. That's the way I think about it. Now, again, there are instances where all the page has to do is do education. And when somebody's ready to convert, you turn them to a different page. Correct. So one of them is a waypoint. That's what I like to call it. It's like, oh, you know, just rest over here. Let me give you the evidence and explain to you, oh, you're ready to convert. Let me drive you to somebody somewhere else where you convert.

That makes a lot of sense. But what do you think of those people that prefer using templates? For instance, like, a good example is Shopify, like, they have like a couple of templates that you might use to redesign your website. What do you think of templates? Do you think, like, each and every template is kind of like optimized for conversions or you're not in favor of this?

Listen, if you're just starting out, templates don't hurt. That's just the reality. But they are merely a starting point. To me, templates is just like going to school and going through first grade if you want to improve your conversion rate. And I think everybody who is sophisticated about marketing eventually will discover that, oh, a template will take us just so far. You go further. Correct. You're in first grade. It's a lot different than, oh, well, I'm going to go further and I need to get to college and have a PhD. Templates give you the basics. And not all templates, even templates that claim to be high converting, sometimes they do sometimes. And silly mistakes. There are sometimes templates that are good. But what we find is you will need to optimize that template more for your particular industry, for your particular site and for your particular customers. So start with a template. Doesn't hurt, by the way, but don't stop there because a template might give you 1%, 2%, maybe, like, you know, if you're lucky, 3%. But that's it. 1%, 2%. It's just not very interesting. 8%, 10%, 12%. That's a lot more interesting. But it depends. Maybe you are happy with 1 or 2%. Most E commerce owner that I know are not going to be happy. That's. But it depends on you. So next week, Simba, we're going to talk. Next week is going to be about Simba Four years. That's what we want to talk about.

Yeah, sure. I'll come up with some of the lessons that I've learned. That'll be cool.

Yeah, that would be very cool. Awesome. Thank you everyone for watching. And we shall be back next week, I guess.