Cautionary tale for y’all today. And if you think it ain’t relevant to your biz cuz it’s about an ecommerce site – think again Chuckles.
Here’s the scoop…
… a friend of mine is a beast at running ecommerce sites/Google AdWords Shopping campaigns. He built a very successful ecom site years ago, sold it for a nice chunk of change but has continued to manage it for the new owners since.
The site was sold again recently and the new owner decided to make some changes (against my buddy’s strong warnings/objections).
So to assert his dominance, the new guy redesigned the website, changed hosting (from dedicated hosting to shared), changed the ecommerce software engine and did a few other things to “tinker” with the site.
The result?
Sales dried up like a camel’s rear in a sandstorm. To the tune of a 99% drop in revenue in about 4 days!
This sort of scenario is more common that you think.
One of my other friends runs a large PPC managment agency that works with dozens of clients that spend – at a minimum – 5 figures a month just on paid advertising.
Over the last year, 5 – 10 of those clients decided they needed to make some design and other changes to their sites.
And, guess what… not ONE of those changes led to them making more money. It was just a matter of how BAD things got after the changes were made.
When you change the design, server, ecommerce platform, etc. on a website, it’s a BIG freakin’ deal. And it will almost always have consequences you aren’t anticipating.
It can (and usually does) screw up your SEO efforts and/or paid ad efforts and/or tracking and/or lead flow and/or money in the bank flow, etc.
If things are going even fairly well DON’T muck it up!
Don’t let some prima donna designer come along and convince you your site needs to refresh…
… Don’t let some techie engineer come along and convince you to change servers or ecom platforms…
… Don’t let some snake-oil peddling salesman come along and sell you on whatever wholesale change to your site…
… cuz assuming what you’re doing now is making some bitcoin, what they’re suggesting likely ain’t gonna end well for you.
Now, listen, I’m all about improving and optimizing and trying to make things better. So if you do want to change your site around, here’s how you do it…
… slowly and incrementally.
If you make a bunch of changes at once, you’ll never be able to pinpoint the problem if things go south.
So compartmentalize. Make ONE change. See how it goes. Then make another change. See how it goes. Rinse and repeat. SLOWLY.
And if you wanna tinker with major design changes… set up a completely new URL, put the site with the new design on it and see what happens. Then if, and ONLY if, things go well should you even consider making those changes on your main URL.
And, lastly, before you make any change make sure you have a BACKUP of your site before the changes. Cuz if the you-know-what hits the fan and you find your “improvements” send leads and revenue tumbling, you want to have the option to restore everything to the way it was before you messed it up.
