The Many Advantages Of A Website Change Log

Occasionally when you look back through your website stats, you wonder “what did we do on that date that made our sales figures jump so much?” You may then spend the next hour or so digging through old emails & logs to try and work out what change you made that increased your sales/visitor numbers/page views (or - much worse - what you did that reduced your sales!)

There’s a really simple way to solve this problem. It takes all of 5 minutes to set up & will pay off for as long as your website exists (possibly longer):

Set Up A Website Change Log

It’s as simple as it sounds - set up a log (maybe in excel, maybe in a textfile, perhaps just in a mail folder) where you record every change you make to your website that may affect your results. Here’s a very basic example:

Using that, in 6 months time when you’re looking at your web analytics tool & you see that your overall sales conversion jumped 2% on the 11th of March, you can refer to that log & see “ahh, we made the ‘buy now’ button larger”.

The 5 Main Advantages Of A Web Change Log

1. Saves you time & effort in solving problems
2. Can solve disagreements with clients over when/what/how/why changes were made to a site
3. Helps to stop you from making the same mistake twice (not sure whether you’ve tried something before? just search back through the log)
4. Going back periodically & checking the results of your changes helps you to learn what works & what doesn’t, what has the biggest effect, etc.
5. When you set up your next website, a quick look back through your website change log will offer a whole range of ideas & best practices for you to reuse

A Few Suggestions For Further Improvement

1. Add extra performance-tracking columns to your log, for example “purpose” & “result” to keep a history of why you made changes & whether they paid off
2. If you work in a larger organisation you could add ‘cost centre’ & ‘time taken’ fields to this, to track where your resources are spent
3. Set up similar logs to track the effects of your link-building, adwords, email & other off-site campaigns