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Optimizing my site increased sales by over 600% in one week.

Quick Overview

As a designer, I realised I was designing the same old components over rand over again. So, I slowly built a Design System UI Kit for myself to use across projects which in turned allowed me to hit the ground running and save a bunch of time.

After a few months, I realised this may be helpful to other designs, developers and makers so decided to beef it up a little, add a bunch of features to make it easy to use regardless of profession, design a website and released the kit.

2021

The first 2 months of 2021 were slow going to say the least. From Jan 1st to Feb 28th, I made a total of $142 in sales. Enough to give me hope, but not enough to keep my motivation high.

Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't expect an instant success and marketing is not my strong suit. Is it my kit? The site? Is the use-case obvious? All these questions, I figured it was time to find some answers.

pre-design stats

Discovery And Strategy

To find the answers, I done Four things.

  1. Asked those who downloaded the demo why they didn't buy
  2. Asked those who bought the kit what caught their attention
  3. Asked other Kit-Makers for feedback
  4. Checked out my user-flows using Hotjar.

I didn't get many replies from those customers I reached out to, the responses I did get were positive but not a right fit for them, they wanted something more like a typical UI kit, not a "lego style" kit.

The makers I spoke to gave some great advice. They said the kit was very good and easy to use, but the landing page could use some improvement.

The userflows, though, are where the issues really came to light. I watched visitors click around aimlessly. Stop and read areas, whilst skipping over others. Many would stop at certain areas and (seemingly) assume it was the end, and leave.

Watching hours of footage, I was making notes into a spreadsheet. Each row was an issue and if multiple users had the same issue, I would add an extra check next to that issue to get an order of priority.

The Redesign

A few things I noticed were

  • Users were getting hungup on the hero image.
  • The site was not explaining the kit enough
  • The site was not showing the kit off enough
  • The features and use-cases were not obvious
  • It was pretty bland, and did not reflect the amount of work that went into the kit itself.

So, I went ahead and redesigned the site from head to toe. Taking extra time to add some interactive elements that show off the "idea" of the kit. How it is different for others and how users can expect to use it.

In the early hours of March 22nd, the new site went live.
new-design

The Result

post-design stats

Old Site
Jan 1st - Feb 28th: $142
Mar 1st - Mar 21st: $0

New Site
Mar 22nd - March 30th: $408

That's right. The week after the new site went live, I had made over 2x the amount I had made over the last 2 and a half months.

If we were to break it down to metrics, Jan and Feb made on average $71. March (despite the first 3 weeks making $0) made $408.

My first sales goal with simplekits is to make on average, one sale a day. Thanks to a carefully redesigned landing page, and a great week, it is looking closer than I initially thought.

Closing Thoughts

Is the site perfect? No way.
Is there more I could be doing? Absolutely
What's next? Well, now my landing page feels in a good spot, I just need to start marketing it. I suck at marketing, and would love any ideas from fellow indies!

If any of you want to check out my Design System Kit, you can at www.simplekits.co

If you have any questions or want me to take a quick look at your website and give some feedback, Just leave a comment below and I would be happy to!

  1. 2

    Nice looking page and the kit looks good as well!

  2. 2

    This is a fantastic looking landing page. The hover animations are lovely.
    It looks like you might have built this with vue are you using a headless CMS of any kind? How are you directing traffic to the site?

    1. 1

      Hey! Thanks for the kind words ☺️ The hover animations are something that were 100% worth it, so many people comment on them.

      Yup built with vue, and no CMS, all the content is currently static and, whilst not scaleable I do not see any huge bonus to implement one, it is much easier to just update the code itself with any new content.

      Traffic to my site is mainly Social media & submitting to "figma UI kit" sites.

  3. 1

    Congrats @kjparker. This is a great example of how important copywriting is for a landing page. Thank you for sharing how you deduced where your potential customers fell off.

    Most people don't reach out to their customers and that is a missed opportunity for growth. I agree with the majority that the new site looks awesome and wish you the best of luck.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the kind words! You are right, many people pass up the opportunity of asking their customers what they thought of the product and experience. Whilst many didn't reply, those that did were valuable insights.

  4. 1

    The landing page looks fantastic and the messaging and purpose are very clear. I'm more excited about the process and what you determined went right and how you adjusted your design instead of throwing more money at the problem. Good stuff.

  5. 1

    What a great project/product this is. Site looks very slick, I really dig the design and information hierarchy. Will try it later!

    I am currently working on something that has end result that could be compatible with your product. I will get back to you when I'll have something concrete to show, maybe we can do some kind of collaboration or just exchanging ideas and making our products compatible - maybe through the integration or something.

    1. 1

      Thank you! IT is great to have such amazing feedback across the board, especially with such a lack-luster site before this one.

      I would 100% be open to any sort of collab. Whether its just idea sharing, integration, or whatever! Feel free to DM me on Twitter or something whenever you have something you want to discuss! 👌

  6. 1

    Amazing! Where did most of your traffic come from - are they similar before and after conversion? I find that with my products, google and Twitter traffic convert the best.

    1. 1

      Most of my traffic came in through social media and UI Kit sites.

      So, here are some more stats to reflect conversions (just to note, views etc are gumroad stats, so it would be users clicking through from the site, or directly to the gumroad product page itself)

      • Jan - 206 product views, 4 Demo downloads, 4 Sales. (1.12% sale conversion.)
      • Feb - 233 views, 17 Demo Downloads, 2 Sales. (1.18% sale conversion)
      • March (1st - 21st, pre-update) 196 views, 14 Demo Download, 0 Sales. (0% sale conversion)
      • March (22nd - 30th, post-update) 240 views, 24 Demo Downloads, 9 Sales, (6.43% sale conversion)

      A lot better conversion with the new design and one I am happy to stay with at least until I start getting more visitors.

      1. 1

        Wow 6+% conversion is amazing. Great job!

  7. 1

    Woah, congrats! I was thinking of implementing hotjar in our next iteration of Adflow's landing page. What plan did you go for? Any advice on how to best set it up to be able to extrapolate meaningful insights as you did?

    1. 2

      Thanks! Yeah Hotjar was great, I actually used the free trial period, but have since switched over to FullStory with the new site.

      FullStory has a much better "free" tier, and has some really helpful features. I haven't really used both enough to say which I prefer, but for a free/cheap preference, FullStory certainly wins!

      100% worth checking out both though.

  8. 1

    Love the demos with the feature/style toggles, that is so good!

    1. 1

      Thank you so much! ❤️

  9. 1

    Awesome landing page.

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