Making continual changes and upgrades to your dealership’s website is incredibly important. As technology and consumer expectations evolve, your dealership’s website will need to align with what consumers want and need online and even in-store.

One thing that’s particularly important is that the changes you choose to make to your website should be made with specific purpose in mind. There needs to be a reason for those changes. Your dealership simply can’t make changes for the sake of making changes. Believe it or not, this happens far more often than you think.

Any sort of modification that you make to the imagery, messaging and code could have a major impact on how consumers ultimately interact with your website. That being said, it’s important to tread lightly and really take some time to think about the changes you’re going to make.

For all you know, your site is performing just fine — and the changes you want would only have a minimally positive impact. That would have meant that you spent time, money and effort on something that was only marginally successful — and where does that get you?

If you’re even considering making changes to your dealership’s website, take a moment to look at these best practices. Perhaps they can offer a little guidance:

Make Data-Driven Decisions

As I mentioned earlier in the piece, there needs to be a reason or purpose for the changes you make to your website. More often than not, the reason for change is because some aspect of your website isn’t performing as well as you had anticipated. These conclusions are drawn from your CRM as well as other website analytics programs.

The aggregate data that you collect from these programs should be the core component of what guides your decision to make changes. Without it, you’re only making assumptions about what’s wrong with your website, and therefore, you don’t come any close to solving them.

Before you make any changes to your website, look to your CRM and analytics programs to see what parts of your website need more help. Let’s say, for example, your consumers are dropping off your website at a specific point before completing an experience. Once you take a look at the page in question, you can make an educated guess and omit/add something that will entice a consumer to convert.

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll say that a checkbox was added that allows consumers the option of of opting into being contact by a salesperson. Before that, the assumption was that a consumer would be contacted no matter what. If we learned anything from the previous piece, we know that consumers love self-service.

Plan Ahead for Upcoming Website, CRM and Strategy Changes

Once you’ve determined that you are going to make changes to your website, you’ll likely need to make adjustments to other aspects of your business: your CRM, your marketing strategy and to some varying degrees, your follow-up. If this is indeed the case (and often it is), you’ll need to plan ahead.

Do not, under any circumstances, wait until these changes have already been made. Set a timeline for when these changes are going to occur (on your website) and then determine what aspects of your CRM and marketing strategy will change.

Once you’ve determined what adjustments are going to be made to your CRM and your marketing strategy, plan out how these changes are going to happen and then develop a timeline for those changes. So long as each of the cogs are moving alongside one another, you’ll be in good shape.

Avoid Making Too Many Changes

Like I mentioned earlier, it's important to base your modification decisions on actual data that you've pulled from your website. However, it's important to note that data changes often and that not every consumer is going to engage precisely how you want them to. You might have those 5-10 consumers per month out of a few hundred who drop off at a certain point. It happens and it kinda sucks... but it's nothing to get bent outta shape about.

As much as it's important to make note of consumer activity as they occurs, it's also important to no go overboard with short, reactive changes. If you make changes to your website too often, it’ll dilute your ability to understand what’s working and what’s isn't. Reporting becomes less valuable because you can’t form any real conclusions based on such a short timeframe.

If the overall net performance of your website is solid, why touch the site at all? Only make changes if you find that the overall performance of your website is suffering. If you've already made changes to your website and you're seeing significant improvement, it’s best to leave it be. More events will occur in the coming months that will require you to freshen up your website. So just be prepared.

How often do you make changes to your dealership’s website? Let me know in the comments below!