As 2025 marketing budgets are predicted to rise to the highest level in a decade, it can be difficult to assess whether it's worth further optimising your website or if it's time to replatform.
In our recent webinar, Optimise or Overhaul, we discussed the key signs that it’s time to replatform; how experimentation can help to improve conversion; and how businesses can avoid common pitfalls when replatforming.
Meet our panellists:
4 key insights from our panel
Replatforming projects often stem from a big need for change
There are key signs that initiate the decision for a business to replatform or undertake a more transformative approach to its digital estate.
Ashley shares, “In my experience, if you want to replatform, it’s a big undertaking and I think there needs to be a big reason to change. You’ll see that in your website not performing in the way that you want.”
These performance issues can take many forms, including not meeting business needs. Ashley continues, “It might be that your strategy has changed and your current site doesn’t align with your overall goals, or it might be that you’ve become more focussed around account-based marketing and your website doesn’t have the personalisation functionality that you need. It might be that the technology that you’re on is outdated and doesn’t really work in your wider marketing stack or integrate with your other business applications. You’ll find that these pain points become apparent as you do what you do and maybe there’s a realisation already or you come to a realisation over time that these pain points are becoming something that you can’t live with and you need to address them.”
User-led pain points are often easier to address with experimentation
While replatforming can deliver huge step-changes in technical performance and necessary for businesses facing internal operational issues such as technical debt, legacy technology and poor editorial experience, digital customer experience optimisation through techniques such as experimentation, can be an optimal solution for businesses struggling with user experience led pain points.
Jonathan says, “With business pain points, replatform may be the way to go. Interestingly, on the flip side to that, when we get people coming to us with more user-led pain points, like a problem with the user experience or not getting the kind of conversions that we would like to see, or maybe the website is difficult to navigate. I think things like that are often more easily solved with something like optimisation of the current stack.”
While this may be the case for some, he continues by saying that not all cases are the same, “It’s not black and white. There is nuance within this stuff, but I think often when we find people with these more fundamental business pain points, that often tends to lead to a replatform or an overhaul. Often when people come with more of a UX pain point, then that can lead to optimisation.”
Experimentation allows businesses to quickly demonstrate ROI
A point all of our panellists agreed on is the importance of being able to demonstrate ROI quickly.
Jonathan shares, “Often, experimentation is an easier way to demonstrate ROI to stakeholders. You can minimise the risk and the cost of whether you’re going to make an investment.”
He goes on to share an example of Candyspace’s with on a European-wide client project: “What we found within this platform is that there was a problem with the navigation and some elements being hidden in the sub-nav and we could see from the data that people on mobile specifically were not able to get to these specific pages. So we had highlighted this through data. We were actually able to launch an experiment on our UK platform to quantify that if we were going to make a change to the navigation, could we improve that journey? We launched that experiment really quickly, and saw how many users were now getting to that page and the value that had in overall conversion, which helped to build a business case that was escalated to the European teams and was able to make that change.”
The key signs that businesses are ready to replatform
For businesses looking to replatform in 2025, Adam’s advice is to evaluate whether your current technology stack is holding you back.
He says, “Based on our experience with replatforms, there are a number of different indicators. Is your current stack preventing you from entering new markets, launching new products or just generally your ability to innovate at speed and at scale? Are you being limited in terms of your business agility? Can your product support modern customer experiences that we’ve all become used to? Are you having trouble delivering real, high quality, immersive customer experiences with your platform? Things like security and compliance, a lot of people don’t think about that but it’s something I often get involved with and often people are driven away from their tech stacks because of those things.”
Watch the webinar in full on YouTube or listen on Spotify for more insights on when to optimise your website versus when to overhaul.
