By Allie Gamble

What’s so great about continuous improvement?

Continuous improvement is the third of three phases to completing a Growth Driven Design website.

But first, let’s back up, what is a Growth Driven Design website? Growth Driven Design begins with launching a “launch pad website” but then focuses heavily on testing, learning and improving–making small optimizations along the way, based on data and user feedback, and then repeating the cycle.

Creating a website with this approach will:

• Reduce the headaches of traditional webs design
• Maximize results
• Create opportunities to continuously improve your website and the user experience

So, why is phase three, continuous improvement important?

Why can’t you just launch a website and make changes when something stops working in a year or two? You may find yourself asking these questions at this point.

The overall goal of continuous improvement is to continuously test your website, optimize what you can, and pivot based on results.

Unless your goal for your website is to solely be a “billboard” for your company, you need to focus on continuous improvements post launch.

There are many tools you can use for testing, but one of my favorites that gives insights into conversion paths and user experience is Crazy Egg.

How do I start?

When beginning the continuous improvement process, you first want to put together a gameplan and wish list. Was there something you wanted to add to your website pre-launch that was out of budget or do you already know your homepage copy needs to be tweaked?

These are items to add to your list. To fully create your wishlist, use these steps to audit your new website.

1. Audience: Does the website have a consistent flow of visitors? Are these visits paid or organic?  
2. Value: Are the visitors finding value in what you have on our site?
3. Usability: Can visitors find value quickly and easily? Do they leave the site satisfied?
   1. Use the 5-second and 15-second tests here.
      1. The 5-second test states if you can look at a homepage for five seconds and then look away, do you what the website is about?
      2. The 15-second test begins the same way, but after fifteen seconds, you should also be able to know what you are to do next, by finding a primary CTA.
4. Conversion rate optimization: Audit your conversion funnels on your website. If at any point these can be shortened or simplified, it will increase your conversion rate.
5. Stickiness: Are visitors coming back to your website? If not, why not? What is your bounce rate?  
6. Personalization: At what point in the users time on your website do they find content or pages specific to their needs?
7. Assets: Think about what else can be added to your website to provide value to your visitors. More blogs, links to more relevant offers, form fills, etc.
8. Promoters: How do you create a website that is so awesome that the visitor recommends it to their friends and family?

Once you have established your wishlist, you will want to create high, medium, and low priority tasks.

Your high priority tasks should be wish list items from steps one and two, your medium priority tasks should be wish list items from steps three through five, and your low priority tasks should be wish list items from steps six through eight.

This keeps your list organized and provides a clear gameplan for your team to execute these improvements.

Once you have accomplished all of your high priority items, you will continue to move down the list. When you get to the point where all of the items on your wishlist are completed, you will repeat this cycle.

Like I previously mentioned, testing during continuous improvement is imperative to making data driven decisions and optimizations. So keep testing, keep optimizing, and keep improving to drive quality conversions!  

If you are interested in learning more about the website process as a whole, and don’t know where to start, download our Website Refresh Workbook!