Prioritize your web updates to make the most impact sooner rather than later.
Identify Your Goals
Define Primary Objectives
Look at your pain points. For both users and for your developers or content editors—what do they wish was different? Create a wishlist to see how it fits in with your marketing strategy. These goals could be: faster page speed and better performance, more mobile-friendly design, or improved security.
For example, if you’re hoping to create a more aesthetic site, that might not be a priority (for now) if it doesn’t align with your goals. But if you’re a SaaS company, your website has to stay looking fresh and user-friendly. So, aesthetics may be more important.
Determine KPIs
What do you want to achieve with your goals? What’s measurable? Look at the data you have on hand already to better determine your ideal key performance indicators (KPIs). If you’re hoping for conversions, look at your existing datasets. It’s not uncommon to be missing data—or to have information siloed among their various departments with no clear alignment.
Additionally, look at competition. Where do you stand in the rankings? Where do you WISH you were? This can help cut out the noise and figure out what you truly want to achieve with your site. The wishlist you made with your pain points should directly translate into a list of possible KPIs. If you’re hearing:
- “I can’t change an image without breaking the website!”
or
- “We’re getting traffic to the site, but they’re not converting!”
…use those problems to create KPIs that will steer you towards results.
In an ideal world, you could have limitless KPIs, as long as they don’t conflict with each other. However, you’ll still be limited in time and bandwidth. Whatever you’re trying to measure requires time and dedication. Determine what can be tracked with data, and be realistic about the number of KPIs you’re measuring. I’d recommend about 2-5 KPIs.
Assess Current Performance
To know where you’re going, you have to know where you are now. Beyond pain points, you’ll need to take a close look at your website’s performance, strengths, and weaknesses before you make a move with website updates.
Website Audit
Examine the front-end and back-end to fully assess your current site. Is it easy to navigate? Does it load slowly? Do your pictures throw off the layout in the mobile version? Look at various page types, and note what’s working and what’s not.
Plus, you need to take a look at your visitors. Who are they? Where are they coming from? Knowing the source and type of your visitors can highly influence your focus for website updates, as well.
Review Data and Performance
Review your analytics. Parse the data to understand what your users are doing and where they’re going on the site. Plus, it’s vital to identify your marketing efforts’ impact on your website. If you’re reliant on paid ads and landing pages, but you’re hoping to lean on organic and SEO in the future, that will impact your page visitors—likely in number and definitely in source type. Also, if you’re working towards making your website more user-friendly (scannable, visually appealing, easy user pathways) this can impact your SEO and allow your site to perform better. Track every “before” that you can. We’ll get to the “after” later.
Note: Your site’s age does matter. Best practices are always changing, and a website built five years ago and left alone isn’t going to be as competitive. Aim to make a site that can be easily updated internally. If you futureproof it now, you can evolve as needed.
Understand Your Resources
Making goals can be pie-in-the-sky, but when it comes to achieving said goals with your marketing website, you have to know who’s on your team and what kind of money you’re working with. Then you can prioritize.
Budget
Websites cost money. Updates also cost money. But instead of having a flat budget amount, consider basing your website budget on how much your website impacts your overall marketing strategy (and how many sales it helps close). Work with your sales team to determine how important the site is to their success, and see if you can work out a better budgetary figure to present to management.
Consider what your team can do themselves; and think of the website cost as an investment, spread out over time. The figures you determined with your sales team can help you start the ROI conversation, as well. It’s also possible to ask other department budgets to share the website cost. Events, sales, and marketing all reap the benefits—often they can all help with spend.
Bandwidth and Capabilities
Website updates require plenty of time and manpower. What are your current team’s capabilities? How much time do they (truly) have to work on a website update? If you can have your team take on some of the updates themselves—design or copywriting, do it. If you can have your team maintain your website regularly (more than once a year) do it.
Stakeholder Input
Hold discussions with your key stakeholders to gather insights and ideas. But: be prepared. Do your research first, have data on hand, and then bring in folks from other departments before you ask for a budget. In order to get aligned, determine main goals and priorities from each department, then move forward with those big picture goals. If stakeholders are included at the beginning, any updates and redesign processes will be much smoother.
Agency Support
Not everyone has the capacity and capability to run a list of website updates or a full website redesign. Some agency packages can be customized to help with budget needs or better fill in the gaps on your team. In looking at the agencies you already work with, you may be able to add on services (e.g. SEO) to what they already do for you. Sometimes you may only need website support and maintenance.
Consult with your agency. Ask for recommendations based on your goals (with your list handy). The agency will often offer rationale for proposed updates that can help you reach your objectives. Audits with various team members from design to development can help make website updates your team can’t. At Solid Digital, our goal is 1) honest feedback and 2) to always help the marketing team improve and get better results with their site—so our recommendations will follow that trend.
Prioritize and Plan
Ask the Right Questions
To get the right answers, get to the heart of the issues. Hopefully you’ve been at least subconsciously asking these questions all along.
- What’s most critical to achieve our goals?
- Which updates will have the greatest impact on UX and conversions?
- What potential challenges and technical dependencies do we foresee?
Rank and categorize Updates
Once you have some answers, you can start ranking and categorizing possible updates. Rank your potential updates based on impact vs. effort. What is more important day-to-day? If you’re weighing a form against an events page, the form (lead magnet) should probably come first. Determine the squeaky wheel and grease it.
Next, categorize your updates into high, medium and low priority. If you have plenty of big changes that need to be made but you have an investor meeting coming up and want to wow them—a focus on the home page (something to show off) is vital. Alternatively, if you have a big event coming up, a tradeshow, for example, you may want to focus on the design, look and feel or a new product landing page.
Develop a Plan
Now that you have high impact, low effort and clear priority levels for your updates, you can create a timeline for implementing those website changes. Find out what can be completed internally, and look ahead at the next year or two. If you have plans to rebrand in the near future, for instance, don’t redo your website—figure out how the updates will fit in. Take into account projects from other departments as well (a new product launch, an upcoming trade show, a possible acquisition).
Once you have a plan, assign responsibilities to team members and/or your external partners, like your agency. Set up some milestones and review points to track your progress.
You’ve just successfully figured out how to prioritize (and possibly execute) your website updates. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Continuously evaluating and iterating your website is a best practice. Look at the data, compare it with your goals, and collaborate with your teams and external partners to strengthen your site.
