Assessing what’s working & what needs updating on your website

Before you get stuck into a big website redesign, or even creating a brand new website for your business, it’s really worthwhile to step back and have a look at what's working for you already. There's no point in fixing what's not broken!

And in the process of assessing your site, you can clearly identify what is not working, so you can focus your energy on the right updates. You may have already some really good pieces of your website and it would be a shame to lose or destroy them in the redesign process. 

In this blog post, we’ll be taking a look at your website and assessing what's working and what's not before diving into any updates or redesign work.

How much traffic are you currently getting to your website?

Are you actually getting people to visit your website right now? If so, where are those visitors coming from?

It’s really helpful to identify where those people are coming from (aka your traffic sources). These could look like Google search, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, other directories specific websites where you've got your website linked. It's interesting to see where those people are already coming from so that you can do more of what's working. 

You can find this in your analytics software under “traffic sources”.

What’s the traffic volume on your website?

It’s also worth having a look then want to have a look at the volume - aka the amount of people - you're getting onto your website right now. 

You know you got people coming to your website,so now we want to see how many people are coming to the website in general and which pages specifically they're actually looking at. 

You’ll probably your homepage has the most views, but you might discover a hidden gem of a page that people are really excited to spend time on!

When you’re getting people to find a specific page organically, you’ll want to make sure you are really prioritizing as you do this redesign work. 

You can find your traffic volume in your analytics software as well.

What’s your website’s bounce rate?

So now we know what's going on with the people coming to your website, we want to know what they're doing once they're there!

You can have a look at things like how long they're actually sticking around to look at multiple pages or spend time on the pages they're on before they leave. This is called your bounce rate.

Your bounce rate is how long someone's staying on your page or on your website. Paying attention to how long people actually stick around shows you pretty clearly how effective your design, your copy, the words on your website, and the offers are speaking to the people you're getting onto the website in the first place.

This is really helpful to understand the match between the traffic you're getting, the people you're getting onto your website, and the content they're actually consuming. And also a sense of how well the design, the copy, the work of that website is, you know, functioning at the moment. 

Now you can work out your conversion rate

Once we've got our bounce rate, we can figure out your conversion rate, which is the number of people who are coming to your website and taking the action you want them to take.

Conversions may not just be purchasing your stuff! You can also look at your conversion rates for your email signup form, contact form, booking an appointment or anything else you’re asking people to take action on.

You can take a look at how many people take that action and then have a look at how many people are getting onto the website and see how those numbers are lining up. 

Looking at your conversion rate can highlight how well you’ve matched the people coming to your website with the ‘ask’ you’re making. Perhaps if no one is booking a call but you get plenty of newsletter sign-ups, that might be a sign you need to nurture your audience more before asking them to hop on a sales call.

Assessing what’s working on your website

As you assess how well the assets you've got are working for you, I’d encourage you to think about what you're actually doing to make this happen. 

Is this happening by pure happenstance? Did you accidentally optimize a page for search engines or are you doing active marketing activities that are driving the traffic and conversions that you're seeing? 

You’ll want to have a look at how much time and energy you're actually expending to get the results that you've just worked out. Then assess how well that effort is paying off with sales and leads. 

Now this could be a really great reflection and you realize that all your efforts are paying off beautifully because I'm making more sales than I thought! Or you’re getting more leads than you thought for the small amount of marketing work you’re doing.

Or you may realize that you are spending hours and hours for fairly low results. Which is also really worth knowing! Because now you can focus on intentionally redesigning your website to get the results you do want.

If you want a step-by-step process to follow as you intentionally, and strategically uplevel your website, I highly recommend you check out my website redesign course Work Your Website!