Is your website successful? This guide outlines how to check your website performance
Before you answer this question, you probably have a question of your own: what defines success for a website? This varies on a site-by-site basis as it all depends on what your website does.
For eCommerce businesses, website performance success is usually measured in sales. If your website is generating lots of sales, it’s performing pretty darn well.
For general business websites, perhaps success comes in different ways. Maybe your idea of success is to generate leads or consultations via your site. Regardless of your definition of success, how can you tell if a website is performing up to standard?
How to check website performance
In this guide, we’ll explain everything you need to do to check your website’s performance. From here, you can figure out if things are positive, negative, or somewhere in between.
You’ll also be able to identify the key ways in which you can improve your site, so it starts performing even better. So, let’s begin!
Set Your Main Goals
We spoke about defining website performance success just a moment ago, and it’s the first step in monitoring website performance.
What are the main goals of your site? There is no right or wrong answer here; it is completely up to you. Think about the reason(s) you set up this website — what do you want it to achieve?
For some of you, the goals are very obvious. For others, it can be harder to figure out what you deem a success or not. With that in mind, here are a few examples of key goals to set for your website:
- To increase online sales
- To improve lead generation
- To boost brand awareness
- To educate and inform others
- To improve your search engine ranking
- To drive foot traffic to a physical location
- To drive traffic to your social media platforms
The list can go on, but it gives you an idea of the things you’re looking for.
Why do you need to define your targets/goals? Because it’s impossible to measure the success of anything without a clear vision in mind. Now, you’ve got something to work towards — it will be infinitely easier to tell if your website is performing up to standard or not.
There’s now a simple question to ask yourself: is your website achieving its goals? If so, how well is it doing it and can it be improved? If not, why isn’t it performing?
Create A Google Analytics Account
You now know what you’re looking for, the question is how do you find it?
For instance, if your website performance goals are to generate sales, how do you find evidence of this? Primarily, you have to use software that analyzes your website. The easiest approach is to create a Google Analytics Account.
It’s very easy to do and there are some straightforward steps outlined by Google to do so if you click the link above.
Why Google Analytics? Because it’s the best free platform to learn as much as possible about your website. Plus, it recently introduced Google Analytics 4, which is a new way of analyzing data. Before, it used something called Universal Analytics, but all the information on GA4 vs Universal Analytics indicates that this is a positive upgrade. You have more tools and more ways of understanding the tiniest elements of your site.
Once your account is up and running, you can use the Admin page to add your website. Again, it’s easy to do and there are in-depth guides out there if you need some extra help. At this point, you have everything you need to start analyzing your website for an overview of its performance.
Choose Your KPIs
Firstly, what are KPIs? As you may or may not be aware, a KPI is a key performance indicator. This is fairly self-explanatory as it is something that indicates how well something else is performing. In this context, it will be something that shows your website performance.
Some KPIs will obviously mean a lot more to you than others — it all goes back to the goals you settled on initially. Here, the aim is to pick KPIs that closely align with your website performance goals. You will always need to choose more than one KPI as this helps to provide context around your main targets.
For example, let’s say your primary goal is to improve conversions. Google Analytics has a KPI called “Goal Conversions” that’s perfect for this. You can set the main conversion goal— this could be 100 sign-ups for your mailing list per month. Google will then tell you what your goal conversion rate is based on this.
However, it doesn’t provide the full website performance story. You should also track other KPIs relating to this — such as bounce rate, how many new users visit your site, returning visitors, average page speed, etc.
As a result, you can start building more context around the goal conversion rate. If it’s low, you can look at the other KPIs for possible reasons behind this.
Maybe you notice your bounce rate is high and average page speed is bad. This could indicate that people visit your site, get put off by the slow page speed, and leave right away. If you fix this and improve the page speed, see if it makes a difference. Suddenly, the bounce rate decreases and the conversion rate improves.
You get the idea, and if you were to have a list of KPIs that are always worth measuring regardless of your goals, it would be these:
- Sessions – total number of visits to your site within a period
- Unique user count
- Total Pageviews
- Average session duration
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- Traffic sources
- Average page speed
- Average time on page
- Top pages
- Returning visitor count
There are so many things to look at for website performance — and you can find them all when you set up your Google Analytics account.
Once you’ve done this, you will be able to check your performance all the time. Set goals and measure them using KPIs.
From here, you can start tweaking your site and testing its performance through Google Analytics. Make alterations, then see if your performance improves or gets worse. This is called A/B testing and is the best way to figure out the ultimate version of your site for the most success!
Conclusion
So, if you haven’t already checked your site’s performance, now is the perfect time to start.
