Time to Renovate Your Embeds?

We recently redesigned our Word of the Day foreign language widgets. We’ve had these up for a couple of years now and they’ve been placed in the wild a whole lot.

Look what happened to our main site traffic when we launched the redesign (there were two stages of the launch, which explains the two distinct upticks).

140% total increase in site traffic.

It’s worth considering what you might have out there in the wild that you could improve on.

We killed some features of the old widget, including the ‘additional forms’ piece (showed conjugations, etc). This content was expensive for us to make, and after implementing event tracking we found it was not extremely popular, so, we killed it.

We added in a lot of other stuff, and it’s ambitious to have a top-level nav in an embed, but so far it appears to be working very nicely - very nicely.

Update: request for before/after of the widget, here it is:

Before