Andy Howard — Experience Director

A simplified, user-centred homepage realignment for Careershifters boosted the homepage conversion by 40% and decreased bounce rate by 15%. Read on for the process and results.

Careershifters is a service for anyone making a major career change, run by people who have done it successfully. The service is centred around a website stocked with articles, guides and top tips, and is coupled with a series of UK-based workshops providing face-to-face advice, inspiration and coaching. Over time – experiencing typical growing pains – the homepage expanded to feature an assortment of articles, along with various calls to action to sign up to a newsletter, purchase a guide or book a place in a workshop. Conversions were ok; but there was scope for improvement. When isn’t there scope for improvement?

The brief

Boiling down the list of objectives – including boosting newsletter sign-up, converting more visitors to customers, reducing bounce rate, funnelling more visitors to guide and events landing pages – the brief was summarised as follows:

Executive summary: We want to redesign our homepage to improve ease-of-use and to sell more stuff.

Perfect. Let’s go.

The process

The concise, no-bullshit executive summary is the work of Careershifters Creative Director Neil Collman. Neil and I tackled the realignment together with an open, collaborative process. We chucked quick mockups back and forth via Mockflow and involved the wider Careershifters team via Basecamp. The process was efficient and effective. Moreover, it was bloody fast. Within a short space of time we had a stack of concepts to take into basic user testing, and design and development raced forward from there. High-speed. Rapid. Agile. Whatever you call it, know this: it’s fast, open, collaborative and it works.

The results

We’ve compared the first week with the new homepage against a similar week before the change. During both of the sample weeks Careershifters was featured on BBC’s ‘Working Week on a Wednesday’, so the weeks are fairly comparable. Ha! Congrats if you just picked up on the subtle play-on-words.

Newsletter conversion sign-up is up 40%
Conversion rate for guide sales is also up about 40%
Bounce rate for the homepage – overall – is down by about 15%
Bounce rate for the homepage with certain keywords – e.g. “career change advice” – is down 45%

There’s something particularly interesting about these stats. The bounce rate is far lower for some keywords than others, which Neil attributes to the new homepage appealing more to those who are looking for “advice” better than those looking for “career ideas”. Which is spot on; that’s the sweet spot for Careershifters.

High fives all round. Neil and the team are a progressive group happy to work in new, smart ways to achieve stellar results. It was great to be a part of it.