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Is it time to redesign, or could evolving your existing website extend its lifespan, whilst providing you with the features, functionality or performance required?
When it comes to an old or underperforming website, or one that simply lacks the functionality required, the first instinct is to consider a complete redesign and rebuild. But this isn’t a quick and easy decision to make. A new website is a big commitment for a business of any size.
Whether due to the budget required, finding the right website partner, or the time required to dedicate to the process, it can be incredibly daunting. This often means that companies are left in limbo, whilst the business case is built, to place in front of financial decision makers.
If the website in question isn’t very old, it can be even more difficult to get a new one signed-off. This is more common that you’d think.
Many of our clients come to us with recently built websites that don’t do what they need them to do, are difficult to use, or don’t convert.
This is why we encourage anyone thinking about a new website to create an extensive brief, with input from stakeholders from across the business.
But what if a redesign isn’t necessary? Could evolving the website, turn things around and extend its lifespan, without the same level of financial commitment?
Could tackling one or two issues at a time, reduce the time investment that a redesign would require?
So what exactly does evolving a website entail? It is a pretty ambiguous term.
It’s ambiguous, as the answer is fairly broad. There are many aspects of a website (in our case, a WordPress or WooCommerce websites) that can be ‘evolved’.
I’ll break these down into categories, and list some examples below.
Evolving a website doesn’t have to be done all at once. It can certainly be done as a one-off project if that is what is necessary, but it can also be carried out gradually, with one or two tasks at a time.
Some of our clients will come to us with a one major improvement that they’d like to make, whereas others may have a list of changes that they’d like carried out at one time. In these cases, we will scope their projects, provide a quote, and they will buy the hours required for the project.
For clients with a long list of improvements they would like to make over time, we have Evolve Retainers. These are pots of time dedicated to evolve tasks that don’t get eroded by support and maintenance time. Clients can then use these hours for improvements, as and when they become a priority.
BHTA
For not-for-profit trade associate, BHTA, we completed a refresh of their homepage design, along with the sitewide header and footer.
This brought their site inline with their offline marketing materials, and improved the user experience, without the necessity of a complete overhaul and redesign.
Country House Weddings
We’ve supported Country House Weddings for many years, providing support and maintenance, evolving their existing sites, and recently, a complete redesign of their main website.
Over the years we’ve added numerous new features to the suite of CHW websites, including but not limited to:
Hanningfield
The current Hannigfield website is over 5 years old, and their team had mostly left it alone. Over time, this meant that engagement and conversion rate had slowly decreased.
We reviewed the site, the analytics data, and the user journeys, and from our investigations came up with some UX and CRO improvements to help the site perform better.
We implemented these improvements, alongside a new Cookie Management Platform, to ensure they were handling privacy correctly for their international audience.In the time since implementation, Key Events/Conversions are up by 497% year-on-year, Engagement Rate is up by 22.3% and Average Engagement Time Per Session is up by 25.9%.
Now here’s the kicker. Whilst it would be lovely to be able to salvage every underperforming or outdated website with a few updates and improvements, some websites do not lend themselves to this approach.
There are cases when a redesign is the best option, and even potentially more cost-effective.
For example, we can make improvements to pages or areas of a site, but in some cases there will be many more changes required to bring that site up to the desired level. Approaching it this way, becomes far less cost effective than biting the bullet, and choosing to redesign.
As they say, “you can’t polish a turd”, and you also can’t escape a badly built website. You might be able to stick a few bandages over the cracks, but you are just delaying the inevitable, throwing good money, after bad.
We might be able to add new functionality to a page for example, but that same functionality might not work site wide. Or it might be that to make it work site wide, would be a much deeper and more costly piece of work. So understanding the goals and budget for each task is vital to making the right decision for a business.
Depending on how your site was built, your budget, the timeframe, and the complexity of the issue or development required compromise is sometimes necessary.
It isn’t always what people want to hear, but where time and budget are short, it is important to ask, how critical is the functionality needed, and will it suffice as it is?
In general, off-the-shelf themes are going to be more trouble that they are worth, when it comes to any major changes. They are often so bloated, and very restrictive, that they’ll will continue to throw up challenge after challenge when they’ve reached their limits.
If your website is very old, it is likely that so much of the code-base will be deprecated. In these cases, a rebuild is usually recommended to ensure modern coding practices and standards are followed, security is prioritised, and that compatibility doesn’t become an issue.
Not all websites are built equally, and build quality isn’t instantly apparent from a glance at the frontend. A website can be outwardly eye catching, but a complete mess once you take a deeper look.
In our case, for websites that we’ve not built ourselves, the only way to know how suitable they are for evolving and expanding, is to take a really good look under the hood.
Our Health Checks are WordPress audits that investigate how a website has been built, the infrastructure it’s built on, and the general health of its plugins and security. These audits are completed manually and follow a 99+ point checklist, which identifies issues and weaknesses, and provides recommendations on tackling these.
This is feedback from a recent Health Check, we completed for an eCommerce brand:
“We had a website health check carried out by Impact Media and were thoroughly impressed. From start to finish, the team was professional, knowledgeable, and a pleasure to work with. James in particular stood out – friendly, insightful, and incredibly thorough in his approach. The level of detail in their work was exceptional, and it’s clear they take real pride in what they do. I would highly recommend Impact Media to anyone looking for expert web services delivered by a genuinely great team.”
