A dramatic website makeover can be tempting when you want to keep up with the times. I think steady improvements often offer a better way to learn what works.
This is good old compound interest at work.
Small changes can add up over time. A full redesign changes so much at once that it can feel like starting over.
When you change everything at once, it is harder to tell which changes helped or hurt.
A smaller change gives you clearer feedback, so you can adjust the next one.
I have worked this way almost daily for eleven years. For the first five to seven, the gains were hard to see. Later, the gap between my starting numbers and current numbers became clear. This is compound interest and I love it.
What looks like overnight success is often years of accumulated work.
Many changes will disappoint you, but they still teach you what does not work.
Other changes will improve something. Let's say it makes your website 1% better. If you could improve something by 1% every day and compound each gain, the result after a year would be much larger than a single 37% gain.
Ship often. Learn quickly.
Like bodybuilding, it takes patience and repetition.
Looking at the histories of major websites, you can see how their designs have evolved over time:
- Apple (26 years)
- Microsoft (26 years)
- Amazon (25 years)
- Google (24 years)
- Wikipedia (19 years)
- Facebook (16 years)
- Google Maps (16 years)
- YouTube (15 years)
My approach is to keep improving, measure what matters and use the results to decide what to change next.