To learn more about York IE’s website and digital marketing services, click here.
Your B2B SaaS marketing website needs to do it all: communicate your value propositions, engage users, and drive conversions.
Keeping your site maintained with fresh, optimized content is a day-to-day activity. But over time your website will need heavier repairs — dare we say an overhaul.
When it comes to enhancing your online presence, a common debate arises: should you invest in a full website rebuild or take an iterative approach to ongoing updates? Each option presents benefits and challenges, making the decision a significant one for marketing teams.
As the director of website and digital marketing services at York IE, I help spearhead many website design projects for our B2B SaaS clients. Naturally, the website iteration vs. rebuild debate comes up often. Let’s dive deeper to help you determine priorities for your next website update.
Iteration vs. Rebuild: Choosing the Right Approach
Deciding how to keep your B2B SaaS website both relevant and high-performing often comes down to a key choice: pursue agile, iterative updates or commit to a complete rebuild.
Each strategy offers unique advantages. Iterative updates allow for agile, incremental improvements, while a full rebuild enables a complete reimagining of the site’s design, functionality, and structure. To make the best choice, it’s essential to weigh these benefits against your team’s goals, budget, and timeline.
Benefits of Iterative Website Updates
Flexibility and Agility
Iterative updates allow for more flexibility in responding to user feedback and changing market conditions. You can make continuous improvements rather than waiting for a complete overhaul.
Cost-Effectiveness
An iterative website revamp typically requires fewer resources upfront, as you focus on making incremental changes rather than investing heavily in a full rebuild.
Reduced Disruption
By rolling out updates in phases, you minimize downtime and maintain ongoing engagement with your audience, ensuring your website remains functional throughout the process.
Considerations for Full Website Rebuilds
Comprehensive Solutions
If your website suffers from fundamental issues – like poor user experience, outdated technology, or a lack of alignment with business goals, a rebuild may be necessary to create a cohesive and modern online presence.
Long-Term Vision
A complete rebuild allows for a strategic reimagining of your website, ensuring that it meets the future needs of your business and aligns with your long-term vision.
Stakeholder Buy-In
Engaging stakeholders from the start of a rebuild can ensure alignment across teams and departments, fostering a sense of ownership and shared objectives.
Ultimately, the decision between an iterative approach and a full rebuild depends on your specific circumstances, goals, budget, and resources.
Determining Priorities: Creating Your Website Iteration Strategy
Creating an effective website iteration strategy starts with understanding what’s currently working and where improvements are needed most. To maximize impact, prioritize updates based on data insights and strategic goals. First, assess your website’s performance to identify high-impact areas; then, map out a structured plan to organize updates efficiently. By aligning iteration efforts with user needs and business objectives, each update can add measurable value.
Assessing Your Website Performance
Before committing to an iterative strategy, it’s crucial to assess your existing website. This involves identifying high-traffic pages, understanding user behavior, and determining where improvements are needed. The following tools can assist you in this process:
Website Crawl: As websites mature, orphaned and abandoned landing pages aren’t always effectively tracked. While you can start with your site map, a crawling tool that looks at all pages gives you a starting point of what to triage, optimize, and build new. Screaming Frog is an example of a crawling tool that allows you to analyze your website’s structure, highlighting important SEO factors such as broken links, metadata issues, and loading speeds.
Google Search Console (GSC): Assess your site’s performance in search results, identifying your highest- and lowest-ranking pages and the search queries driving traffic. By understanding which pages are growing versus declining in search rankings, you can better assess priorities. Plus, this gives you a baseline understanding of the quality of content on the current page. You’ll get a better idea of the messaging work you’ll need within your iteration plan overall, or on a per-page basis.
Website Analytics and Performance: Don’t make assumptions. Review insights into user engagement and behavior on your site. Use GA4 (or whatever analytics tool you rely on) to assess which pages receive the most visits and how users interact with them. Try using Page Speed Insights to understand how page performance could be affecting your user experience (UX). Analyze trends (the good, the bad, and the anomalies) to see if UX optimizations can be made to help your website conversion paths and page stickiness.
Mapping Your Website Iteration Plan
Based on your website performance analysis, your team should have a pulse on the overall website map, your top-performing pages, and your pages that need some TLC. With this information, you can map your website iteration plan and build out a resourcing roadmap. We recommend you take the following steps to build a comprehensive website iteration plan:
- Focus on High-Impact Pages First: Begin with essential, high-traffic pages like the Home, Solutions, and About pages – key areas that drive user engagement and conversions. Prioritize tackling any triage items – like 404s or redirect chains – that are lighter lifts but improve UX and SEO.
- Batch Additional Sections: Identify secondary pages to batch for updates, such as the Resource Hub, Industries, and Case Studies pages. This helps in organizing your workload efficiently.
- Set Clear Objectives: For each page iteration, establish specific goals—such as improving SEO rankings, increasing conversions, or enhancing user experience.
- Organize Your Sprints Efficiently: Structure your iterative updates in focused sprints, coordinating messaging, design, development, and QA workflows in parallel. Map clear timelines for each team and resource path, ensuring all dependencies are accounted for to keep progress smooth and aligned across functions.
- Monitor and Measure: After implementing changes, continuously track performance using GSC and GA4. Analyzing key metrics will help you measure the success of each iteration and refine your strategy as needed.
Partner with York IE for Website Iteration Strategy & Execution
At York IE, we understand the complexities involved in the iteration vs. rebuild debate. Our website and digital marketing experts are well-versed in guiding B2B SaaS companies through the decision-making process, helping you determine the best path for your website based on your unique needs, and augmenting your team to develop and iterate on your website.
Our Approach
York IE starts by conducting an in-depth assessment to identify your website’s strengths and growth areas. From there, we create a customized strategy that aligns updates with your business goals, prioritizing changes that drive the most value. Our continuous support ensures that, whether through iterative updates or a full rebuild, your website adapts to evolving business needs. After launch, we closely monitor performance to assess impact and guide future improvements, ensuring sustained success and alignment with your objectives.
In the debate between iterative updates and full rebuilds, the best choice depends on your specific business needs, objectives, and available resources. By assessing your current website, determining priorities, and leveraging the expertise of York IE, you can make an informed decision that enhances your online presence and drives success for your B2B SaaS company.
Let us guide you on the path to creating a website that effectively engages your audience and supports your business growth.
