How Do You Know A Website Redesign Is A Success

Website redesign. Two of the most dreadful words in the online world. As the old saying goes, too many cooks in the kitchen spoils the broth. The same goes for website design. Figuring out what you personally like for the design is hard enough but even worse is trying to figure out someone else’s likes. Balancing what everybody wants is impossible and shouldn’t be the goal of the redesign. The goal of the redesign is to increase business through your website. So obviously your ultimate benchmark for deciding if a redesign was successful is by tracking sales results from the site compared to your previous site. But this is not the only way to judge your site. Success is more than visits and leads when it comes to redesigning a website, it’s all about the actions someone is taking while they’re there. Let’s take a look at a few of the metrics you can analyze in order to judge how successful your website redesign was.

Average Page Views to the Number of Visitors

How many pages do your visitors end up viewing now compared to your previous site? The average number of pageviews per visitor should raise due to a website redesign. This is because you should be telling a more compelling story, laid out in a way that the reader is enticed to learn more about your company. You have to say something that sparks their curiosity, which should persuade them to start digging deeper into your website. This may not always be the best way to judge for success; it just depends on how you redesign your site because if you condense your information into fewer pages then your visitor would view less pages to see the full scope of your business. So if this is the case, how should you judge redesign success?

Time Spent/Bounce Rate

The bounce rate and time spent on the page are also great indicators of how successful your website redesign was. Some of you may not know what a bounce rate is so lets define that real quick. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who go to your site and leave the site rather than viewing other pages within the same site. The reason this is a good indicator is because it gives you an idea of what visitors think of your site. If it is messy and confusing, they are more likely to leave instead of reading more. So if you lower your bounce rate after a redesign, you know that your website is more appealing and not too overwhelming to scare people away.

Obviously time spent on page shows that your visitors are more interested in what you have to say. If on average they are spending more time on your pages, it shows you have improved your site to make it more interesting and relate with visitors better.

Behavior Flow

Behavior flow is the way your visitors are moving through your site (internal page clicks). You can use this to analyze if the path your visitors are taking in comparison to what you would want. Why does this matter? After analyzing your page statistics, you will see typical trends that visitors who converted on your site took to get there. Of course it will be different for different types of visitors, but they usually tend to view a lot of the same pages so creating a similar flow on your site could help improve conversions.  And like I said earlier, conversions are the ultimate metric of a website redesign.

Analyze for Success

Website redesigns are one of the hardest things to really analyze whether or not it was successful. Everyone will have their own way to decide, but by using any of the metrics above (the average number of page views to the number of visitors, time spent on the site, the bounce rate and behavior flow) you can get a good idea of how well the redesign went.