I want to talk to you today about A/B Testing and always keeping your website up-to-date. So, when we look at web design, I have a lot of clients that, in the past, have not really messed with their website much for maybe a few years. They have it designed, they spent a lot of money with an agency, and then leave it alone for two, three, or maybe more, maybe 5, 6 years, and they really don’t significantly change it.

So what happens is they get up to date with technology and then it stays stagnant and technology keeps going upwards. Finally, they jump up and are in line with the rest of the world.

Mobile Responsive Design is probably the most recent example of a website update that a lot of people didn’t do immediately and now everyone is finally catching up to it. But what if we thought about it a different way, and let’s take the best in-breed companies, and I’ll have you think about Amazon right now. So amazon.com, can you remember a time when they made a radical update to their website layout and changed it completely? No, because they haven’t done it.

Their website instead has improved in small increments literally on a daily basis. Now, that company and their entire business is based on their website so they do it all the time, but even if we made small incremental changes on a weekly or monthly basis, the website can stay up-to-date and current without having to have a radical design change.

One of the other challenges with radical design change is if you have a successful site and you completely change it, sometimes you throw the baby out with the bad water.

I’ve seen sites that have maybe a somewhat ugly design, but they work. They get it redesigned and suddenly they don’t perform as well. Instead, if you implement an A/B test on a regular basis to determine if a small change will improve or decrease performance, and then only implement winners, you’re constantly enhancing your site rather than taking two steps forwards or one step back.

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