We audited our own website. It was humbling.

Our website’s traffic was never higher, our infrastructure was working, scalability was evident, yet something wasn't right about it. The bounce rates were suspicious. The navigation felt like a labyrinth. The brand quality was leaving clues everywhere.

So I put on my detective hat and opened an investigation. 🕵️

At Alan, we obsess over the product experience: the app, the care journey, the moment a member gets their reimbursement in less than 24 hours.

But what about the experience before someone becomes a client or member?

A few months ago, I ran a full investigation of Alan's French website - 15 topics, across Growth, Brand, and Product teams - to honestly assess our quality before deciding what to fix in 2026.

Here's what the evidence revealed.

A website is not a deliverable. It's a living organism.

It breathes with your brand. It evolves with your product. It speaks before your sales team does, before your onboarding flow, before your first email.

It's the first handshake. And like any first impression, you rarely get a second chance.

Yet too often, websites are treated as static artifacts - something you "launch" and maintain. A collection of pages managed by whoever has bandwidth that week. No vision. No roadmap. No owner.

That was, honestly, part of our problem.

The case files revealed three suspects:

Our homepage serves 5 very different audiences — from freelancers to large enterprises, retirees to public sector employees. The data showed that nearly half our paid campaign traffic bounced without taking action. Not because users weren't interested. Because the page wasn't built for them.

A website that tries to be everything to everyone ends up being nothing to anyone.

This is the insight I want to challenge every growth team on: conversion and brand expression are not silos.

We found pages with outdated illustrations, dense text blocks burying key proof points, generic photography assets, and a discovery funnel that - in our CEO’s words - had mascots that were completely off brand.

None of this shows up neatly in your analytics dashboard. But it silently destroys trust at the exact moment users are deciding whether to believe in you. A poorly chosen visual, a wall of text, an unpolished screen - these are conversion problems parading as design problems.

The best websites don't choose between beautiful and effective. They understand that clarity, consistency, and quality are the performance levers. 

We had the skills. We had the data. What we were missing was someone whose job it is to carry the vision - to treat the website as a product, not a project - with a roadmap, OKRs, and a long-term point of view on how it should grow with the brand. 

Without that, you get fixes but never evolution.

That ownership culture is already part of Alan, the big question was who would sit in the driver’s seat. We're working on that ownership model for the website now. And the vision is clear. 

Think Apple Store. Think IKEA. A digital storefront that creates desire before prospects even "enter" - not functional and forgettable, but impressive and intentional. A website that matches the 4.9/5 quality of our app, not just in design, but in the experience it delivers.

The business case is hard to ignore: 3.8M annual sessions - and conversion rates that are a fraction of industry benchmarks. Closing that gap could unlock ~220k additional leads annually.

The roadmap is in motion: homepage revamp, navigation restructure, quality debt cleanup, measurement framework, A/B testing. No more reactive fixes. A real product, with a real owner, built to evolve.

Because a living organism that doesn't evolve eventually becomes a liability. And ours is just getting started. 🌱

Every prospect deserves to feel Alan before they ever sign up. ✨