Part 9: Monitoring Your Website

Once the site launches, it’s time to start monitoring changes in metrics. This is the only way to know whether or not the redesign is helping you accomplish your business goals.

Monitor Your Website’s Metrics

For example, if you wanted to know before redesigning the site if it would help reduce your bounce rate, start tracking that metric. Follow it for 30 days or even 60 days after the site launches and analyze how the metrics change.

Do the same thing for other metrics and ask yourself, “is the redesign doing what I want it to do?”

See How the Redesign Affects Your Search Rankings

The impact the redesign has on your rankings should be apparent within 30 days. But keep in mind, it’s common for your rankings to fluctuate, due to the changes, but you should be on the lookout for huge traffic drops, as that could indicate a specific issue with the redesign.

Unfortunately, this is the point that search engine optimization (SEO) experts are brought in. to audit the site and see what happened. But it’s much better to get an SEO expert involved earlier in the redesign process.

Collect Feedback Your Sales Team and Customers

You want to gather feedback from both your sales team and individuals who actually handle the sales process to find out if the new site is benefiting them.

You also want to ask customers if the new site has had a positive or negative impact on their experience. A lot of the time, talking to customers is also how you discover problems with specific functions and tools on the website. You can’t fix something until you know it exists.

Common Post-launch Issues

During the post-launch phase, the number one issue businesses have is not monitoring metrics. In order to know whether or not the redesign is accomplishing what you had originally set out to do, you have to track your site’s performance.

Another common problem is not carrying over the analytics properly. Obviously, in order to track metrics, your analytics account must be connected to the site.

Some businesses also refuse to take into account feedback from its sales team or customers, but it’s extremely important to communicate with both those groups once the site has gone live. And, if you get a lot of traffic, gathering feedback is easy because you have access to so much information.