Looking towards a redesign of our e-commerce website. Pros and Cons?

[theSwak]

Hello Webmaster World, this is my first question which is pretty general but I want to get a consensus of possible issues that I am not aware of. Mainly I see many pros to have a redesign, from efficient loading to something that is less clutter and easy on the eyes. But I geneuniely have a concern on making such big changes in the visual interpretation people view our site. A few questions brewing on my brain are...

Will big changes to our site, possibly have a negative effect on our current traffic? Why? What do I need to keep in mind to avoid this from happening?

What other things should I take in consideration? (SEO, Visual Design Interpretation, Ease of Use, Loading)

Has anyone else ever updated an e-commerce site with about 30k visitors a month? What advice could they give me before flipping the switch?

[rachel123]

Be sure to do some A/B split testing. Watch your bounce rates. Be sure that high traffic pages are easy to get to. Be sure to redirect old urls to the new ones.

A redesign is a huge undertaking but worth it if you do it up right. But don't fix what ain't broke.

Good luck!

[RhinoFish]

"Has anyone else ever updated an e-commerce site with about 30k visitors a month? What advice could they give me before flipping the switch?"

Load test it before releasing it.
Then load test it some more.
Finally, run some pre-switch load tests.

Work with marketing / PR and have some of your best customers preview the new store and provide feedback before it goes live.

[mattur]

+1 to rachel123 and rhinofish's advice.

Small changes often is what I'd recommend. Easier to test, easier to implement, easier to isolate what makes a difference - and it avoids discombobulating existing customers.

And of course make it as fast as possible. Then make it faster some more...

[arieng]

I strongly concur with the others on this one. Huge site design overhauls have a surprisingly high frequency of backfiring. Nothing is more discouraging that having to go back to an old design because the new is not converting as well and you have no idea why. Trust me, I've been there.

Let me ask you a question that might help put this into context --> When was the last time you saw a site redesign on Amazon.com? To the frequent visitor, that site seems to have been fairly static over the past 4-5 years. However, if you were to put a current version side-by-side with one from a few years ago they would have very little in common.

Amazon is constantly testing small changes to their site, probably hundreds at any given time. These small changes, often imperceptible to their users, are carefully tracked. Alone they may seem innocuous, but over time they add up to serious change. Moreover, every change is supported by data and their users are never put off by a huge change to their interface.

If there is a model for how to change a site's design, I think Amazon is it.

[theSwak]

Thank you for all the responses, this helps in giving direction for our redesign. Instead of going for a straight overhaul now, I will take the advice of keeping our changes small as we upgrade our overall templates.

A second question, since this is something I believe can help our performance of our website. We have years of changes with what I like to call dead code. Minor changes over the years that were implemented at one time but are now obsolete. I feel my first step in this process would be to keep the designs as close as possible and go through these templates and basically clean up the coding. I believe this speed up our overall loading time as well as cut down on browser compatible issues. I don't see why something like this should be taken in minor steps as it should have little effect on a person's experience. Is that safe to presume or even such changes should require step by step implementation?

[iambic9]

I'd second everything already said, we've just been through this process and it went great, but it requires LOTS of careful planning. I would strictly agree with doing some A/B split testing if you're going for a large visual overhaul, even the tiniest detail can have a strange effect on sales.

We've recently moved our site to a new dedicated server (with a new address) and took that opportunity to completely re-write the backend of our site. In a large number of instances we've managed to "make it faster some more" by a staggering 80% for some pages, and have made some major improvements in security, structure and SEO, this was a serious headache for us and has taken just over 2 months from start to completion but we're really glad we did it, and it means we'll be good for the next year or two. I think a lot of sites could do with an overhaul every few years, and between large updates keep tweaking and testing the small stuff, because there is always improvements to be made. Good luck!