WordPress business website teardowns

What is a website teardown?

A common practice in which someone evaluates a website “line-by-line” and provides feedback to the website owner within a given context. For instance, in today’s episode, Devin and I teardown four unique commercial WordPress plugin websites submitted by listeners. We’re looking through the lens as if we were landing on their respective sites for the very first time, as an interested customer. The feedback we provide should be used as a guide to help the owners improve messaging, design, and overall usability of the website. At the end of the day, hopefully, this advice proves valuable and increases sales for their business.

Critical website feedback through teardowns

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The process of a teardown is to get feedback that you, the website owner, may not have been able to see with your “business blinders” on. Some of it hurts and some of it makes sense, just know that getting an outsider to look over their interpretation of your design, layout, or messaging is a valuable investment.

A few notes about this episode:

  • We had no prior knowledge or relationship with the products or websites evaluated. I knew of one, but had never purchased or used their products before.
  • We don’t expect our word to be taken as gospel. As to say, who the heck are we to give advice?! Devin and I are plugin creators and struggle with the same issues we’ve outlined in today’s show. It was an exercise/experience for all of us.
  • Life. We realize that some of the KPI’s (key performance indicators) we point out are a result of everything else that’s going on. Folks are building products, supporting products, possibly working day jobs — so we can’t expect every T to be crossed and every I to be dotted.

Interested in having us look at your site for a future episode? Contact me.

Websites we evaluated in this episode:

Bonus podcast:

We had some audio issues earlier in the episode, so I decided to keep that out along with the time consideration. In this bonus episode, Devin and I recap our 2015 and plans for 2016 ahead.

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Using our free Baton theme to redesign Quiz and Survey Master

Here’s a bonus video tutorial of how I use our latest free WordPress theme, Baton, to re-design Quiz and Survey Master website.


Comments

One response to “WordPress business website teardowns”

  1. Great show, thanks! I’d just like to add this: Performance does matter, whether you care about it, or not. If a site owner opts for automatically playing a video in their sales page’s hero section (like one of the sites mentioned here), they may want to test it on different network connections and/or machines.

    I see ocean waves juddering for over 1 minute in the hero section of said site, before the video finally is played nicely, and the fan of my (4yo but otherwise absolutely functional) MacBook Pro starts blowing almost immediately when I enter the page. On a random page this would be annoying. On a sales page it’s clearly a conversion killer. People seem to have weird illusions about available bandwidth outside of larger cities.

    That being said, there seems to be a way to get large hero videos right if you think you must have them. When I take a look at http://feelingrestful.com/ for example, that video in the background starts playing instantly, and my fan keeps quiet.

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