Website redesign: London Vision Clinic launches new website and sees a 21.75% reduction in bounce rate and 22.91% increase in organic search visits
We launched the London Vision Clinic Website v4 on March 22, 2011 after a 3-month website redesign project. Comparing the Pre-launch against the Post-launch month-to-month period, version 4 outperformed version 3 in almost every metric available. We observed this pattern in home page analytics and in site-wide analytics.
Before and After: The Home Page Only
The homepage continues to see the majority of all Pageviews on the website. However, this page has significantly decreased in relative importance (v3 = 25.91%; v4= 18.61%) when compared to the rest of the site (the other pages in the site are getting more relative traffic than before). Still, the performance of this page is critical to success.
The most impressive improvement here is the 21.75% reduction in bounce rate (the percentage of single page visits resulting from this page) and the 26.16% reduction in exit rate (the percentage of site exits that occurred from this page).
A decrease is time on page, which is seeing a reduction of almost 28%. The change in this metric can be interpreted in a variety of ways:
- the page is read more quickly because it is more scannable
- people find what they are looking for faster
- or there is a reduction in the load speed.
Considering the lowered bounce rate, we believe that this change is due to people finding what they are looking for faster than before, and following through on to other pages as a consequence.
If the page were less engaging, we would probably see an increase in exit and/or bounce rates – instead, we see the opposite effect.
As you’ll see below, time on site has increased across the site, which also serves to validate this interpretation that v4 is more engaging the v3.
Before and After: Site-wide Visitor Behaviour
Across the site, we also saw significant and consistent gains. It is important to note that the only significant decrease in performance (New Visits down by -2.32%) is attributable to off-page factors (in particular paid search visitor volume – see below) as opposed to on-page factors.
Before and After: Organic (SEO) Search Engine Performance
Month-to-month search visits from organic search have increased by 22.91% since the launch of v4 (accounting for almost 5000 incremental visitors month to month). The drop in new visits and increase in returning visitors (considered with an increase in visits) suggests that more visitors that originated from organic search are returning to the site. This suggests that the site has more loyal visitors that before.
Before and After: Site-wide Content Overview
We have also seen consistent improvements across the number of pages visitors see, the number of unique views across different pages, and a reduced bounce rate across the site. This data could be interpreted to suggest the site is more engaging to visitors and provides visitors with content that is more aligned with their expectations. These statistics are also influenced by the fact that more visitors are hitting the site.
Acknowledgements and Credits:
The LiveseySolar team involved in the development of this website:
- Christina Hildebrandt who managed the project from start to finish
- Michelle Nottebrock who designed and developed the website
- Tiya Makwana who provided copy editing, HTML formatting, and image processing
- Charmaine Brink who managed the administrative details surrounding the project
- Neil Matthews who provided technical support
- Laura Livesey who provided creative direction
- Rod Solar who provided strategic direction
Please visit the site.