These stats from the Framer State of Site's report are extremely PSYCHOTIC. 

71% of teams say conversion is a top KPI for their site but only 12% use A/B testing tools.

Obviously this was the first thing that made me jump out of my seat because it's exactly the dynamic we built Surface AI to address. Most growth teams are being graded on outcomes but they are not. . .DOING REALLY OBVIOUS THINGS TO CHANGE THE OUTCOME! If you ship a website and let it sit on the internet without seeing if your initial assumptions were correct, you probably didn’t build something that is performing as well as it could be.

I spend my time thinking about how people could be converting more on their websites. When we talk to our potential customers, we often find out that the problem is not that people don’t agree with us. The problem is structural: the tools available to most teams were designed to publish websites, not optimize them. 

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AI has made the launch phase faster than ever

According to the same report, 84% of teams now use AI to generate copy, images, and code. I’m on the Claude Code train, shipping features and content updates by myself that I never thought possible. We also built agentic features into Surface, because customer told us that they were excited to move faster. But yanno. . .after you launch, then what? In my experience, most tools for A/B testing are complicated and expensive. These tools require an additional set of analytical skills that your original launch team might not have, and so teams skip it.

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One of the most frequent reasons potential customers give to NOT work with Surface is “we’re not really prioritizing our website right now.” This is so common: Framer also found that 70% of website projects get deprioritized because they're too slow or difficult to ship. I obviously think that website creation is easier than ever and I’m really disappointed when I hear this. The test you wanted to run on your pricing page, the experiment on your hero copy, the variant you had a strong hypothesis about — they just... don't happen. They sit in the backlog while the site stays static and traffic keeps converting at whatever rate it converts at and you don't grow nada. I always want to shake these people and say

“It won’t take that much time!”

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More stats:

63% of teams only update their website monthly or quarterly. I bet a lot of those updates are more procedural than anything – maybe you need to change a product description or update the team page – not making any changes to the user journey or the context you’re sharing with your audience. 

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Over time, if you don’t make improvements, your traffic will drop, and you won’t know why. This is just a natural result of your inaction. Things look dead and users don’t see anything that appeals to them in a fresh way. According to Framer, 61% of teams track traffic as a key metric, and 16% use heatmaps or session replay. This is fine, but the report is correct to call this "measuring what you can't improve." If you know you are dropping but you’re not doing quick, iterative testing and changes, you are left to wonder about the source of the issue. Is it your performance marketing? Is it the site? You don’t really know the source.

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Just as importantly, if you're only touching your site a few times a year you never build the feedback loop that teaches you what converts. Every material update becomes high-stakes, over-reviewed, and slow because it happens so rarely.

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Understanding your users and what they need is a muscle that you have to exercise frequently. It’s the definition of use-it-or-lose-it. 

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OK so you’re doing a website redesign. It’s expensive, painful, takes months. According to the report,  30% do it because the brand looked outdated. Not because conversion was tanking. Not because the homepage data was bad. Aesthetic refresh while the actual performance problems just sit there. It’s hard to imagine how history isn’t going to repeat itself.

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I’ve heard the cope: “websites aren’t that important anymore, the new interface is LLM, no one even visits anymore,” yadda yadda.

But the state of the world remains: your owned and operated website is the end of your conversion funnel. More importantly, it’s the only place on the internet you truly control. It’s where your users (and LLMs and search engines) can truly learn and understand what you’re about. And you’ve spent a bunch of time and cash getting people to visit it, since traffic is more expensive than ever. 

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IDK people if I were you I'd get some tooling fast and furious. . .Get testing and make sure every web visitor gets the best possible journey. 

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