Why Growth-Driven Design is Essential for Your Website Redesign

What is growth-driven design? 

Growth-driven design is a more efficient website redesign strategy that focuses on continuous improvement by prioritizing the most important updates first to better evaluate user behavior and make data-driven decisions on optimization.

From the months of research, designing, and developing, to the significant financial investment required, marketers know they’re in for the long haul when it comes time to redesigning a website for their brand. Marketers need to consider several different factors when starting a website redesign project. But if time and budget concerns are of most importance, there’s a better approach than your traditional website redesign process: Growth-Driven Design.

What’s Wrong With Traditional Website Design

Growth-driven design challenges traditional website design paradigms, demonstrating that the way websites are typically built and improved might be fundamentally flawed. A conventional approach brings its known hurdles, including:

• High upfront costs
• Significant time and resource commitment: The process usually takes between three and six months (and sometimes even longer) depending on the scope
• A labor-intensive methodology requiring your teams to evaluate everything at once 
• Disruptive unknowns that can arise during the process causing unexpected project delays and increased budgets
• No prototype or trial-and-error run” to get feedback from users
• An unclear and often un-measurable impact on the business

Plus, after the initial launch, it’s difficult to make any significant updates or improvements without going through the entire time-consuming process again — meaning your site will stay static until it’s time to redesign another time.

Growth-Driven Design: Smarter, Faster, Stronger

Contrast that with growth-driven web design. This website redesign process takes an evolutionary approach, moving away from the “everything all at once” method and instead focusing on a few key improvements first, before using the resulting user data to make improvements to the rest of the site. By prioritizing the most important updates first, then taking a data-driven approach to making continuous improvements, you make smarter decisions about the design process, get the redesigned site up-and-running faster, and build a stronger website.

The Three Phases of Growth-Driven Design

The growth-driven design approach is made up of three phrases: strategy, launch pad, and continuous improvement.

Strategy

Similar to the traditional process of website redesign, this initial strategy phase should be used to dive into audience insights and define goals for the website redesign. Unlike the traditional approach, you’ll also use this phase to determine which updates to the website need to be prioritized first.

Launch Pad

Next, you’ll use your list of priorities to create a launch pad website. According to Hubspot, “A launch pad is a website that looks and performs better than what you have today but is just a starting point. It’s the behind-the-scenes process that helps you build an amazing website in record speed.”

During the creation of your launch pad site, you’ll want to zero in on high-value pages and focus your updates on areas that will have the highest impact. This might mean optimizing back-end code to improve page speeds, updating key components to boost SEO, or revamping content on your high-value pages (such as your homepage, key product/service pages, etc). During this quick launch, your iterative site will help you better evaluate user behavior and make data-driven optimization decisions in real time. 

T1 Tip: The launch pad phase is the time to switch to your desired new CMS platform, such as Hubspot, WordPress, or Adobe Experience Manager, and set up any needed analytics or additional tools so user data can inform future optimizations and set your team up for success.

Continuous Improvement

The launch pad website is your key to continuous learning and improvement. By analyzing the user data generated from it, you’ll be able to optimize the website by regularly updating and reconstructing the most impactful items one by one.

Make the Switch

Growth-driven design can require a mental shift for you and your teams, but for time and budget-conscious marketers, the benefits are clear. With the quick launch of a new site, you’ll start seeing ROI faster, and real-time user data and feedback will inform your optimization process. Your teams will also have more time to process and evaluate your website goals and needs, making for a less overwhelming and time-sensitive process and allowing for more intelligent and thoughtful decisions. You’ll also shift operating expenses away from significant upfront costs. Instead, you’ll use a budget spread out over time as opposed to all at once — a much less risky implementation for your bottom line. 

If you have more questions whether growth-driven design is the right approach for you,  we’ll leave you with this: Brands using growth-driven design report 14% more visitors, 17% more leads, and 11% more revenue after six months.

Learn more about how Tier One, a Hubspot partner agency, can help you take a growth-driven approach when it comes to your website redesign.