How to plan, execute and monitor a site redesign

Contentsquare can be used before, during and after the process of redesigning your website. There are a number of steps you can take at each stage, to help deliver an efficient and effective redesign.

To help you better plan out your site redesign project, here's a list of some best practices on how to make changes to your site without disrupting data collection.

Prepare for the site redesign

• Share your staging or BETA site with Contentsquare before initiating the redesign. This ensures a thorough check of tag functionality and prevents data loss from day one. Provide site details to your Customer Success Manager.

• Organize your key pages with a logical naming convention and date, clearly identifying them as part of the old site.

• Rename any existing mappings, goals, and segments to align with your old site. This aids in seamless pre/post analysis during later stages.

• Export the last three months' data from Page Comparator, focusing on key conversion goals and micro-conversions for comprehensive insights.

During the redesign

• Confirm the presence of the Contentsquare tag on the live site. If your redesign involves a gradual rollout, implement a custom variable or URL parameter to distinguish between the old and new versions.
• Ensure your custom variables are defined correctly within the data layer for your new site - these are really helpful for setting up mappings!
• Create a mapping for your new site, and set up goals and segments for any behaviours or groups you want to analyse.
• Create a dedicated Dashboards to monitor pre/post performance, and set up AI Alerts for key metrics like bounce rate, load time, and conversion.
• Zone up the main pages on your new site.

After the redesign

• Five days post-launch, request a data check from your Customer Success Manager to ensure alignment between Contentsquare data and other analytics tools.

• Do a post-launch analysis by referring to the detailed step-by-step analysis recommendation provided below

Post-launch Step-by-Step Analysis

Dashboards

The first step is to take a critical look at the results of the redesign based on pre- and post-launch main KPIs progression. Using Dashboards to start, you can get a view of the session level metrics for each group.

1. If you haven't created a dashboard, easily set one up using built-in templates. Navigate to Dashboards and begin with the 'Site overview' template for automatic population of your key metrics.

Learn how to create your first Dashboards and analyze your data using the Site Overview dashboard template.

2. Select the Comparison mode in the Analysis context. Then, apply the time period before and after the redesign launch for comparison. Key metrics to look at are:

• Revenue
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Line chart of over time progression of the number of sessions/conversion rate

Note down the answers to the following questions:

• Is there an impact on conversion and revenue? 

• Are there any spikes or sudden drops of the bounce rate?

• Have a look at how the global metrics are tracking? Is the change improving in some indicators but not translating to an overall improvement in conversion? If so, you need to start analyzing why this is so. Now is the time to start really drilling down and make a deep dive analysis in the rest of the modules in Contentsquare.

Page Comparator

Page comparator is useful for getting an overview of different segments’ activity on a given page: Did it impact any of the key UX metrics on the page?

To begin your analysis, open the Page comparator and select the Comparison mode in the Analysis context . Then, select the two timeframes for comparison - before and after the launch. Next, favor the key pages (or the ones that were part of the redesign) you want to analyze and look at the following metrics:

• Check the exit/bounce rate of your key pages to figure out if the changes made are helping in retaining your visitors

• Look the load time to understand If the change had an impact on the loading speed of any of your key pages

• Apply different conversion goals (link those to the predefined objectives of key pages) to understand how the changes are impacting the micro conversions of your page: are your visitors now more likely to achieve the goal you’ve set? 

Journey Analysis

Use the Journey analysis to understand if the redesign has affected the key journeys on the site: Do the journeys differ in pre- and post-launch periods?

Open Journey analysis and in Comparison mode apply your two time periods: before and after the redesign. By comparing the two Journeys from landing pages you can really understand:

• Where your visitors go after landing on your site? Are there any notable differences in the browsing journeys?

• Is the change aiding their overall navigation or disrupting their journeys by creating stumbling blocks? Are they seeing any unexpected pages (e.g., Error pages)?

• Is there any looping or unexpected journeys: are they more likely to loop back between any of your key pages or going through an unexpected path (e.g, from Quote journey to Homepage)?

Zoning Analysis

How does interaction on elements on the page differ between the two versions? With the Zoning analysis you can get an in-depth understanding of the user behavior on the page.

Open the Zoning analysis, activate the Comparison mode by clicking on the Compare button. Change the default time frame to suit your analysis needs. Analyze the following metrics:

• Look at the click rate, attractiveness rate, engagement rate. Are previous attractive elements correlating to what you are seeing on new site? Have attractive elements become less exposed as part of the new design?

• Check how the hover rate, time before first click and click recurrence are trending. Did the change have an impact on interactions in any other way?

• Look at the conversation rate of the key elements of your page. Select the goal of your page as the conversion goal (e.g., ''Add to Cart' as the goal of the Product page, etc.). Are the users in the new site having an easier time finding what they're looking for?

Post-launch monitoring with Dashboards

Performance monitoring

A crucial step of the successful redesign n is the monitoring the performance of the new site/pages to ensure it is operating within acceptable performance levels. Tracking page load times and key KPIs will help you quickly identify and resolve performance issues and minimize downtime and prevent user frustration. 

Here some of the key widgets to include in your dashboards :

• Number of sessions
• Percentage of sessions
• Views/sessions
• Site and page Bounce Rate (or exit rate if in the Quote funnel)
• Load time (use an “All pages” mapping)
• Ecommerce conversion rate
• Conversion rate for the page main goal: Start a quote, passthrough rate, etc.
• Pass rate for each funnel step
•  Load time of a chosen specific page and its impact on other key metrics such as conversion or exit rate (through a line graph)
• Any other KPI that you would like to monitor

Example of a dashboard used for monitoring load time by using the following widgets: Line charts of 'Checkout load time vs Exit rate', ''Checkout load time vs Conversion', 'Cart load time vs Conversion', 'Cart load time vs Exit rate'

Tip. Use the analysis context bar to check the evolution and impact of load time on different devices or different segments based on browsers etc.

User behavior analysis