Every digital marketing leader faces the challenge of improving their website with limited resources. You know your site could work harder, but with so many potential opportunities and competing priorities, where do you focus your efforts?
The key is objective prioritisation.
By applying a data-informed approach to understanding opportunities and efforts, you can ensure every change you make maximises impact, while considering budget and resources.
In this guide, I’ll share practical methods to help you prioritise website improvements strategically, even with tight budgets.
Without a clear structure, prioritisation often falls victim to stakeholder opinions, loudest voices, or internal biases. To avoid this, start by using a prioritisation framework such as PIE, ICE, or RICE to objectively log and rank website changes based on the merits of each opportunity.
The PIE Framework has three factors by which to rank a website change or opportunity.
Start by rating each website change against each of the three factors on a scale of 1-10. Next, take the average score across the three factors, and you will arrive at a PIE Score for the website change. You can now quickly and easily compare PIE scores for each of your website opportunities, with the high potential, high importance, and easy to execute changes bubbling to the top of the list.
However, while this framework is quick to do, this process is subjective and relies on the experience and opinions of the people ranking the items.
The ICE Framework is like PIE, with its three ranking factors.
Similar to PIE, by scoring each factor on a 1-10 scale, but this time summing the total score, you can arrive at an ICE score between 3 and 30 which allows you to compare the merits of one opportunity against another.
While the PIE framework differs with its ‘importance’ factor which ties opportunities to overall business goals, the ICE framework is a little more user-centred with consideration around its ‘confidence’ factor – i.e. based on the data we have, how confident are we in the website change will make an impact?
However, both PIE and ICE are top-level and at risk of stakeholder subjectivity.
The RICE framework aims to remove some of the subjectivity of PIE and ICE by introducing data to its ranking factors.
Once you have assigned your score to each factor, use the following formula to arrive at your RICE score for each opportunity.
Again, you can now sort the list of opportunities to see which ones bubble to the top.
While the ICE, PIE and RICE frameworks offer strong starting points, Jaywing’s own custom prioritisation model builds upon them by incorporating additional layers of user experience insight and data triangulation for a more objective assessment. This ensures that prioritisation is not only based on estimated ease of implementation and actual reach, but critically, confidence gained from data-informed user-centred research.
Avoid making changes based on assumptions or internal preferences. Instead, fuel your prioritisation framework with user data from a range of sources to maximise the confidence in your website enhancements.
For a cost-effective approach to user research, consider the following methods:
Though only scratching the surface, these quick and low costs approaches to user research will help provide data for your prioritisation efforts and reduce subjectivity when ranking. Prioritising with data-driven insights ensures that every change you make is based on user behaviour, and not guesswork.
With limited budgets, you must weigh the trade-off between smaller, easier tactical improvements and bigger, resource-heavy strategic initiatives.
For example:
Lower-Effort, Higher-Return Wins
Higher-Effort, Higher-Impact Projects
A balanced approach ensures you’re driving both incremental improvements and long-term transformation within your budget constraints.
Not all pages or features deserve equal attention. Red Route Analysis helps you identify the most crucial paths users take, ensuring you focus resources where they matter most.
For example:
Prioritising these core user journeys ensures that your website improvements drive measurable business impact.
When resources are limited, success isn’t about doing more – it’s about doing the right things in the right order.
By using a structured prioritisation framework, leveraging data, balancing quick wins with strategic changes, and focusing on the most critical user journeys, you can ensure that every improvement delivers real value.