Why your website still doesn't convert after a redesign

The redesign that changed nothing

The scenario is a familiar one. A company notices that its website generates no enquiries, concludes that it looks dated, and invests in a redesign. The result is objectively better, with a faster site, a more consistent visual identity and a more pleasant experience overall. Six months later, the phone rings no more often than before.

At that stage the usual reflex is to blame the traffic, or to assume that the design still needs some polishing. A redesign is an investment, however, and when an investment does not deliver the expected return, the sensible move is to check the assumption it rested on before spending more in the same direction.

Every redesign rests on the implicit assumption that the problem was the form. There is a whole category of websites that design cannot save, namely those that showcase an offer nobody understands. The useful question is therefore less whether the new site is a success than what, in the project, was left untouched.

What design can do, and what it cannot

Design matters, and we have devoted a full article to the impact of design on sales, where the research is clear. The first impression of a website forms in a fraction of a second, it rests almost entirely on appearance, and that appearance is the first credibility factor users mention.

That finding needs some nuance, though. A website stages an offer. Design builds initial trust without supplying what that trust is about. When the offer is unreadable, visitors extend their trust to something vague, and that trust turns into nothing because they cannot tell what it should turn into.

This is the structural limit of any purely visual redesign. Good design around an offer that says nothing amounts to a beautiful package around a product nobody can identify. Design amplifies what exists, and it cannot create what is missing.

Buying services is a decision under uncertainty

Before turning to the research, it helps to set out the economic frame, because it explains why clarity weighs so heavily in your particular case.

A prospect comparing service providers cannot assess the quality of what they are buying before buying it. Economists in fact class professional services among the goods whose quality remains hard to verify even after purchase. Lacking any direct way to evaluate, buyers fall back on signals such as the clarity of the message, the consistency of the whole, and how easily they understand what is being offered.

This mechanism has two very concrete consequences. Whatever the prospect does not understand, they translate into risk. Perceived risk is always paid for somewhere, either in a longer sales cycle, because each meeting is spent clearing doubts the website should have removed, or in pressure on prices, because value that cannot be told apart gets negotiated like a commodity.

The brain trusts what it understands without effort

The first layer belongs to cognitive psychology. Researchers call it processing fluency, meaning the subjective ease with which the brain takes in information. A landmark review published in 2009 by Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer brings together dozens of studies on the subject, and its central finding is counter-intuitive. That ease spills over into judgement itself. Information that is easy to process is rated as more true, more familiar and more trustworthy than the same information presented in a more laborious way.

The most striking illustration comes from finance. The same two researchers showed that shares with an easy-to-pronounce ticker symbol outperform those with an unpronounceable one at the time of their initial public offering, even though the ticker says nothing whatsoever about the company. The gap then fades as investors gain access to real information. In other words, fluency weighs most precisely when buyers lack the elements to judge on substance, which is exactly the situation of a visitor discovering your company.

The literature also documents the opposite behaviour. Faced with information that is hard to process, consumers tend to postpone their decision or fall back on the default option. On a website, the default option has a name, and it is the back button.

The commercial consequence deserves to be stated plainly. An offer that is not understood is almost never rejected outright. It is postponed, and in a sales pipeline a postponement with no date amounts to a loss. As for the prospect who stays anyway, unable to tell apart what they do not understand, they compare on the only criterion that remains readable, which is price.

Too much choice delays the decision

The second layer concerns the breadth of the offer, and it rests on one of the best-known studies in consumer psychology. In 2000, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a jam-tasting stand in a Californian supermarket, sometimes with 24 varieties and sometimes with 6. The large display drew noticeably more passers-by. Among those who stopped, however, 3% bought, against 30% at the small display, which means ten times more sales with four times less choice.

A word of caution is in order, because this study has become a favourite of marketing blogs and is often quoted as a universal law, which it is not. The meta-analyses carried out since have shown that the effect does not occur under all conditions. It appears mainly when the decision is complex, when buyers have no established preference, and when they want to decide quickly and with little effort. Those three conditions describe, point by point, a business owner comparing unfamiliar providers for a purchase they rarely make, between two meetings.

The translation to the web is direct. A services page listing twelve offerings, or a menu with nine entries, is the 24-jar stand. Each added service widens the addressable market in theory. In practice it lowers the probability that a given visitor will recognise themselves and take action. This is a real economic trade-off between coverage and conversion, and most companies settle it without realising they are making a choice at all.

Not choosing is the riskiest bet

The third layer plays out at the level of the company itself, which is the territory of strategy. As early as 1980, Michael Porter formulated the hypothesis that became famous as "stuck in the middle". Companies that refuse to commit to a clear strategic line end up caught in between, with no identifiable competitive advantage, and underperform.

For twenty-five years, empirical research failed to settle the debate, largely because each study measured strategic purity in its own way. In 2007, Stewart Thornhill and Roderick White published a study in the Strategic Management Journal that clarified the question. They define strategic purity as a degree of consistency, the share of a company's activities aligned with a single competitive logic, and measure it across thousands of companies in four sectors, namely manufacturing, construction, retail and business services.

The result is worth quoting precisely. Depending on the sector, companies with a clear strategy sometimes do better than the others and sometimes do as well. In none of the four sectors, however, do hybrid strategies come out ahead. Never worse and often better, the pattern is asymmetric, and it overturns the intuition with which most business owners approach this decision.

Seen from the ground, committing feels risky. You see at once the revenue you are giving up and the requests you will no longer accept, whereas staying broad feels prudent because every door stays open. The data say the opposite. The option perceived as prudent is the only one for which a risk of underperformance has been measured, and the option perceived as risky shows none in these data. It is a kind of Pascal's wager applied to positioning, in which the choice that feels frightening is the one that costs nothing.

An honest caveat is needed here, as always. This study concerns competitive strategy in Porter's sense, the trade-off between cost and differentiation, and it says nothing about the number of services displayed on a website. The bridge between the two is a line of reasoning rather than a research finding. The underlying mechanism is the same, though, since a company that is inconsistent internally cannot produce a consistent message externally, and your website is the first place where that inconsistency becomes public.

What these studies do not say

Three limits deserve to be stated, because they honestly define what can be claimed.

These results are mostly correlations. Thornhill and White observe that consistent companies outperform, and they do not demonstrate that consistency causes the outperformance. The choice overload effect is conditional and does not apply to simple or repeat purchases. More recent work also shows that hybrid strategies fare better in highly unstable environments, where flexibility becomes an asset.

Finally, none of these studies directly measures the effect of an unclear offer on a website. The transfer relies on the logic of the mechanisms rather than on the figures, which is precisely why no magic percentage appears in this article.

How to read your own website

What remains is to turn all of this into a diagnosis. The exercise comes down to four questions, and it works best with your own site open in another tab, ideally while trying to read it as someone who does not know you.

The first question is who it is for. If your home page could suit any company in your sector, the answer is missing. The classic symptom is a message that talks about you, your story, your values and your tools, rather than about the visitor's situation.

The second question is what it solves. A services page organised by skills, such as website design, visual identity and SEO, describes what you know how to do. A readable offer is organised by problems, the ones your clients recognise as their own before they even know the vocabulary of your trade.

The third question is why you. Without proof, concrete cases or an identifiable point of view, visitors have nothing that sets you apart, and the comparison falls back on price as described above.

The fourth question is what happens next. A generic call to action at the bottom of every page does not organise any journey. The point is to know which precise action a convinced visitor should take, and whether that action matches their actual level of commitment.

If your site answers all four clearly, your problem probably lies elsewhere, in traffic or targeting. If it fails on two or more, the visual redesign was not the priority, and the next one will not be either.

The order of operations

The whole article really comes down to a question of sequence. Faced with a disappointing website, the common reflex is to start with the form, with a new art direction, new photos and new animations. The right order is the reverse. The offer comes first, covering what you sell, to whom, for which problem and with what proof. The architecture comes next, with the pages, the hierarchy and the journey. Design comes last, to showcase answers that already exist.

Reversing this sequence does more than waste the redesign budget. It locks the vagueness into a polished setting for the next three or four years, along with the sincere and mistaken belief that the matter has been dealt with.

At Nualt

This is why our projects never start with a mockup. They start with the offer, what it promises, to whom, and what sets it apart, because everything else follows from it, the site structure, the content, and only then the art direction.

We applied the method to ourselves. Moving from our former identity to Nualt involved exactly this work, choosing what we stand for, accepting that we would be fewer things in order to be identifiable, and rebuilding the site from there. It is not a comfortable exercise, which is precisely why it is worth something.

Sources

Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2009). Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to form a Metacognitive Nation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13(3), 219-235.

Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(24), 9369-9372.

Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995-1006.

Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R., & Todd, P. M. (2010). Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(3), 409-425.

Chernev, A., Böckenholt, U., & Goodman, J. (2015). Choice overload: A conceptual review and meta-analysis. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25(2), 333-358.

Thornhill, S., & White, R. E. (2007). Strategic purity: A multi-industry evaluation of pure vs. hybrid business strategies. Strategic Management Journal, 28(5), 553-561.

Porter, M. E. (1980). Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. Free Press.