Quantifying Website Redesign Success Metrics

You have poured your blood, sweat and tears into your website redesign. Hours. Days. No, months of work. And perhaps even a little of your mental well-being. But now the project is complete! So what happens after the redesign? How can you quantify the work that you put in? Here are some of the key website redesign success metrics that can be measured, reported and compared to pre-launch metrics.

4 Key Success Metrics for a Website Redesign

To elaborate on each of these website redesign success metrics, we are sharing the results from our recent redesign of hilemangroup.com. The data below only represents organic, direct and referral traffic to keep it as accurate as possible. This removes any paid, offline or email data. The data also excludes any traffic from our internal office IP address.

1. SEO metrics – page count, keyword rankings, organic traffic
   1. A website redesign is the perfect opportunity to evaluate and improve on your website’s search engine optimization. Throughout the process, content is created, expanded, edited, and removed; all providing opportunities for keyword optimization. To measure the results of a website launch, take a look at the total page count, keyword rankings change, and organic traffic. (Disclaimer – most often websites will see a slight dip immediately after a redesign)
   2. Hileman Group Results: The total number of pages on hilemangroup.com more than doubled. Less than 60 days later, the site is now ranking for key terms that we previously had no supporting content for. As a result, organic traffic has increased 36%.
2. Engagement metrics – time on site, bounce rate, number of pages viewed, heatmaps
   1. Engagement is a tricky thing to measure, website redesign or not. There is not one metric only that can provide the right insights. Instead, you must compare multiple metrics together to paint a more vivid picture. Our approach is to look at bounce rate, average number of pages viewed, and the average time on-site together in combination with on-page heatmaps. There is no straightforward good or bad here; instead you must analyze the intended goals in relation with each of these metrics.
   2. Hileman Group Results: There was an interesting trend of a decreased average time on-site and average number of pages viewed in combination with a higher bounce rate. Although many would view this as negative, it is likely just that users are able to find what they are looking for faster with the new layout. We are still pulling and analyzing the heatmap results from our redesign for a final conclusion. TBD.
3. UX metrics – mobile, site speed
   1. User experience again is a difficulty thing to measure, but there are some defining metrics. These metrics report on the core functionality of a website: site speed and mobile usage. Without a quick-loading and mobile-friendly site, you will lose visitors based on the functionality of your website.
   2. Hileman Group Results: The percent of mobile visitors remained the same, but before the redesign, the site was also mobile-friendly. However, the average site speed was cut in half.
4. Conversion metrics – number of leads, conversion rate, key page hits
   1. One of the most common KPIs in a website redesign is improved conversion rate. The assumption here is that the same number of people will be hitting your site, but you want to convert more unknown visitors to a lead. To measure this, simply count the number of leads and divide it by the number of visitors. (Pro Tip – exclude campaign data to provide to remove outliers and focus in on just organic, direct and referral traffic)
   2. Hileman Group Results: Through the website redesign, key conversion pages increased from 3 pages to 5. Of these 5 pages, 3 of them are always one click away from any page on the main site. As a result, compared to the same period of time, the total lead count doubled and the conversion rate increased from 1.78% to 2.74%.

All of these goals are great, but if you really want to be successful, you must set primary and secondary KPIs. Measure these KPIs before and after your website redesign. Then build a physical report for reference; share both the good and the bad. And don’t stop there! Continue to test and measure your website on a smaller scale to optimize your KPIs until it’s time for the next redesign.