What does a website redesign really cost you when it goes wrong?

Transcript

Charles Travers: Hey guys, welcome back to another week of e-commerce marketing chats with myself Charles and the main man Jimmy Jimmy. How’s it going, mate?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I feel like I’ve been on zoom calls all day today. So, it’s nice to have a little break and then jump on another one with you. But, yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a bit of a hectic week. I might start off with a, let’s start off with a story that from one of my clients this week, but I just, I just see it happening like ⁓ still in this industry. So what happened was they got full website redesign, right? So they, had some problems with their website. They wanted it fixed. They went for a full redesign. Um, but, uh, a couple, a couple of mistakes that they made. Um, one, didn’t keep their, they didn’t keep like their freelancers that had working on SEO or Google ads in the loop. So the site went live and we were being told in, uh, February that it was going live. So I was checking it. And then, um, the, lot of the apps stopped working. They’re, they’re Google analytics code was removed from the site on the, um, the website change. They changed the homepage and the homepage before had a lot of texts on it. now. Their like rankings have completely tanked for like keywords that were homepage was ranking for their Google ads lost probably like five days of data because I just, I didn’t, I didn’t know that they updated the website. And then the, were doing a GA four goal import on that particular client, which was a pain. It’s like one of the only ones I’ve got it done. then they stripped the GA four tracking code from the. something that they’ve spent like on, to like improve results, start of this month, they’ve, they’ve already lost 13,000 on what they did last month. ⁓ yeah, it’s, and I like, really like these guys too. So it’s looking at it and I’m trying to help them out as much as I can, but even like going out, outside the scope of Google ads. I’m like, need to change this, this, this, and this, but there’s a whole list, but it’s not what you want to hear as a business owner. When you’ve just invested like 12 grand in the site and then you’ve got all these problems and you’ve actually lost more revenue, from the period of the month last month, then you like forking out all this money for a website redesign. So there’s a, a couple of lessons here that If you are looking to getting your website redesigned that you need to keep the stakeholders that are doing your marketing in the loop, every step of the way and get their feedback. And two, need to work with someone reputable that knows what they’re doing with like a website change. don’t, I’m not sure. Sure. The, the website looks slightly better. wouldn’t say it’s a wow. Like it’s heaps visually. and there’s a few. There’s a few elements to it that are like a much better functionally. So for example, one, one of their products, have to, can ⁓ a custom photo too, and you get that, you get that photo on the, on that product. but before they upgraded the website, you had to like email them and then email them the photo. Like it wasn’t an intuitive user experience. So they’ve improved things there, but they’ve just like destroyed the website in. every marketing capacity you could imagine, like in the meantime. Um, it’s pretty clear that whoever built the website had none of that in mind. It’s just like, Hey, let’s just make this website look better. Um, and now for w for whatever reason, over the last two weeks, the site is just being hammered with spam. And I mean, like they’re getting, I don’t know, like 500 visitors a month usually. And now their sessions are like eight to 9,000 a day, like, and their conversion rate is just gone to like 0.0 something because of all the spam traffic they’re getting. So they are just getting hammered by one thing after the other. And to be honest with you, it sucks for them, but it’s a series of, it’s a series of poor decisions and poor communication. yeah, the, the stakeholders that we like this client, they’re great. So we’re doing everything we can to, to try to. Revive this, this site, but, had a bit of life in the Google ads, this week, but far out. just, it’s, I haven’t even told straight how bad it is. Cause it’s, it’s, it’s a bit in, how do you tell a business owner that just invested 12 K? Hey, like everything you did has made things worse. ⁓ yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a bit, bit of a rough week on that front.

Charles Travers: Yeah, it’s a difficult conversation. Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, exactly. And, I think, I think business owners get frustrated too. And it’s, it’s just like, don’t know the solution though, cause there’s the people that offer these services, they’re obviously market own services. Well, they just do. They, I don’t even think the website wasn’t absolutely horrible, but they’ve just like destroyed SEO and destroyed all the marketing tracking that was in there initially. ⁓ Now it’s just like trying to gather the momentum that was there beforehand. but instead they’ve got like a massive hole in revenue that’s now missing. So I kind of want to tell this story for people in the e-commerce space to, cause I think, especially with AI coming, there’s a lot of people that, probably going to offer really cheap website revamp services because the barrier to entry to, kind of build these websites now is so low. and you can do some amazing things if you’re kind of across the AI space and especially with flawed code, being able to integrate directly into Shopify now and design themes and change themes ⁓ that stuff is going to the cost to get that done is going to come down dramatically because the expertise needed is, much lower and the expert. that the really good level of expertise that you do need, they can kind of do it more at scale now. Like it’s faster for them, even with these kind of AI integrations. But I would say that there’s a, there’s a lot to, there’s a lot to changing a website and it’s not just about the aesthetics. the, you’re looking to get your website redone, the number one, the number one focus should be conversion rate. Cause it’s, it’s all that matters. If you’re updating your website, you’re only doing it because you think it’s going to increase conversion rate. If you’re doing it for aesthetics and it doesn’t increase conversion rate, what’s the point? Like why, if you, if you’re going to change something on your website and it’s not going to improve how many people are purchasing on it, there, there is literally no to it at all. ⁓ But think this client went ⁓ into with the expectation to fix a few of the UX. ⁓ And with the goal of, guess, of increasing conversion rate and it’s just add some of the UX features have improved, but the conversion rates tanked and lost a lot of organic traffic. So ⁓ I’m you’ve got your own horror stories, Charles, the website migrations that you’ve seen just absolutely tank as well with zero communication and just someone that doesn’t know what they’re doing or haven’t done it before jumping in the deep end and.

Charles Travers: Yeah. ⁓

Jimmy Dalgleish: So yeah, this is a great idea. then later, quite realize the consequences of basically what they’ve just done to their business until it’s too late.

Charles Travers: Yeah, I wish I’d like to say that I’ve never seen any any brand commit any, you know, poor website migrations, but I would be lying to you, Jimmy. There’s been, know, I’ve done a few audits over the years and I’ve seen a few. I’ve seen plenty of horror stories, but you know, everything from a site that had Basically migrated their blog off of their main website onto a sub domain or actually sorry onto a brand new domain and the owner wasn’t even aware of this and they lost basically all of their blog traffic, which was a significant amount of overall I’ve seen sites have been with no ⁓ SEO titles moved over descriptions and basically that’s just tanked all their page rankings. I I could go on and on. There’s been numerous occasions. where I’ve come in, unfortunately, the fact. And that’s the problem. Most hire, if you need a new website, you hire a web agency or a slash agency. The problem is a lot of these agencies, they just focus on that one area and they don’t typically tend to have… a good oversight of even just the SEO foundations and making sure that you’re mitigating risk when you’re, you know, launching a brand new website and or migrating across to a different domain, etc. There’s so many different scenarios. yeah, it’s very unfortunate, especially for the you know, owner of the business who’s ⁓ a large chunk of money and, you know, think they’re going to get a better. Effectively a better product that’s going to sell them more And actually they’ve gone backwards So yeah, it’s super important to make sure that you’ve got the the foundations in place from tracking to SEO To you know your ad setup and make sure that you don’t lose any of that momentum that you’ve already gained over the years

Jimmy Dalgleish: even be, I just thought about it there. It might even be worth us like putting our brains together and just creating like a checklist for, if you want to, if you want to update your website, these are all the things that you consider before you do it. So, Charles and I might put our heads together and do that and, post it in the Facebook group and, Shopify marketing secrets. So if you go in there and just comment checklist, we’ll, we’ll put one together. even, even after this week, they should check this, they should check that they should check this. So, I think, I think I think the important thing too, is just keeping people in the loop. Cause if, if you tell like, if they had told me the day that the website would have been live, I would have been checking it thoroughly and making sure everything was working properly. probably could have like mitigated like some of the damage, but didn’t tell me for two weeks after it went live. ⁓ yeah, it’s like, and you’re managing Google ads, you’re not like actively going on ⁓ website, like every day. So I’m checking if the website’s new or not, you know? ⁓ and even if I was, to be honest, the changes were, I thought pretty minor. So ⁓

Charles Travers: Yeah, that’s crazy. Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: I probably would have been questioning myself whether this was the live new website or not anyone. but yeah.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah, you just thought it was a slight, yeah, it’s like refresh with a few pages. Yeah, I think also it’s

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yes.

Charles Travers: Especially with if you’ve got a larger scale e-commerce store, know Shopify store and you’ve got you know Hundreds if not thousands of product skews It’s even more important because it becomes a lot the migration becomes a lot more complex, you know when you’re redesigning a site, it’s not necessarily complex But if you don’t have the foundations in place, then it’s a real mess Because you haven’t got like you haven’t set up the right redirects, you know all those type of things that are important make sure that yeah you don’t lose any potential rankings but yeah these these these situations happen

Jimmy Dalgleish: This, um, this client too, like I’m one of their hero, you mean, uh, one, I’m one of their hero products, right? They, they had in brackets in the product title, like Melbourne and Sydney. And when, when I had a, when I had a call with them, I’m like, Oh, does this particular product only ship to Melbourne and Sydney? I was like, no, it’s Australia wide. I’m like, why does it say this? Like if I was coming from anywhere other than Melbourne and Sydney, there’s no way I’m purchasing this. So it looks like it’s only for. Melbourne and Sydney and they’re like, Oh, we were trying to rank for Melbourne and Sydney. I’m like, no, that’s not how this works. Like you can’t put that in a product title. can’t put the location in it in a product title. Um, and then you basically cutting off anyone that’s not from Melbourne and Sydney when you do ship it Australia wide. So there’s a, yeah, it’s kind of, it’s been a bit of coaching, I think this week for them and Yeah, I just, just wish the communicate it’s if, if a business owner listening to this or an e-commerce owner and you do have freelancers and other people managing certain parts of your marketing and you haven’t spoken to them in a while. find this as a, so as a media buyer, I try, tried to get this client on a call for two months. I just have not been able to, you need to be. ⁓ communicating with the people that are running those aspects of your business. No matter how busy you are, you need to make time at the minimum once a month. you should be taking, talking to your media buyer at an absolute minimum once a month. and yeah, honestly, helps do my job too. If I know what’s happening in the business, I know what’s important to you. I like talking to my clients. Some, some media buyers will say, you know, ⁓ If I don’t hear from the client, it’s great. Blah, blah, blah. don’t like operating like that. I want to work with you. I want to hear from you. What’s working, what’s happening in the business and making sure what I’m doing is aligned with, with what’s going on. ⁓ it helps get the results and Charles, know you’re the same. know you find it hard to get onto some of your clients as well, but when you have, get them on the call and you have a really constructive conversation, makes a big difference for the results. Even over the next week, you can notice it. So. Yeah, I think if you, if you are an e-commerce business owner and you haven’t spoken to your media buyer for a while, get onto them. And I will say this, from the media buying side, the clients that get onto chat regularly are in communication with you. They, it’s one of those, it’s almost like, what do they say? The, the squeaky wheel gets the oil or something like that. You know, it’s like, if, that if you’re on the top of that media by his mind, if, if you have two tasks that you have to do today and it’s between a client that you hear from regularly versus a client that you never hear from, you’re to do the client first that you hear from regularly. Like it’s just, it’s just how it works.

Charles Travers: Yeah, well, it’s exactly the same if you’re, you if you’ve got an SEO agency on board, the same with immediate, like I’m the same as you, Jimmy. Like I want to, there’s certain things that I need approval on for my clients being able to. know, publish new pages you know, maybe I’ll spot in an opportunity to build out a new collection page, which has got a decent amount of searches per month. But I want to know from the client, are they actually selling that product or do they have enough products within that collection to build out a new collection page? But if I, you know, there’ll be scenarios where I might not hear back from that client for a month, two months, which, you know, It’s just it’s too long. Basically, it just extends that time in terms of getting that page executed and it just means that results will take you know, you’re gonna it’s gonna take longer to see results. yeah, that’s certainly probably, you know, one of the frustrating parts about kind of service providers and what we do. But yeah, if you’re paying, you know, you’re paying us then you ⁓

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. Yeah. Let me, let me give you an example of one of the, one of the clients that I, was working with recently. So I did get on a call with them and I was like, ⁓ this product that you’ve got is absolutely flying. Like, started to do a little bit more optimization around it. He’s like, and then he said to me, ⁓ I haven’t told you I’ve heavily discounted that product because I don’t want to sell it anymore. So it’s like, if, so if I, ⁓ hadn’t have got on call with him, I would just been looking at the data and like, the conversions for this product huge, like it’s flying off the shelf. So like, let’s do some more dedicated campaigns for this. Let’s build some more stuff around it. I mean, a complete waste of time, because as soon as he’s sold out of that, it’s not coming back onto the store. So you can, you can look at the data or all you want in the account, but unless you’ve got context sometimes from the business owner, then like there’s nothing in the Google ads account that would have told me that this client. And it’s just Even after the, over the scope of a week, you’ll have a much better kind of just overall picture of what’s actually happening in your business. I don’t understand it. Like I, if it’s my e-commerce business, I’d be wanting to speak to my media buyer almost weekly.

Charles Travers: Yeah, I think maybe there’s the assumption that whether this comes with with, you know, educating clients that we work with, but there comes with the assumption that maybe, you know, okay, Charles knows what he’s doing. Jimmy knows what he’s doing. I don’t need to ⁓ involved at all. But I think the problem is, is when you’re focusing on ⁓ area of marketing that e-commerce store there’s crossover with with other areas website you know email digital pr these these all impact

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, definitely.

Charles Travers: the results potentially that your area or your area of expertise can get, i.e. SEO, Google Ads. maybe assumption. Or sometimes, ⁓ always, are just stretched and they get too busy and they just just, especially, obviously, ⁓ most cases, they’re an agency that are working remotely. They’re not in the same… premises that e-commerce store Yeah, situations happen but you know communication like you said is key. I think as we’ve as we’ve Highlighted in this episode based on the that Jimmy is experienced with one of his clients this week

Jimmy Dalgleish: transition off that now and just talk about what’s in the AI space again for e-commerce and marketing. So Claude this has just released Claude Design and I have already seen a few videos and examples of people using it to build out like complete emails for Clavio. Yeah. If you are wanting to experiment with that, it’s definitely worth it. It’s so new. Like I’d love to give you guys more insight on it, but it’s literally been out for two days, I think. I haven’t had a, haven’t had a good play around with it yet, but, ⁓ yeah. everything too. you did. ⁓ what, what’d you think? ⁓

Charles Travers: I just tested it out actually Jimmy Sunday I was sitting there watching a movie, yeah, sitting there watching American Gangster the movie I don’t know if anyone’s seen that, it’s a good movie if you haven’t seen it. And was on my laptop of planning for the week ahead and I saw a tweet come out from Claude.

Jimmy Dalgleish: You

Charles Travers: the claude’s account and yeah i just set it up i was very impressed with what it can do like so all i did basically was i just you i set up what they call a design system so incorporated what it is I do with my brand colors and I just uploaded a proposal template a few documents and it created me like a really well designed new document which quite honestly if I a graphic designer I would be worried it was my thought

Jimmy Dalgleish: think the graphic designers worried a long time before ⁓ design even came out. now, it’s just, people have described it as like Canva steroids. but I saw it’s actually, because I saw Canva announced that, know, got a new integration with Claude, but I didn’t see Claude.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah, it’s…

Jimmy Dalgleish: And now as any partnership with Canva at all, all they announced was, got Claude design now. So it’s funny. Like you, literally, it’s it’s almost like the Trojan horse. so funny to watch in real time. Like Claude is getting like ⁓ built to all these other SaaS companies ⁓ that eventually just going to squash. You know, like, ⁓ it’s, it’s, crazy to watch. it’s, ⁓ it’s.

Charles Travers: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It’s almost like Amazon, isn’t it?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Like Claude is like the Trojan horse going in just…

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, no, you’re right. It’s almost you know the the analogy that I would use or the similar situation I saw was you remember with amazon so amazon, you know you had People that were able to sell on amazon and the best sellers were always eventually Sold by amazon they would create their own version and so so it’s slightly different But it’s it seems like the yeah the clawed are

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a supermarket model too. Like the supermarket, the best, the best sellers, the supermarkets just end up creating their own like home brand version of it. it’s like whoever’s got the data, but Claude, but never seen a company ever kind of ship features as fast as what Claude has. It’s just insane. Like every time I talk to, every time we talk Charles, I’ve like shipped out three new features. ⁓

Charles Travers: They’re coming after all, all SASS basically. Crazy and this is like on a weekly basis as well. We’re literally having like so now they’ve got effectively You’ve got the whole suite. You’ve got Claude as a general kind of chat bot. You’ve got Claude code for coding, know building out those those systems apps you’ve then got Claude co-work which allows you to Autonomously give tasks out to Claude agents and how you’ve got Claude

Jimmy Dalgleish: You

Charles Travers: design on top of that as well. what seeing is they’re going to start to kind of integrate even more effectively together. So there’s going to be kind of, I would assume that Claude designs going to more effortlessly collaborate with Claude code to build out, you know, apps, websites. ⁓

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I just thought, I just saw today they’ve, well actually it wasn’t today. was like four days ago, but they’ve apparently redesigned the desktop app as well. I haven’t played around with it yet, but, apparently it’s going to reduce the need for like an ID for when you’re coding. So basically make cursor or VS code like redundant. So they’re working towards that too, but Um, just before we started hit record on the show, Charles and I were just briefly talking about, uh, Charles was talking about the keyword research for cowork and you know, how it’s not quite there yet. And from the last meeting I went to on AI, um, the thing they always say like AI is, is, is as good as it needs to. It can be basically like it could do anything that you can do, but where people are going is they’re putting in baseline information, and expecting like the results at the level that they have the knowledge of. So the thing that I took away from everything is that the AI platform should be seen as almost an employee ⁓ and imagine new employee coming into your business that doesn’t know anything or know how to do anything. And you just saying to them, for example, like, okay, do this keyword research and see what they come up with. I still think AI is going to be better than that employee, but you need to, you need to ⁓ AI almost as if it’s an employee, ⁓ step by step, with you can create a Claude skill for a repeatable task. For example, if it’s keyword research. And like, try to instill as much as your knowledge that as you can. And I think you’ll notice that the results kind of improved dramatically. It’s what I’ve seen from, if give an example to, I’ve tested like a few product feed optimizers for Google ads or whatever, but I was never quite happy with them. They never quite gave the output that I want. And I’m like, okay, it’s not the AI. It’s the person that’s built this. doesn’t have the same knowledge that I have in this industry and what I’m looking for. it’s why, like, there’s a lot of solutions out there, but I like building my own because I’ve, got the nuances that ⁓ how I like to operate and I’m kind of teaching it to think and do how I would do it. But it’s a process. So I think, I think when you are working with AI, I think needs to keep that in mind. If you’re building out, sure, got the knowledge of everything that’s on the internet. But if you want to do it, if you want it to do the process you would do, then you’ve really got to have good systems in place. You’ve got to teach it. and you’ve got to, like, once it does a skill, if it does something wrong or something that you wouldn’t do, it’s going to teach it. You’ve got to say, Hey, Hey, Basically just talk to it like you wouldn’t employee. Hey, I saw you did this, but I really need you to operate this way. And can you remember it in future and add it to the skills? So when you go to do it again, this is how it started future. So I think, I think people need to definitely put in the hours to train it. ⁓ I think that’s where a lot of, a lot of people are falling down for some of the tasks that are being produced by AI, ⁓ AI at the moment.

Charles Travers: Yeah, for sure. I like to say the more Pacific and tailored the input, the better the output. I like the idea of what you said to me about, you know, treating it like a junior employee. What do do with a junior employee? Typically you give it plenty of direction, know, directions. And also you probably provide it with some form of SOP, which, you know, we’re thinking about this in the AI world. We’re talking about, you know, Claude skill or, know, a set of clear instructions. it’s like an MD file. So no, completely agree there. think you’re right. It can incredible, but you do need to give it the right inputs.

Jimmy Dalgleish: when we have a chat next week, we’ll probably have another five new features to talk about with Claude as well. But I’m to see the design side more. keen, definitely interested in testing that out a little bit more myself. But yeah, I’ll be building a couple of tools for clients and students this week around helping them optimize their product titles. Product titles is a…

Charles Travers: You

Jimmy Dalgleish: interesting one too, because everyone likes to optimize them in slightly different ways. And again, this is where I want to put my knowledge into the AI and like, Hey, this is how I want the product title written. Cause sometimes the product titles are written. And I was like, no, isn’t it. I mean, know that’s the template that you’re that was in this skill, but like we need to alter this. The brand isn’t that strong. So we can’t be having the brand name at the front of the product title. taking up the whole real estate. cause this is the thing people get like generic recommendations or product titles like, ⁓ you need the brand name at the front. ⁓ And It makes sense if you’re selling a supplement and it’s like the well-known brand. for example, herbs are gold in Australia is a, is a well-known supplement brand. ⁓ Most of product titles, when you look it up in Google, say herbs are gold. And then what the product is like vitamin C or vitamin D or whatever it is. But just think you’ve got like, I dunno, uncle Joe’s card trading shop. and you’re like, need my brand name at the front of this. And you’re selling like Pokemon cards. And then the product title says uncle Joe’s card trading shop. And that’s all you see in the product title. you need to think about that. So when, when people are saying, I’ll put brand name at the front, like, sure. If it’s got, if it’s got equity and it’s strong and it’s a household name, but especially in like tech product, for example, like Sony headphones, for example, but you’re not going to put a brand name. If you’re selling, say selling, I’m trying to think of a good example, like, like Fisher, I don’t know, fish aquariums or something. And, the brand is like, I don’t know, like ⁓ fish tank store or You’re not going to have. Melbourne fish tank store at the front of the title and then like by three meter fish aquarium after that. It makes no sense with the brand name at the front for that kind of product title. So there nuances to each and every category. And I think I’m trying to build that out in my like title building description at the moment. And it’s actually, I’ve been really impressed with the output. So ⁓ I’m hoping to roll that out in scale for a few clients and a few students, but yeah, man, we’ve already hit the half an hour. This call went fast tonight. think I think I enjoy the topics that we covered tonight. So hopefully the people listening did too. is anything else that you wanted to touch on Charles before we wrap up?

Charles Travers: Hi guys. No, I don’t think so. think we could probably, could go on for probably another hour, couldn’t we Jimmy? But I think that kind of wraps things up nicely. One I actually just quickly to finish on, ⁓ I reading an article from and just a bit of kind of positive news. It said the is the future-proof job and it’s got entrepreneurship and it’s talking about.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: how there’s a number of different stats here. Like more people are starting businesses more than ever in 2026. Said here since 2018 the number of shopify merchants who have made a first sale has increased by 7x so, you know as much as there’s a lot of doom and gloom with regards to Traditional markets and the traditional job market. I think if you are an e-commerce Store founder or you’re thinking about starting a store now is you know? the best time to do it this with the tools out there and easy it is to get a product to market now not to that you know building a store is easy, but It’s it’s the easiest it’s ever been in terms of being able to get started. So Yeah, hopefully if you’re listening to this podcast, you’ll get some some good insights with regards to the marketing side of things So yes. Yeah, share this this article in the episode notes, people can kind of take a look at it, but there’s a few kind of useful data stats from Shopify own website. yeah, exciting times ahead though, in terms of ⁓ can be achieved now with AI all this technology and building out like an e-commerce store that’s not reliant on huge overheads.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, definitely. I think we’ll wrap it up there. So if people want to check us out, you can check us out at eCommerce marketing chats on the podcasting platforms or come say hello to us on Facebook at Shopify marketing secrets and we’ll catch you there. We’ll see you next week guys.