7 Things We Learned from 1 Year of Website Strategy Calls with Clients

After nearly a full year of facilitating website strategy calls with our clients, here are the 7 things that we learned. As a website company, even WE were getting some of these things wrong.

1. You're simply not talking to your website company enough. 

You communicate with your website company in support requests, tickets, quick emails, or even at a project level for a new initiative. Your website company hands you analytics, you digest them (or ignore them). But are your goals aligned? The web is moving fast – are you taking advantage of the latest features your website company has made available? This is just the tip of the iceberg.

2. Your Navigation is a mess.

You've spent years adding pages, gift guides, holiday landing pages and brands that didn't last into your website navigation. All that clutter means friction to a customer just trying to find a piece of jewelry. Don't get me started on Staff Bio pages you still have for people that no longer work there.

3. Your highest-grossing categories and brands are hard to find.

This is where you're leaving the most money on the table. You and your website company never stopped to identify your highest-grossing landing pages, categories, brands, and services, so all pages are created equal – or worse, some don't exist. Each of your money makers should have a dedicated landing page at minimum, and then make sure customers can get there – whether from your navigation, a website banner, your website footer, a dedicated section on your homepage or all of the above.

4. Your website is optimized for different marketing goals than your business.

Your store is warm and friendly and your website is cold and product-focused. Or you have allowed one jewelry brand on your homepage to usurp all the attention. Is your website helping you actually develop relationships? Ecommerce converts at about 1-2% of traffic. But if you get a customer into your store and engage them, the lifetime value of that new customer can be tens of thousands of dollars over time.

5. You're not keeping up with the latest features.

You don't have time to read every email or every update that comes from your website company. With AI, new connectivity, AEO, chat agents, automation, and as fast as this world is moving, there is always something new. If your website company is innovative on top of that, they are building tools for you to use that could make your life easier, or lead to more engagement from your customers.

6. You're showing brands you no longer carry.

You carry a brand for a short period of time, and because it wasn't that significant to your business, you forget to take it off the website. Now customers have to deal with dead links or empty product pages.

7. Your Events are not tied to your website.

You may change your banner for your bridal event, but there is nothing on inner pages, no preregistration form for people to show interest, no event calendar, and no list of past events to show people that you're fun. In this day and age, you could have countdown timers and experiences that lead to higher attendance and more engagement before and during the event.

Why Strategy Meetings?

Handling over 21,000 service requests in the past 5 years, our folks have gotten super good at assisting with strategy. In late 2024, our Customer Success team told us they could be much more effective if they weren't just waiting for clients to submit tickets. They wanted to reach out to clients, learn their goals, and actually make suggestions. This is only the first year, and what we've learned has completely changed how we deliver services to clients.


Also, please take that Mother's Day banner down. It's nearly Q4.