"Should we redesign our site or take an iterative approach?"
Hey I’m Shane, welcome to another issue of The CRO Weekly where each week I explore how to build a high converting Ecommerce store. If you’re not subscribed you can do so here:
This week I’ve got more of an experimental issue. Instead of sharing something actionable I want to answer a question I get all the time. Please let me know on Twitter what you think about these Q&A style posts and if you’d like to see more of them in the future.
“Should we redesign our site or take an iterative approach?”
I’ve been on both sides of this argument. When I was doing full site redesigns, I argued for redesigns. Now that I’m doing more iterative work I argue that you should iterate. Alas, biases are tough to overcome.
But when I consider it, it’s not a tough decision to make and only comes down to two factors. Let’s talk through them.
Upgrading your branding
The best argument for doing a site redesign is that your website doesn’t do a good job of representing the company you are today. When you started, you probably built your store yourself and had a logo created on Fiverr. Maybe you even hired a design firm but they were either junior or underpaid, or both. Now, you’re doing 7 figures annually and have honed in on who you are as a company.
At this point, the look and feel of your store is completely disconnected from the brand you’ve become. Trying to iterate your way into an updated ‘look and feel’ of your store will take ages.
A great example of this is Three Ships Beauty. With their products being stocked in big name retailers like Target, they’re a much different brand than they were when they started. If you look at their instagram vs their current store, the disconnect is palpable. Their store doesn’t look bad by any means—just not right.
Since launching their store they’ve also learned a lot more about their customers and why they choose to shop with three ships. They can only modify their current store so much to reflect that.
Knowing that they’re going to double down on Ecom they want to upgrade their store to a beautiful, modern design that they can stand on for years to come. I think that’s a great idea.
Performance
Say you’re a 7-figure brand with a pretty good looking Shopify store. Maybe it doesn’t entirely represent your brand but it isn’t far off. More than anything you’re concerned about performance.
This is where we get to the heart of the redesign vs iterate debate.
The reality is, iterative AB testing of your store isn’t likely to get you massive results in a short period of time. The goal is to test, fail, learn, and ultimately inch your way to the highest converting design for your store.
The results are incremental but completely within your control. Every test you run teaches you something new about your customers and if something doesn’t work you will know about it.
On the other hand, redesigns have the potential to have a large impact on performance. The best outcome of a redesign could be a 2x improvement in your site-wide metrics. The results are lumped together which is great but that also increases your risk. Think about it:
You may remove things that did a great job of motivating your customers to buy
Your new design may not resonate with the same people you’ve been driving to your old site
You may add something that confuses your customers and causes them to bounce.
When thinking about doing a redesign you have to weigh the risk of spending 2-6 months and $30-150k for a potential negative outcome. (P.S - Price usually doesn’t correlate with results here but that’s a topic for another day)
The best performance-driven design teams will mitigate these risks as best as they can but you can’t eliminate them entirely. If you’re in the DTC world long enough you’re guaranteed to meet a brand that had to revert back to their old theme after paying a boatload for a redesign.
My advice here is that if you’re trying to improve performance and don’t have ambitions of updating your branding, you should choose to iterate. If you’re looking to upgrade your branding – take a risk on the performance side and do the redesign. You can always start to iterate afterwards.
That’s all for this week’s issue. I’d love to answer any questions you have or talk about these ideas on Twitter: