Think you are done with your website after a re-design? Think again…

Many businesses and people think that once their website is redesigned, that is it. Just redesign the site and sit and wait for all of the [insert goal of web site here: traffic, leads, subscriptions, etc.] to come pouring in. Despite the utopian thoughts, this is unfortunately not the case.

Your web site can be compared to a car – a common comparison when it comes to internet marketing. You can purchase a brand new car and 3,000 miles later, you need to get an oil change. About 20,000 miles later, you need to change your wiper blades and fuel filter, and 40,000 miles later you need to change your tires (note: these are estimated timeframes and I am not a mechanic :). Point being: even a brand new car needs up keeping.

The same goes for a website. You might have just launched your new site with a fantastic, cutting-edge design in the best CMS with all the latest interactivity, but the biggest mistake you can make is to just sit back and watch the analytics. Continuous updates help to not only maintain it, but also make it perform better, be more recognizable to search engines, and keep users intrigued. This is no easy task, but it’s worth it. At PlattForm, our SEO teams look into our websites everyday - to figure out the proactive steps via the analysis of traffic and see what changes we can make that have an impact. Testing different elements of a site is not just “cool to do” anymore – it’s a necessity if you want to make substantial gains.

Testing is a perfect way to establish performance metrics for your website. From testing different photography and imagery to testing the content or fields of a contact form, constant testing of individual elements will allow you to pinpoint specific areas that affect traffic and conversions. At PlattForm, multiple teams within our Interactive marketing department test different aspects of many websites across the company. We then utilize our findings company-wide to establish best practices for all teams. This is why most of the sites we re-launch have higher conversion rates than their previous versions. But it doesn’t stop there. After the new site is launched, we continue to test and tweak different elements to keep that conversion rate creeping up and to the right.

Think about your conversion rate for a minute. Let’s say you are getting 10,000 visits per month and your conversion rate is at 3%. You are getting roughly 300 leads per month. Now, if you are able to raise your conversion rate by only .2%, you get 20 more leads per month (20 leads per month times 12 months = 240 extra leads!). Could you use 240 extra leads per year? Think about .5% or even 1% increases…

Continuous improvements based on test results need to be completed on an ongoing basis, and it’s becoming a huge part of web design and development. Many companies are capable of producing a great design – not many companies are good at building on that design to make it increase [insert goal of web site here: traffic, leads, subscriptions, links, etc.].