Calculating the ROI of Your Website Redesign

We already tackled the topic of calculating your website’s ROI, but what happens when you want or need to update your website? A complete website redesign can be a long and more difficult process than it seems.

First, make sure you have an idea of the ROI of your current website. If you are not sure, go ahead and figure it out now. Next, you need an estimate of your desired website redesign. Once you have have a quote or two for how much it will cost, you can proceed to calculate the ROI of your website redesign.

Next, any costs of the website redesign need to be rolled into the development and launch costs of the worksheet. In essence, more is getting added to the overall development and design costs. If your website has broken even or made a profit according to the calculations, these added costs might make your profitable website into a non-profitable one.

Which is why you also need to look at what the reason is behind redesigning a website. Simply changing the website just to change it, is going to negatively affect your ROI as the costs are added without elements that help close more customers.

Instead, when you are going through your website redesign process, it is important to make impactful changes to the website. Sometimes, this can be difficult when you are forced to unexpectedly update the website due to technological reasons. Even then, there are always small changes that can be made that should have an impact on your business.

Examples of adding value can be a better event management system which streamlines the booking process, a clearer presentation of your website’s information, or a tool which helps engage visitors. It is hard to determine how these changes can affect your site but that is where some educated guesswork comes into play. Be realistic with your goals and the true website redesign ROI will be close to expectations.

Anything that either draws people in, helps convey your business’s value, or helps convert visitors will improve your overall website redesign ROI. There is a theory about website redesign that is based on the principle that redesigns should be about making calculated and measurable improvements over the original. It is called Growth Driven Design and for high traffic sites with a bit of a budget, it is the best way to go.

GROWTH DRIVEN DESIGN CAN AMPLIFY ROI

If Growth Driven Design is not the best way for your business to proceed with the website redesign, it is still beneficial to draw some ideas from it. Since you are adding the real costs of the redesign to the website ROI worksheet and predicted changes based on our new improvements, you will not have a clear picture of the return until you have had time to test it.

Therefore, it is important to make sure you are tracking the conversions as closely as possible so you can determine roughly how many conversions were made based on the improvements you made. Since you are redoing the entire site, this can be difficult as, potentially, there are a lot of elements at play here.

The best way forward then is to compare a three month (or longer) period of the new website with the performance of the last 3 months (or longer) period of the old website. If there is an increase in conversions proportional to the increase in cost, your business did alright. However, the aim is to have a bigger increase in conversions than the increase in cost. Striving for this goal is how you get your website redesign ROI to really shine.

IT MAY TAKE TIME

If, after 3 months, your new website has not turned a serious profit based on old results, don’t fret. As long as it was turning a profit before, in time it will recoup the additional costs.This is not an ideal scenario but it is one that can be used for learning. What tweaks were implemented that didn’t work? Take a look at the changes made and see if, based on the new data you have gathered, it can be altered in a way which might be more appealing to visitors.

Instead of looking at it as a failure, look at it as an important learning opportunity. To really get the most ROI on your website redesign, look at it as an iterative process where the site is continually tweaked until it gets the results that you want.