You Launched A New Website; What’s Next?

Launching a redesigned or re-platformed website feels like crossing the finish line of a marathon. Months, sometimes years, of hard work are finally coming to fruition. You’re dreaming of the rest you’ll be able to enjoy now that the project is complete.

But you aren’t crossing a finish line; you’re summiting a mountain. Reaching the peak feels like completion, but experienced climbers know that’s only halfway. The descent is equally challenging and requires different skills and focus. In the same way, optimization requires a different approach than a website launch.

You’ve successfully achieved a huge accomplishment, but you’re only partway through. You still have to climb down the mountain or, in this case, optimize your website based on user feedback.

In our decades in business, we have discovered that the most successful companies view launch day as “day one” of an optimization journey. If you want to do the same, this is the playbook to follow to maximize ROI on redesign investments.

The benefits of optimization post-website launch

By leveraging optimization post-launch, you can expect benefits like the following:

• Objectively and quickly determined opportunities for change
• Easily determined priorities according to potential impact
• Less waste of resources on changes that won’t work
• Higher ROI because you have success rates at a lower cost

Leveraging optimization after launching a website is a high-performing, systematic way of getting better results from your hard work.

In an ideal world, you conducted a data-driven redesign. You carefully derived measurements of what was actually happening on the site and feedback from customers to inform the process.

In this case, you have already conducted user testing and received clear customer feedback on your new site. You’re set up to seamlessly start collecting post-launch data and begin identifying improvement opportunities to build on the momentum you’ve generated.

If you haven’t, don’t fret. You can still reap the rewards of optimizing your site post-launch. As long as you don’t “set it and forget it,” you’re in a much better position than most of your competition.

The best optimization tools post-launch

What do you need to get started?

Our recommended toolkit for optimization post-launch includes:

Quantitative data

• Google Analytics: Analyze traffic sources, user behavior, and conversion paths. GA is essential for comparing pre/post-launch performance and identifying underperforming segments or pages.
• Heatmaps: Visual representations of user clicking, scrolling, and movement behavior that reveal which elements attract attention and which are ignored. Allows you to optimize content placement and identify what does/doesn’t resonate.

Qualitative data

• Usability testing: Structured observation of real users completing key tasks on your new site. Reveals pain points invisible in quantitative data alone and provides direct insight into how customers actually experience your redesigned user journeys.
• Session recordings: Video captures of actual visitor interactions with your site that expose unexpected navigation patterns and friction points. Helps you identify where users get confused, hesitate, or abandon their journey on specific pages.
• Customer feedback tools: Direct voice-of-customer collection mechanisms, such as surveys and feedback widgets, that capture qualitative insights about the redesign, highlighting immediate improvement opportunities from your most valuable asset: your customers.

Experimentation

• Rapid testing: Quickly validate design and content changes without dev support. Get efficient feedback on elements like CTAs, headlines, and pricing or product page components.
• A/B testing or multivariate testing: Get statistically significant proof to validate riskier design and content changes without full deployment. Test in context and make sure any further website updates will drive target user behavior.

What to do post-website launch step-by-step

With those tools in mind, you’re ready to get started.

Step 1: Rapid response protocol and the basics

The best way to celebrate a website launch is to get your organization together for a post-launch bug-squash-a-thon.

During the first 72 hours post-launch, get cross-functional teams together to hunt for bugs on the new site. Document any technical issues in a central location and use a simple prioritization framework so your devs know what to tackle first.

Implement fixes while the bug hunt is going on so people see the improvements in real time and are motivated to keep searching. Keep in mind that some of these bugs will indicate larger UX issues, so don’t delete them after solving them; keep them available for review later in the week.

Your only other priority in the first three days post-launch is to ensure all of your tooling is set up correctly. Make sure your Google Analytics is tracking the right metrics, get your heatmapping software working on the new site, and be sure any customer support functions (chatbots, etc.) are up and running.

Step 2: Compare pre and post launch data

Revisit your baseline metrics to get started reviewing pre- and post-launch data. Specifically, compare KPIs before and after the redesign and compare those across top channels and device types to get a foundational understanding of what is working and where to dig in.

Example key performance indicators to track immediately:

• Conversion rates by traffic source and device type
• User engagement metrics (time on site, pages per session)
• Cart abandonment and checkout completion rates
• Customer acquisition costs vs. lifetime value

To effectively do this, set up before/after comparison dashboards and circulate them with your team.

Layer heatmaps on top of this to understand how performance changed on a page-by-page basis with more context.

When you identify where things aren’t improving, you can identify low-hanging fruit optimization opportunities and areas that need more testing to understand what is going wrong.

Step 3: Refresh user testing and competitive analysis

Once you have a baseline of data and changes, you’ll want to conduct user research and testing. Have real people use your new site to discover its flaws and give their feedback. If you didn’t conduct testing during the refresh process, you might also find it helpful to have them use both versions of your site (the old and the redesigned) to tell you which they prefer.

Even if you have plenty of user testing data on the old site, it’s crucial to gather impressions of the site update and collect ideas for additional optimization. You can send the site to the same user testers for comparative feedback, and also be sure to get your site in front of new users for an unbiased and completely fresh perspective.

Specifically, conduct usability testing with new users to help uncover accessibility issues and where customers are getting stuck on the path to conversion.

It’s also a good time to study your competitors. What features and systems work well for their digital properties? Their success doesn’t guarantee success for you (even if your audiences overlap perfectly), but it can be a good reminder of what’s going on in the competitive landscape after many months of focusing on your own website.

Step 4: Build an optimization roadmap

Based on your GA data, the heatmaps you’ve set up, the user testing you’ve conducted, and the competitive analysis, you’re ready to start building an optimization roadmap.

A clear roadmap will help align optimization efforts with business objectives, allocate resources for continuous optimization, and generate buy-in from leadership at your organization.

Theme the categories of problems and opportunities that you identified in steps 1-4 (more on this in our article on theme-based roadmaps). Then, prioritize the themes to create a clear 90-day plan of action.

Some outcomes of your roadmap could be:

• Using initial post-launch data, you identify underperforming customer segments and decide to theme personalization opportunities based on their early behavior patterns.
• Traffic source performance is lower than your benchmark, so you create a plan for optimizing landing pages based and adjusting paid media strategies.
• Session recordings show customers getting lost while looking for more information on a specific product, so navigation and directional guidance become the main focus for your next phase of optimization.

Step 5: Delegate or outsource

With a roadmap in hand, it’s time to optimize. At this stage, the post-launch excitement might be starting to fade, but this is the step that sets successful teams apart.

If you have an internal optimization team, set up a meeting cadence and reporting framework that drives accountability, and you’re off to the races.

For teams that are struggling with:

• Data interpretation challenges
• Testing velocity limitations
• Expertise gaps in specialized areas
• General confusion about what to do next

You may need external support. Sometimes, it’s hard to read the label from inside the jar when you’ve been working on the site for so long. A partner like The Good can lend the expertise and fresh perspective to make sure you drive ROI from your redesign investment.

Double down to keep the momentum going

Your website improvement journey doesn’t end with launch; it evolves.

The businesses that treat their website as a living, breathing asset rather than a static project are the ones that consistently outperform competitors.

By implementing the five-step process outlined above, you’re positioning your organization to capture immediate wins while building a sustainable optimization practice that drives continuous improvement. 

Each insight gained, each test run, and each improvement made compounds over time, creating an ever-widening gap between your business and those that “set it and forget it.”