Maximising ROI through continuous website support and development

In a growing business, juggling priorities is the norm. The challenge is focusing on what will deliver the most impact against your goals and objectives. A key part of this is evaluating whether spending money now will drive profitability in the short, mid, and long term. Will it deliver a solid return on investment (ROI)?

For marketers, ROI is often the deciding factor in whether to greenlight a campaign or initiative. This is even more critical as Gartner reports that CMOs are having to “do more with less,” with marketing budgets dropping to just 7.7% of total revenue, down from 9.1% in 2023. Under this pressure, your website stands out as one of your most significant marketing investments.

Even if your website doesn’t directly generate revenue, investing in an elevated user experience consistently pays off—driving value across both your top and bottom lines.

Maintaining this elevated experience is as important as creating one in the first place.

In this post, we’ll look at how investing in continuous website support and development helps you maximise ROI. We’ll cover:

• Continuous improvement vs full refreshes – what’s more cost-effective?
• Staying competitive, building trust and streamlining internal processes
• Driving revenue through consistent uptime and smooth user experiences
• Keeping SEO and performance on track to drive traffic and leads
• Practical steps to maximising website ROI through ongoing support and development

Continuous improvement vs full refreshes

In the past, an established model for most businesses’ website development strategy might be investing in a full-scale refresh every couple of years. This is still quite common – a lot of clients approach us with a website that hasn’t been touched for several years. One of our core philosophies is that investing in a good foundation and continually improving it is far more effective than a full redesign every few years. Our research has found that on average, clients who invest in an ongoing support and development plan for their website can save around 26% on total cost of ownership (TCO) versus starting a new project from scratch every three years (a typical refresh cycle for websites). Lowering the TCO on your website is a key component of maximising ROI.

Protecting brand integrity

It’s simple – a poor website experience reflects badly on your entire business. In fact, studies show that 88% of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad experience. Failing to provide a consistently smooth user journey on your website risks losing potential customers after just one visit. Consistency is crucial in protecting your brand integrity and building trust with new and existing customers. A solid website support plan is essential to achieving this consistency. It ensures maximum uptime, enhances security and helps you stay on top of key performance metrics – loading speeds and efficiency, accessibility elements, and anything else covered by Core Web Vitals. As user expectations and technical standards are constantly changing – staying ahead of the game is critical. Beyond the intangibles protecting brand perception, keeping your website is operational and high-performing directly impacts ROI by maintaining a steady flow of orders, leads and enquiries.

Staying ahead of competitors

Faster adoption of innovations and the latest technologies helps give you a competitive edge. You can’t risk stagnating while your competitors are forging ahead, and you equally can’t miss out on the opportunity to increase the gap between you while they’re stagnating instead. An ongoing development plan provides the support needed to stay agile and outpace competitors by delivering an elevated user experience. Some advanced website support plans include regular competitor analysis, ensuring you stay informed and can seamlessly integrate insights into your development strategy.

Improving internal efficiency

Automating and streamlining internal processes through the use of digital tools can improve operational efficiency, reduce human error and free up resources to focus on activities that will add more value. Automating processes between your website and internal systems can improve communication, collaboration and visibility around customers and sales, enhancing the process for both you and the customer. Examples can include integrating with a CRM system to effortlessly keep customer data up to date. You can also improve processes by sending data the other way. Integrations can sometimes be quite complex, and this complexity can add significant time to the initial development process if incorporated from launch. It’s quite common to use ongoing development time to complete further phases and add key integrations later, meaning you can start benefitting from relaunching your website now and continue to streamline processes further down the line.

Steps to maximising ROI through your website development plan

So far, we’ve outlined how an ongoing support and development plan can improve ROI. But what does that look like in practice? How do you select the right kind of support and utilise it effectively to achieve that all-important ROI?

Focus on impact

Getting the most from your website support and development plan relies on focusing on adding features that will provide the most value against your goals and objectives. Typically, you’ll get chunks of time each month or quarter to use on development – so prioritising and planning is essential for using your allotted time effectively.

Drive decisions with data

While we’re talking about prioritising, an effective way of deciding what to focus on adding or improving at each stage of your development roadmap is by referring to user, customer and internal data. Is there a particular part of your website where users are dropping off and you could do more to retain them? Is there a bottleneck in your current processes you could further streamline? Harnessing the data at your disposal is vital in identifying where you should focus your energy.

Pick the right partner

Having the right expert partner like Adaptable on board will ensure you get the right support plan in place as well as all of the expertise and knowledge to create a development plan that will help you get the most of your website. Our support plans from advanced onwards include quarterly or monthly strategy sessions for roadmap planning, and dedicated time for design, engineering, maintenance and reporting.

Key takeaways

• Creating a framework for continuous iteration and improvement is more cost effective than full scale refreshes on a longer development cycle
• Ongoing maintenance and improvement helps you deliver a consistent and high-performing experience that protects your brand’s integrity and builds trust
• It’s vital that you don’t let your website “stagnate” in order to stay competitive
• A development roadmap can help you plan for and execute additional integrations with tools that will continue to improve your processes
• Maximising ROI on your website is about focusing on development that delivers the most impact, using data to drive decisions, and having the right partner to help you deliver everything.

Want to find out more about options for going website development and support? Check out our support plans, or drop us a message to tell us about your next project.