Your business website is the world’s window into your company – your services, your products, your values, and your missions statement. And sometimes, it is the only window, as over 80% of clients/customers make their decisions online. That’s why it is important to make sure the site is as close to perfect as possible – it is important to monitor the performance of your website and learn when it is a good idea to invest more in it. This could be through a redesign, adding extra content, tweaking the code, etc. there are a lot of paths to upgrade your website, and this article tells you how you should frame the problem and look at it through an investment and productivity lense so you can get the best bang for your buck.
Measure Your Website’s Performance
Without empirical and accurate data measuring your website on multiple fronts, you really can’t have an objective way of finding out when your website will need an update. You’ll likely rely on your intuitions, which is a horrible thing to rely on in the business world (well, at least, if your goal is to survive long term). That’s why if you don’t have access to this kind of data already, you should start collecting it right away:
- The amount of organic traffic and how visitors interact with your website: how many people visit your website each week? How many of them decide to buy your product/service? How much time do they spend on each product page? Do they bounce out of your website quickly without interacting with it? You can collect a ton of interesting and important information about your visitors. This will inform you later on what kind of upgrades you should be investing in.
- How independent tools measure your website’s performance on security and speed: there are a lot of independent tools that will stress test your web pages and do various tests to learn about its weak points. We have tools that will check the website’s speed, we have tools that can check the website’s search engine optimization and tools to grade websites based on how secure they really are. If you choose high-quality tools to test your website from leaders in the industry, you’ll have a great multifaceted report telling you about the weaknesses in your website from multiple angles.
Measure How Much You’ll Gain from Upgrading
Now that you’ve collected as much data as possible and tested your website through a few different tools, it is, now, the time to learn how much will each upgrade benefit you. Although your upgrade paths are virtually limitless, we are going through a few basic examples so you can learn about some of the most common problems and how to approach them.
- Low levels of organic traffic: if your website is seeing a decline in organic traffic or very low levels of organic traffic for months, then your company might be in a big bind. This is because there can be multiple reasons for the decline, and it is very difficult to ascertain the exact cause. Nevertheless, looking at how much of that organic traffic translates to revenue generated for your company will tell you how much money you can expect if you decide to upgrade your website with a focus on increasing organic traffic.
- Low conversion rate: in some instances, your website gets a massive amount of traffic, but nobody is deciding to actually buy your products/use your services. This is likely due to your content being bad and untrustworthy or your website’s design being old and uninteresting. A better conversion rate, even if it isn’t followed by an increase in organic traffic, still could mean very decent revenue growth.
Measure How Much the Upgrade will Cost You
Now that you’ve learned how much you can expect in extra revenues when you choose how to upgrade your website with specific goals in mind, it is time to learn how much it costs. This is also a very complex step that you need to take many variables into account before you have the final cost.
If you’re deciding to upgrade your website yourself, you won’t need to pay upfront costs, but this doesn’t mean that it is cheap. You have to calculate the opportunity cost of spending tens of hours writing code, testing, and bug-fixing and running the website. You also need to keep in mind that a lot of the tools used to test websites generally cost money, and if you want to see comprehensive reports on the weaknesses of your website, you need to pay for these tools.
If you’re hiring a team, it is much easier to get a concrete figure. For example, if you come up with a design and then decided to use a Sketch to HTML service to bring it to life and upgrade your homepage’s design, you’ll learn the cost after messaging the company in at most two days.
Now that you have the cost, and you have the potential benefits of an upgrade, the only thing left is to decide if the cost will outweigh the benefits or not. This approach ensures when you decide to upgrade your website and invest in it, you get your money’s worth and then some.