Sometimes it seems to me as if people treat their websites like a book. Every time one single typo is found, the whole book gets printed anew. And because they dont’ get updated often enough, they get outdated. So some years later, everything needs to be overhauled at once. Again. This leads to several unnecessary problems and risks.
But there’s a smarter way. Thankfully, websites are totally different than books. Not only typos can be fixed easier and faster. A website – with its contents, functions and the design – can improve over time. And there’s lots of data and insights available to improve your directions while going: Let’s talk about the continuous relaunch!
What is a continuous Website Relaunch?
How does this thing called “Continuous Relaunch” work?
You can always improve your website continuously in small steps. One after another. This offers more sustainable success, control and steady innovation. Take advantage of ongoing data insights after each step. Derive informed decisions. Keep your website up-to-date and top of innovation with this “unfair competitive advantage“. By avoiding the risks of sudden overhauls, you stay ahead of your competition. And more than that: You extend your lead more and more.
But first, let’s start with the problems or challenges of a classic website relaunch. There are quite some of them:
What are often problems of a traditional Website Relaunch?
One big website relaunch “at once” involves numerous issues that are often underestimated. Whether it’s financial risk, a degraded search engine ranking, or impaired user experience – all these factors are part of a large-scale website relaunch.
- Financial Risk: The budget can easily spiral out of control due to unexpected technical challenges and subsequent adjustments, causing additional costs. Given the size of this “one-time” project, costs quickly become difficult to track. Due to changes, suggestions, and ideas that naturally arise during the implementation phase, initially unplanned costs can add to the sum.
- Search Engine Ranking Losses: The website’s search engine ranking can be significantly affected by a major website relaunch. Search engines and their algorithms dislike drastic changes, and it may take months for your site to regain its previous visibility – if at all! Of course, there are several steps to be considered so you can avoid this pitfall. This is possible. But in reality, still today a big website relaunch often leads to a significant drop in traffic. It can result in substantial short- to midterm revenue losses.
- Users Get Confused & User Experience Decreases: The user experience often suffers from a large-scale relaunch! Yes you heard that right. You might wonder why? Well, many UX improvements are applied within a website relaunch and thus many aspects are optimized, on the one hand. BUT on the other hand, when building up everything new from scratch, you can – and many do! – also throw away lots of proven practices and processes that were proven in the old website.
Just one example of many: Regular customers who are accustomed to structures and navigations of your site or app get confused or even angered by such extensive changes.
I have seen so many examples where such “alleged improvements” (or – let’s call them what they are – disimprovements) lead to frustration and weakened the bond with a website and brand. In the worst case, annoyed users may even get lost and migrate to the competition. - Bugs & Technical Issues: A major website relaunch frequently brings also technical difficulties. New features and adjustments can cause unexpected bugs that affect your websites or apps functionality. They all need to be identified and resolved before Go Live. Finding and resolving these issues can be time-consuming and, above all – once more – pricy. It’s this last quality assurance phase of relaunch projects, that has been in my project experience often very likely to overstretch budgets.
- Needed Team Trainings: A new CMS or a changed technology can require trainings for team to work effectively with it. This incurs additional costs and a temporary drop in productivity.
- Time Consuming: A complete relaunch requires overall an immense amount of planning and development time. Especially during the implementation phase, there are always unplanned changes, ideas, and suggestions.
- Awesome And Meaningful Ideas Get – Sadly – Often Rejected As “Evil Extra Cost”: Typically, many new and great ideas come up while the team is deeply dedicated to the relaunch project. That’s a big dilemma: When taking these ideas into account, the project – again – takes longer and gets more expensive. When rejecting them, they will be – sadly – postponed. And finally they are – according to my experience often – never realized. Because there is no process and only small budget that continues to add such ideas after the relaunch is finished…. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able, instead to concentrate just on this one greatest idea, that has right now captivated all minds?
The Alternative: Continuous Improvement – A Website Relaunch Step By Step
Instead of a classical relaunch project, there is a proven alternative: Establishing a continuous improvement and innovation process. This enables more sustainable optimization and innovation. Instead of risking a lot by doing everything at once, this approach allows for steady improvement and optimization of your success, based upon ongoing data analysis and data informed decisions. Every small change brings valuable insights. Regular improvements keep the website constantly up to date with the latest technology and design.
This ensures that your company stays top of innovation and, besides that, avoids dangers of abrupt overhauls. Embrace a step-by-step relaunch and secure a competitive advantage through continuous, risk-free and innovative development.
The illustration shows the key advantage of a modern continuous over a traditional “all-in-one” website relaunch process: It is to be an innovation lead. And to gain with each little step more innovation headspace.
Continuous Improvement – Key Advantages At A Glance
By going your way with an continuous improvement approach, you can leverage these key advantages:
1. Control your finances better
By breaking down your relaunch into smaller tasks, you minify the risk of exceeding budgets.
2. Elevate your
User Experience
By small steps and with data-driven actions, you’ll excel faster and higher.
3. tailor the most effective Customer Journey
Learn more deeply than ever before which methods are truly successful and effective for your users.
4. understand your success Continuously
Analyze every change of your application. And every step of your users.
5. Focus 100% on what’s important right now
You can always be concentrating all your power on this one magic upgrade, that’s most important right now.
Read on below to get to know more about these advantages.
Do it like all those big online brands – With continuous improvement!
There’s a lot of proof out there for continuous improvement.
Let’s take a look at some really huge brands: You won’t ever see Google, Amazon, Booking.com, Airbnb and many more major online brands doing a website or app relaunch. All these brands really have embraced this advantage of a continuous integration approach, and integrated it into the core of their brands and their innovation processes. Indeed, exactly this technique is the core of what made them as big and successful as they are today.
Also Facebook and LinkedIn have followed this approach. Continuous optimization is the way how they thrived. How they advanced with a website, app, shop or any other platform step-by-step. How they apply this to their platforms. They not only do continuous optimization, but above that discuss ways how to scale the effects of this approach massively. Thus, in case you want to hear and learn more about them, check out the podcast “Masters of Scale” with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.
Cite from Mark Zuckerberg from the Podcast:
“At any given point in time, there isn’t just one version of Facebook running, there are probably 10,000. Any engineer at the company can basically decide that they want to test something.”
🎧 Listen to the podcast “Masters of Scale” with Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg here
Key Advantages In Detail
1. control your finances better
By breaking down your one big relaunch project into several small, agile tasks, you disperse and minify the risk of exceeding your relaunch budget. When budgets are consumed after the first tasks, comparably more tasks will be finished. Thus, you can pause or stop, wherever you are right now within the list of your tasks. Costs will be more likely to remain within your budget plannings.
2. Elevate your User Experience
Another advantage of the step-by-step relaunch is the reduced possibility of alarming or disorienting users. With major changes all at once, many users often feel lost, leading to a temporary drop in conversion rates. However, by making small adjustments repeatedly, users can gradually adapt to the changes and better understand them.
Also, you can ship faster iterations, for your developments don’t need to be perfect in their very first version. Instead, you can bring the new features, functions and contents faster (as MVP = minimum viable products). What means you get the very valuable user data and feedback earlier. And with that “real world feedback” you can improve everything even faster and better on point. This results in a continuously excelling user experience, that outperforms your market companions soon.
3. Tailor your most Effective Customer Journey
An effective customer journey is the centerpiece of a successful relaunch. Through targeted, step-by-step improvements, the user experience is continuously optimized, and users are taken on the journey. Each small innovation allows for gaining valuable insights into the behavior and needs of customers, which directly influences the next round of optimization. This not only makes the customer journey more effective but also more personalized and relevant!
4. Understand your success – through ongoing Analysis
A continuous relaunch also allows for checking after each small step whether the changes are developing as expected. User feedback and data analysis can directly influence the next steps, increasing the efficiency and success rate of the improvements. Through this iterative process, you can quickly identify which adjustments are well-received and which are not, and respond accordingly.
5. Speed up the pace of your implementation – and Focus 100% on What’s most important right now
With the continuous optimisation mindest and processes established in your organization, you can always be concentrating all your power on this one magic upgrade, that’s most important right now. You don’t need to bother exceeding budgets and deadlines. Just concentrate on it, do it, go live, check the data after go-live to see how it thrives. When it’s optimized, corrected and finished, go on for the next top most innovative idea.
One more reason to do it this way: You will speed up your implementation time of new contents and new features. Especially of those having the highest value and highest impact.
Doesn’t this sound awesome?
Bonus tip: Validate your ideas with A/B-Testing
Many of the small steps should also be validated through A/B testing. By testing two variants of a change simultaneously, you can identify and implement the most effective solution within the company. This data-driven approach reduces the risk of making wrong decisions and maximizes the positive impact of each change.
My Approach – How I establish datadriven & continuous improvement
The following steps represent my over years fine-tuned process for continuous improvement:
- Develop a data-driven strategy: After about 1 month, you will have a data-driven strategy in your hands that has already been tested in numerous projects.
- Understand better with data analytics & user research: After about 2 months, we have conducted a data analysis deepdive to determine when, where and why your visitors fail. In addition, we create within the analytics basis check a good technical setup.
- Improve your User Experience: We implement initial improvements to your online marketing with Conversion & UX Optimization as well as with A/B Testing after about 3-4 months.
- Build knowledge with my coachings: My field-tested coaching sessions build the knowledge for a data-driven culture and continuous improvement of your online marketing sustainably in your organization.
- Rinse and Repeat: After we have walked together through this cycle of improvements, we restart exactly this again and again: Strategy fine-tuning, more regular data analysis & user research. More UX optimization. Further coachings. And so on. All this for maximum speed of innovation and improvement.
I have written a new blog post about my continuous improvement process and framework:
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT – A PROVEN 5-STEP-PROCESS
Let’s discuss: What’s about your website relaunch?
So how is it with you and your organization: Are you and your team considering a website relaunch and are planning for deadlines and budgets being in plan, without SEO drops? Or, are you already in the midst of your relaunch? Or are you already a fan of continuous improvement and can add some more experience and aspects to the comments?
Please comment to let me know your opinion, your personal experiences and your tipps on this topic. And in case you are looking for some help how to switch to a continuous optimization process, my expertises are: 1. Help your team to establish a process and culture of continuous improvement and 2. Substantiate this all with data! Book an appointment and let’s talk about your challenges!