How A Website Redesign Brought A 63% Lift In Conversions

If you’re thinking about doing a website redesign because your site isn’t mobile friendly or because of rebranding. I’ll give you the steps and process I took to get a lift in conversions with a national canadian TV show website ( www.mynewday.tv ).

Before we can redesign a page or an entire website we need to know what is working and what is not working for your visitors. Making radical changes to a site can hurt your business if not done properly. There are many stories of businesses that paid for a new redesigned site that suffered poorly in conversions.

We have to gather the data from the site and the people using it. We need to understand how people use the site and what the problems are. This research will help us answer some key questions about our visitors:

• What brings people to the site?
• What are people trying to accomplish?
• What pages or elements on the page are preventing people from accomplishing their goals?
• What aren’t people doing that we want them to?
• What persuades some people to buy?

First outline every step visitors need to take to become your customer. I use mind mapping software like MindNode or MindMeister to do this. This helps me understand the entire conversion funnel and now I can work on identifying areas that hold the greatest opportunity.

Digging through web analytics will help us understand our different visitor types and how they behave. Understanding these different visitors will give you clarity about how to organize your conversion funnel so you’re showing the right content, with the right call-to-action, to the right visitors, at the right time in their buying journey.

Next we can identify user experience problems with the site. Going through the steps we covered before and asking questions like:

• Does the site load correctly in the browsers your visitors use?
• Do the pages load fast enough?
• Is it easy for users to navigate through the site and know what they need to do?
• Is the copy clear or confusing?
• Are forms easy to use?
• Do users encounter error messages that confuse or deter them?

I capture the voice of the customer through heatmaps, screen recordings, user tests, customer surveys, web surveys, chat logs, search queries, and support/sales staff. We setup tools like ClickTale , HotJar , or CrazyEgg on your site to gather some of the data listed above.

Now I can write a list of all the objections and usability issues for each step in the sales funnel. Highlighting the most common will show where the biggest opportunities are. Then we can prioritize these issues by checking out which pages are getting the most traffic.

I give the detailed list of issues I found earlier to the web team to start the redesign process. Polishing the parts that are working and re-thinking the parts that aren’t. My New Day TV implemented all the changes at once and realized a 63% improvement in their conversion rate.