Why Jersey Shore Businesses Should Redesign Their Websites in the Fall

For restaurants, rental shops, and charter boats from Long Branch to Point Pleasant, the busy season ends in September. Owners usually put off work on the website until spring, when Memorial Day is close. By spring, some of the best records of what went wrong on the site this summer are harder to get to. Any fixes then happen in the same weeks the business is getting ready to open.

Fall is the better time to redesign a seasonal business's website. You still remember this summer's calls and booking problems, and the traffic data is still in your reports. The site can be rebuilt during the slow months, with room to test everything before the first spring visitors arrive. Spring redesigns are often rushed, which leaves less time to catch a broken form or a missing page before customers find it.

We plan a seasonal business's custom web design around what visitors did on the old site during the season that just ended. Much of that record is in Google Search Console and Google Analytics, if your site uses them.

What This Summer's Data Shows Right Now

Google Search Console's Performance report opens on the past 3 months of search data, which in October covers July, August, and September. According to Google's Analytics help, "Search Console keeps data for the last 16 months." That window lets you compare this summer with last summer before either one drops off.

The data retention setting in Google Analytics is the choice of how long Analytics keeps detailed event data for explorations and funnel reports. On a standard property, it's either 2 or 14 months. If your property is set to 2 months, much of July's detail is already gone from those reports by October. Standard reports aren't affected, but the funnel view of where visitors quit a booking form is.

In Search Console, set the date range to compare this summer with last summer. Look at which town and service searches grew, which fell, and which pages people landed on. If your menu page got more clicks from search than your home page did, put the menu up front on the new site.

Check your property's data retention setting in the Analytics admin area this week. If it's set to 2 months, this summer's detail is already dropping out of your funnel reports.

Why Spring Redesigns Go Wrong at the Shore

The common advice is to refresh the site just before the season so it looks new for summer visitors. We think that gets the order backward. When a new site goes live in May, there's no quiet stretch left for finding problems, and paying customers are often the first to run into them.

Say you run a bike and kayak rental in Point Pleasant Beach. You decide in March that the booking page needs work. The new site goes live the week before Memorial Day. If the new booking form sends confirmations to the wrong inbox, you could hear about it from a customer standing at your counter in June.

If a few old URLs disappeared in the rebuild without redirects, anyone who clicked those pages in Google's results would land on an error page during your busiest weeks. With a fall launch, you can find and fix mistakes like these while few customers are using the site. If you kept track of what went wrong on the site this summer, bring that list to our first conversation. Call or text us at (732) 800-1766 to talk it through.

What You Get From a Fall Redesign Before Memorial Day

When ShoreSite Web Designs plans a fall redesign for a restaurant in Asbury Park or a rental business in Long Branch, the first conversation is about the summer that just ended. A redesign done in the off-season has four advantages over a spring rush:

• Real data to design from: the pages people used, the searches people used to find you, and the forms they started and abandoned.
• Time to test: booking tools, menus, and mobile pages can be tried again and again while traffic is low.
• Room to protect your search traffic: a redesign that changes page addresses needs redirects from the old URLs, or the search traffic that went to those pages can drop.
• Your own attention: new photos, updated menus, and fresh descriptions all need input from you. You have more time for that in November than in May.

What to Gather While the Season Is Fresh

Some of the most useful material for a redesign is the list of questions your staff answered on the phone all summer. If people kept calling to ask about parking, hours, or whether you take walk-ins, those answers weren't on the website where visitors looked.

Write those questions down now, while your staff still remembers them. Add the complaints, the pages you meant to update and didn't, and any booking or order problems that reached you. Screenshots of anything that looked wrong on a phone help too.

Then read this summer's Google reviews for any mention of the website, the menu, or booking, since customers sometimes mention problems there that they never raised with you. If you track your website leads, you can also see which pages this summer's calls and form fills came from. ShoreSite Web Designs builds shore-business redesigns around that list, since it shows what visitors needed and couldn't find.

Plan Next Summer's Website Now

Over the off-season, we can rebuild and test a seasonal website before your customers start booking again. If you learned this summer what your site is missing, start the redesign this fall so the new site is tested before Memorial Day. Call ShoreSite Web Designs at (732) 800-1766 or use our contact form to set up a time to talk.