ALERT! This month’s website mastermind group starts on the 16th. We pushed back a week due to many parents with kiddos heading back to school! Click here to signup and join us – we still have a couple of seats left.
When it comes to improving your website, a lot of times I encounter resistance – from clients, but even when working on my own stuff – because of the fear of making mistakes. After all, it is possible that if you change something to try and improve it, you could make it worse.
What’s one to do?
Face those fears, folks.
The fear of “making things worse” is understandable, as it is part of our wiring. Back in the days of living in caves and foraging, if the times are good, let’s not change things, even if they could be better. Because, ya know, we could end up starving and die if we make a mistake.
Nobody reading this is going to starve and die if you end up making a mistake when optimizing your website. Keep telling yourself that.
Now, getting into the specifics, I find that most website projects fall into two buckets:
- Something is not working: A sales page is not converting. Customers are confused by your branding and language. You’re frustrated, they’re frustrated. In this case, it really can’t get much worse, eh?
- Something is working, but could be better: Many websites do “OK” but there is lots of room for improvement. In this case, there is a true opportunity for something to actually get worse rather than better. But, you could always revert back to the original plan, right?
No risk = no reward.
Here’s the rub with upgrading, optimizing, tweaking, changing, massaging, cuddling, corralling websites: where there is reward, there is always risk.
Often, when we try to increase something – signups, sales, engagement – it comes at the expense of something else.
Often, no matter how many tests you run, how many users you get feedback from, you’ll make a change to your site that just doesn’t land well.
(And every time you launch a new website? Someone will complain that they liked the old one better. People hate change. It’s a thing.)
If you want to improve your changes on the web, you have to accept that sometimes, you’ll get it wrong. Yes, I get it wrong all the time. The market changes, you change, your customers change – sometimes you’re right one day and then wrong the next.
Be prepared to make mistakes – getting things wrong on your website is just part of the process of getting them right.
Don’t forget: This month’s website mastermind group starts on the 16th. We pushed back a week due to many parents with kiddos heading back to school! Click here to signup and join us – we still have a couple of seats left.