Your website is a vital asset to your business. Indeed, it represents a significant source of income. Whether you use it to sell products, sign customers up for a service or collect leads, your website is essential to growing your business.

When we realise the importance of a website in an omnichannel mix, all we want is to maximise its scope and effectiveness to sell more and collect more leads.

Many believe that resetting the counter and doing a complete website overhaul is inevitable, which is why many companies are instantly turning to a solution that provides a complete site redesign. It is entirely fair, and after all, we, as a digital business, provide the best in the class site redesign.

Obviously, in some cases, the latter will prove to be necessary. However, another approach is less well-known, allowing to improve a website’s performance in a way just as sure, but more progressive: the optimisation of the conversion rate, often referred to by the acronym CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation).

First of all, let's make sure to discern the two approaches:

• Site redesign: Operation consisting of rebuilding the core foundations of a website to make it more agile and efficient. An overhaul usually involves a complete transformation of the code and design of the original website. This solution is particularly effective when, for technical reasons, the technology the actual website is based on no longer allows marketers to integrate their strategy due to multiple limitations (old systems, limited CMS capabilities).
• CRO: Continuous strategic approach consisting of optimising conversion rates on websites, mobile applications and marketing applications. It is very effective for websites with a clear objective that can translate into revenue. This approach is mainly based on scientific and statistical evaluations, such as UX procurement, qualitative and quantitative data and A/B tests.

To support the community of business leaders and marketing managers in choosing the approach that best suits their organisation’s specific needs, we have prepared an infographic that broadly compares site redesign versus CRO.

As you can see, redesigning and optimising the conversion rate are two completely different approaches that serve the same goal: get more sales/leads on your website.

A redesign will be favoured by those who have a website that restricts them and prevents them from innovating, creating and deploying digital marketing strategies. This choice will often be justified by technology, CMS limitation over time or by problems relating to the website’s infrastructure.

On the other hand, the CRO approach can be more agile and is ideal for those whose website does not prevent them from innovating or having any technology limitation. The problem to be solved does not belong to the platform’s core foundations, it rather concerns the design, the UX or the way of relaying their products/services to their users.

Let’s imagine the following situation:

You own a brick-and-mortar store that you want to optimise to achieve more sales. Would you start by pouring new foundations to straighten the entire building, or would you just have to rectify your store’s layout?

Suppose the current foundation poses a significant danger to your customers and yourself. In that case, you will first establish a new and more robust foundation to ensure that the store stands up and that no serious incidents occur in the future. If, on the other hand, you are not confronted with any problem of this nature, you will instead choose to give a lick of fresh paint, tear down the walls, rectify the windows or reorganise your shelves.

The same goes for your website! You should only rebuild your website if the core foundation does cause an issue for your customers.

To optimise your current site, a CRO approach will allow you to test various new changes and settings without having to tear down the old store and thus have to start from scratch.

Of course, not everything is necessarily black or white. It is possible, for example, to opt for a strategy geared more towards optimising the conversion rate but including a partial overhaul or vice versa. However, whether your business is physical or online, the idea remains the same: select the approach that allows you to get the best possible results as quickly as possible. To do this, the first and essential step is to familiarise yourself with the various options available to you.

If you are interested in learning more about the above, either for CRO or site redesign, please get in touch!