How do you know your website is performing well?

How do you know your website is performing well?

Portal Home > Blog > How do you know your website is performing well?

It’s all well having a website, but is it performing well? You should find out.

These days everyone knows that having a website designed with your audience’s needs in mind is crucial. However, people often think their work is done once their site is designed, built and live on the web. They simply sit back and wait for traffic, sales leads and conversions to pile in. But very often this doesn’t happen.

Why? The reason for this is simple. You can spend lots of money, time and effort building a website that stands out, but it’s likely to all go to waste if you do not take the second, perhaps even more crucial step: monitoring and evaluating its success.

There are myriad ways to alter how well your website performs. These are not always large-scale or structural changes; rather, they are nothing more than simple tweaks and alterations to make sure visitors are enjoying the most optimised experience and that your website is serving their needs.

While the changes may be simple, ensuring your website is fully optimised and monitoring its success is not a one-off task. Consistent vigilance and evaluation is necessary, and this is why so many people skip or simply ignore this step as it can be quite a bit of work! But the key lies in how you fundamentally view your company or business’s website. Rather than think of it as a one-time work of art, framed and put on permanent display, think of it as an evolving, living installation which you must constantly update, monitor and adjust to keep it dynamic and thriving.

If you’ve built a website and you’re wondering why it’s not performing or delivering the results you had hoped for, there is every likelihood that you can fix the problem by implementing monitoring tools. Here are some ways in which you can monitor the success of your website:

Use Google Analytics: As Google is the predominant search engine through which most visitors will discover your website, using their analytics platform is essential to determine how visitors are finding your webpages and what they’re doing once they get there. There is a huge variety of elements you can measure, but some key metrics you might consider are: how many “engaged visitors” are there (people who spend a lot of time on your site); your conversion rate (how many of your website visitors are actually converting into subscribers or sales); ad performance (how the various ads on your website are performing in terms of impressions and engagements); and bounce rate (how quickly people bounce off to another page after landing on your site).

It’s also key to determine whether there are any specific webpages within your website—blog posts, services pages etc—which perform particularly well in Google search results. Remember that in most cases people are far more likely to discover you via a search engine than a direct hit on your homepage, so figuring out the most common path of discovery for your visitors is essential.

Track keywords: Every business and industry has key search terms that potential website visitors are likely to search before they even know about your products or services. You need to make sure your website is updated with these keywords on a regular basis. This, again, is an ongoing process. The keywords that were dominating your field six months ago may have changed—this can be influenced by trends, current events, competitors etc—so in order to maximise your website’s success, you need to constantly be monitoring what keywords are the most likely to drive people to it.

Run a crawl test: No website is perfect, and problems like broken links or missing page titles can leave a bad impression on first-time visitors, potentially losing them forever. Use software that runs a “crawl test” on your website—services like Xenu, GSiteCrawler, Custom Crawl, or Crawl Service in the Web App help you do this —to help you assess your website’s accessibility and spot any problems .