“Digital experience matters” is the kind of thing that ends up on a slide deck and makes everyone nod. Then nothing changes.
So let me try to be specific about what matters in digital experience and what does not.
What matters most
Whether the customer can find what they came for. Without zooming in. Without hunting through a navigation menu. Without scrolling past a popup. The single biggest predictor of whether a website does its job is how quickly someone can get to the thing they actually wanted.
Whether the contact form works on the third attempt. Most contact forms work first time on the desktop browser the developer was using when they built it. They break in unpredictable ways elsewhere. On Safari mobile. With certain validation rules. When autofill misbehaves. The number of leads I have seen lost to broken forms is hilarious if you do not work in this industry.
Whether the page that converts best is actually the one being promoted. Often it is not. The team is sending paid traffic to a homepage when a deeper service page converts at three times the rate. Same audience, different page, very different results.
What does not matter as much as you think
The “look and feel”. Most clients spend the most time on this. It produces the smallest measurable difference. A site that looks fine but works well will outperform a beautiful site that has a broken checkout, every time.
How “modern” the design is. Modern is a moving target. What converts in 2026 looks remarkably similar to what converted in 2018. Clear value proposition. Obvious next step. Trust signals near the action. The fundamentals do not change.
Most personalisation. Real personalisation done well is great. Most “personalisation” is putting your first name in an email subject line, or showing a popup based on which page you came from. It is not building loyalty. It is mildly creepy at best.
The honest version
If you want digital experience to “matter” in measurable terms, pick the three most-trafficked journeys on your site, watch real users go through them, and fix what slows them down. That is the work. The rest is mostly philosophy.
If you want help pulling that apart, let’s talk.