Don’t “New Feature” Your Site to Death

It is VERY easy to kill your website with new features. It’s also very easy to increase a website’s revenue by removing features (simplifying) the site.

“Less is more” is a cliche, but it is very true in a great many situations.

The easiest example is tracking scripts. Bloating a website with a bunch of tracking scripts, especially trackers that are render blocking at the top of the head, can make a website so slow that it doesn’t convert. Sure, the trackers are tracking a lot of traffic – but they’re tracking lots of lost revenue due to how slow they are. Tenths of a second can mean several percentage points on conversion rate which translates to lots of revenue.

An easy partial solution is to put trackers at the bottom of the body and as async/defer so they aren’t render blocking. I’d rather have an un-tracked conversion than a tracked lost sale.

Taking things a step further, don’t fill your site with a bunch of trackers as that hurts performance a LOT. Instead, minimize the amount of trackers you have and double down on the trackers you do use. Don’t half commit to a new channel because that new channel is hurting the performance of your website.

With a large enough budget, services like RudderStack or Segment can act as a single source of truth and a single tracking script on the website. They allow you to send info to various third party services while only having one script on the website, which can be a big boost to performance (and revenue). It’s quite easy to have a positive ROI with these services.

This advice goes way beyond just trackers though. The more pop ups, banners, CTAs, functionality, and programs you put on your website – the more dilluted your website is. Most likely, you’re hurting your website by making it too busy and complex. A simple website tends to convert better than a complex one. Focusing intently on where you’re succeeding tends to be more successful than weakly dabbling in a bunch of different areas.

Don’t “new feature” your site to death.

Simplify your site to increase focus on successes which will maximize revenue.