A fancy website make-over is attractive for many companies because they want to keep up with the times. The latter is wise, but choosing for ongoing improvements instead of a total redesign will bring way more success whatsoever.
This is good old compound interest at work.
Small baby steps will compound into a gigantic improvement long term, whereas a redesign is basically going back to zero and start all over again.
With a redesign you don’t know which changes drove improvement or decline because you changed everything.
While every time you improve something small you will get instant feedback on how things work out and you can adjust accordingly.
I have been doing this on a daily basis for eleven years. I didn’t notice any difference in the first 5-7 years, but then all of a sudden I saw how big the difference with my initial numbers was. This is compound interest and I love it.
When people start to think it was an overnight success, that’s when you worked long enough.
Most changes won’t work out the way you wanted, but will still bring you super valuable info because you learn what not to do.
Other changes will improve something. Let’s say it makes your website 1% better. If you manage to improve 1% every day, the website will be 37% better after one year.
Ship often, fail often and quickly.
It’s like body building, you’ll need perseverance and stamina and success will come naturally.
When you look at the websites of the internet’s big boys you’ll notice that all of them have never radically changed their designs since they started years ago:
- Apple (26 years)
- Microsoft (26 years)
- Amazon (25 years)
- Google (24 years)
- Wikipedia (19 years)
- Facebook (16 years)
- Google Maps (16 years)
- YouTube (15 years)
The verdict is to keep improving every single day, measuring everything you can and act upon failure and success.