Bluehost Early Website Creation Survey
Project Overview
I collaboratively created, and individually conducted and analyzed a survey about Bluehost customers’ early website creation experience.
The goal of the survey was to learn about customers’ behavior at the start of their website creation process in order to help them create their websites faster, increasing retention.
The results of this survey helped move the organization from thinking about retention from a product-centric point of view—the length of Bluehost’s return period, which is 30 days—to a customer-centric point of view—how much time customers are willing to spend creating a website, about 10 hours.
My Role: UX Researcher
Problem: Website creation process and goals?
Bluehost has a 30-day return policy on its products. Customers who haven’t published their websites were the most likely to cancel their Bluehost accounts. Stakeholders suspected that if Bluehost could help customers publish their websites before the end of the 30-day return policy, we would be able to reduce churn.
One way we could help new customers publish their websites faster was by helping them learn how to do it. The plan was to expand the customer-facing ‘help’ archive about website creation to be a ‘Learning Center’ with up-to-date, comprehensive tutorials about using Bluehost’s products.
The hope was that this would help new customers get their website live within 30 days, thereby increasing retention.
The ‘Learning Center’ would also grow to include targeted content that automatically shows customers the information they need at exactly the right time to complete the next step of their website creation process.
The survey sought context about:
The goals of new customers’ sites
What features customers add to their websites and when they are added after signup
How often customers work on their websites each week, and for how long
What website-related information new customers want to learn more about
Approach: The same survey goes to 4 groups
Stakeholders wanted to learn about new customers’ behavior about website creation over time, and with particular attention to the first 30 days after purchase. So, I created 4 waves of the same survey that reached customers during 4 different sign-up windows, each a week apart. 225 people took part in this survey, and there were between 53 and 61 respondents in each group.
The button below will take you to the screener and script that were used for the survey
Findings and Analysis
Finding 1: Stakeholders thought we had 30 days to help customers get their websites live, but we only have 10 hours
Participants were asked: What have you done with your website so far?
This was a card sort survey question where participants took cards with different website-creation activities (Choose website theme, Choose fonts, Add page, etc.) and put them into buckets that described the state of completion of the activity (Done, In Progress, Have Not Done, Don’t Need).
The graphs below are organized by participants’ state of completion of website-creation activities, and within each of the four completion states (Done, In Progress, Have Not Done, Don’t Need), participants are grouped by sign-up date.
The goal of this question was to understand what parts of participants’ websites were completed during each week of the first 4 weeks of their website creation process. Our assumption was that people who had been Bluehost customers for a month would have more website-creation activities completed than customers who had signed up more recently. We wanted to find out what website-creation activites were complete in each of the 4 weeks after sign-up. But the data told a different story.
The results were surprising! Stakeholders had assumed that people who had been customers longer would have more website-creation activities completed than customers who had signed up more recently. But this was not what the data said! The participants, in the aggregate, showed no signs of progress on website-creation actions between 1.5 weeks after sign-up and 4.5 weeks after sign-up.
Any progress customers make on completing their website and getting it live would have to happen within the first 1.5 weeks (10 days) of signing up, not within the first 30 days!
If we want to improve churn by helping customers get their websites live, we must do so within the first 10 days after signup and possibly less time than that, because there were no participant groups from before 1.5 weeks!
Based on this data, I recommended further research to find out how much time it takes most customers to get their websites live. It could be less than 10 days.
Participants were asked: How many days did you work on your website in the last week?
Most participants worked on their websites for 3 days or fewer in the last week.
The most common amount of time participants spend working on their website is 1-2 hours (1-2 hours is the mode of this data set).
If we take the above findings and put them together:
3 days per week for 1.5 weeks is approximately 5 days
Working 2 hours per working session for 5 days is 10 hours
Bluehost has approximately 10 hours to help new customers get their websites completed and live in order to reduce customer churn
Finding 2: 50% of Business Owners have A Blog on their website
The top self-described categories were:
Blog
Business
Build my brand/marketing
To eventually make money from my website
This question was open-ended. I sorted the answers into categories.
The two largest categories were the same:
Blog
Business
This graph made me curious about the overlap with the two largest categories here: business and blog.
Participants could select any answers to this question as applied to them. For example, a participant making a blog that will make money with affiliate links is a ‘blog’ and a ‘business’.
The answers by category had a very similar distribution to the previous graph.
The biggest overlap of customers are people who want their websites to be businesses and blogs!
Up until now, Bluehost was not thinking about small business owners as also being bloggers
This begged the question: What proportion of business owners want or have a blog?
97 of 225 respondents said “Business” as the purpose of their website.
About 50% of business websites are blogs or have blogs!
Finding 3: One-third of participants seem to be stuck in the website building process
1 The newer signups are in the “foundational work” stage of building their websites and the oldest signup already have their websites live. This is not surprising, as we expect customers to build their websites over time.
However, around ⅓ of customers seem to be stuck “in the process of building” their site. This was an opportunity area where Bluehost might try to intervene and help customers get their websites live.
Why do ⅓ of customers stay in the “process” stage?
What can Bluehost do to help them get their website live?
Finding 4: Novice customers overestimate their website-building skill set
Most of our customers are novice website creators. However, for these novice customers, there is a disconnect. Novice customers rate their skills as “can create a basic website,” even though they lack experience doing this. We can infer that novices will probably be frustrated when building a website is much more difficult than they expected.
Finding 5: Participant are very interested in learning how to Improve search engine optimization
Impact
This research redirected the organization to think about new ways to help customers complete their websites and get them live within 10 hours. One way was to design a website theme called “Sinatra” that was easy to use and edit. That was then abandoned to focus on the Bluehost Website Builder, a new drag-and-drop website building product.
Before this research, small business owners and bloggers were seen as two different groups with different needs. Finding 2 propelled Bluehost to reconsider that idea and redesign and improve the blogging experience we offer.