Redesign your site or optimize the conversion rate?

Your website is important to your business. Indeed, it represents a significant source of income. Whether you use it to sell products, to register customers for a service, to collect leads or simply as a showcase of choice to promote your business,  your website is essential to the growth of your business.

When we realize the importance of this tool, all we want is to maximize its reach and effectiveness; that he sells more, that he collects more leads. In short, to perform better.

Many believe that it is inevitable to reset the counter and perform a complete overhaul of its website, which is why many companies instantly and blindly turn to this solution. Normal. After all, what professional in contact with the world of the web has never heard of a redesign project?

Obviously, in some cases, the latter will indeed prove necessary. However, there is another, less well-known approach to improving the performance of a website in an equally safe, but more gradual way: conversion rate optimization, often referred to by the acronym CRO (for  Conversion rate optimized ).

First of all, let's make sure we clearly distinguish between these two approaches, of which here are short definitions:

Redesign:  Operation consisting in rebuilding the foundations of a website in order to make it more agile and more efficient. A complete redesign generally involves the complete transformation of the code and design of the original website. This solution is particularly effective when, for technical reasons, the technology on which the original website is based no longer allows managers to do everything they want with their platform.

CRO: One-off   operation or continuous process consisting in optimizing conversion rates on sites, mobile applications and marketing applications. Very effective for sites with a clear objective that can translate into revenue ($), this approach is mainly based on statistical evaluations such as  A/B tests .

To support the community of business leaders and website managers in choosing the approach that best suits the specific needs of their organization, we have prepared an infographic that compares, in broad outline, the redesign of conversion rate optimization website.

As you will have understood, redesign and conversion rate optimization are two totally different approaches which nevertheless serve the same objective: to get more out of your website.

On the one hand,  a redesign will be preferred by those who have a website that restricts them , which prevents them from innovating and creating. This choice will often be justified by a technology or CMS problem or, in other words, by a problem relating to the website infrastructure.

On the other side, the CRO approach is much more agile and is ideal for those whose website does not prevent them from innovating. The problem to be solved does not belong to the foundations of the platform, rather concerns the design, the UX or the way of relaying their products/services to their users.

Imagine the following situation:

You own a store that you want to optimize to complete more sales. Would you start by pouring new foundations to straighten the entire building or would you just have to rectify the interior layout of your business? 

The answer is simple: you will select the solution that best meets the constraints associated with your reality. 

If the current foundations represent a major danger for your customers as well as for yourself, you will first establish new foundations to ensure that the store is standing and that no serious incident occurs in the future. If, on the contrary, you are not confronted with any problem of this nature, you will rather choose to give a fresh coat of paint, to knock down a wall, to cut a new door, to enlarge the window or even to reorganize the spatial layout of your shelves.

Well, the same goes for your website! You should only rebuild the foundations in case of force majeure. To optimize your site, a CRO approach will allow you to test a variety of new changes and settings, without having to tear down the old store and start from scratch. 

Of course, not everything is necessarily black or white. It is possible, for example, to opt for a strategy oriented more towards optimizing the conversion rate, but including a partial redesign, or vice versa. However, whether your business is physical or online, the idea remains the same: select the approach that allows you to obtain the best possible results, as quickly as possible. To do this, the first essential step is to become familiar with the various options available to you, and we hope that this article has been able to help you on your way. 

If you are interested in learning more about the issues discussed above, you will find several other articles on our blog on the  redesign  and optimization  of websites.