If you’re not getting the results you’d expect from your website, a little site redesign or tweak might be in order.  But how do you know what kind of change to make?  How do you know where the problem lies?  And what sort of impact will changes have on the success of your site?  These are all questions that anyone thinking about a site redesign should consider.  While it’s true that making changes in the way your site looks or works can have dramatic positive benefits, the opposite is also true:  the wrong kind of change can actually make a website perform less successfully than it previously was. 

MarketingSherpa has another excellent case study illustrating how one website put their site to the test to determine the answers to those questions.  And while individual testing would have taken 24 years, ParrotSecrets.com was able to complete its tests in just two months… with excellent end results.

Research had shown that ParrotSecrets needed to test 20 factors of 7 different variations to fully experiment with their site design.  I’m not a math whiz, but luckily MarketingSherpa is.  That equals out to a whopping 24 years if tested individually.  With 83% of its visitors leaving the site within 30 seconds, ParrotSecrets didn’t have 24 months, let alone years, to get things turned around.  After two years the site was only able to muster 0.4% signup rate for it’s free newsletter. 

Using software specifically designed to test website design, ParrotSecrets came up with 16 website variations.  They tested those variations using a rotating design system, entered the results into the software, and came up with 2 “best-bet” designs.  A second set of tests was conducted on 4 different variations produced by their software.  Total time investment:  2 months.  Not bad when you consider the alternative (24 years).

The redesign paid off for ParrotSecrets.  Revenue increased by 85% and newsletter signups increased by 600%.  The number of visitors leaving the site within 30 seconds also dropped from 83% to 55%.  In addition, the company determined that it was actually undercharging for its product.  Raising the price to closer match the perceived value of the product certainly helped.  When combined with higher sales, ParrotSecrets definitely came out ahead.

Give the full case study a read for more details and for a link to the software ParrotSecrets used to help optimize its site design.  What could you do with an extra 85% revenue?