One of the goals of every website owner is to increase their website performance, especially if you consider commercial websites. Whether you are creating a new one or already have an existing website, there is a large number of factors you can follow. They can all be indicators of how good or bad your website is performing overall. However, it’s not always clear which of the factors has a more significant impact. That’s why it’s crucial first to understand how measuring works and what are the most important metrics for your website performance. Only then will you be able to identify the potential problems, work on improvement, and successfully monitor them in the future.
Measure your website performance with some of the most important metrics
Even though the ultimate ambition of the majority of websites is to generate revenue, their conversion process might be different. To choose the right metrics that will show the applicable success of your website, you need to understand the conversion process and set your goals. That way, you will be able to target the relevant ones instead of focusing on every metric you’ve heard about. And when working on your web and mobile app development, you will know exactly what to measure, why it’s essential, and how it affects their performance.
To help you with this, here are some of the most important metrics to measure what is working and what is not:
- Traffic metrics
- Traffic source measuring
- Number of unique visitors
- Number of returning visitors
- Visitor engagement metrics
- Bounce rate
- Conversion metrics
- User-experience metrics
- Traffic metrics
Traffic is probably the most fundamental metric because everything starts with it. It represents the total number of visitors to your website, and without visitors, there is nothing else to measure. To attract more visitors, you will need great content. After that, it’s necessary to work on your link profile. It’s important to realize that natural links are crucial and probably the best links to improve your website’s relevance, authority, and link juice. Both content and links, coupled with other factors, will significantly increase website traffic. However, you need to pay attention to the increase in traffic over a more extended period. If it steadily grows over time, it’s a good sign that your website is performing well.
- Traffic source measuring
Another important thing is to know where all of that traffic is coming from. There are numerous tools to track this information, and Google Analytics is probably one of the popular choices. Generally, you can distinguish a few categories of traffic sources:
- Organic search sources – it’s the traffic coming from search engines and can be directly dependant on search engine ranking positions.
- Direct traffic – when someone directly types your website URL in the browser or uses bookmarks.
- Referral traffic sources – all the traffic coming from other websites.
- Social traffic sources – the traffic coming from various social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
By knowing your traffic sources, you will be able to tell which of your SEO strategies and plans give the best results. It will allow you to place additional efforts into more specific improvements.
- Number of unique visitors
While measuring the traffic shows important data, you could also use data that gives more specific information. As the name says, it is the number of unique visitors to your website regardless of how many times they come back. This metric is helpful because it can show you how effective your website is in attracting new visitors. You can eventually use this information to determine which targeted audience you should focus on.
- Number of returning visitors
This group consists of all those who visited your website at least twice. A high number of returning visitors, in general, shows how engaging your website is. This, along with other data, can point you in the right direction when it comes to improvements. It tells you whether you should place more effort on your content quality, improve technical performance, or expand the product offer, for example.
- Visitor engagement metrics
Visitor engagement metrics can show you if your website is efficient at keeping the visitors on its pages. You can follow how visitors are moving through the website. Check how they interact and what interests them the most, and see which of the elements are the most performing. If engagement is low, it might mean you need to work more on your content marketing, for example. The point is to keep them occupied long enough, interest them, and motivate them to complete an action. You can also measure how many pages the average visitor opens per session or the average session duration of each visitor.
- Bounce rate
Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors that leave after opening only one page. Generally speaking, a high bounce rate may indicate that visitors are not finding the expected results on your pages. But it’s not necessarily precise because the information may be on that exact page. Nevertheless, combined with other metrics, it can help you realize which section potentially requires improvement.
- Conversion metrics
Depending on your goals, a conversion metric can be used to eventually measure your website’s success. If your goal is to sell products, this metric will show how efficient the website is in converting visitors to buyers. It’s always good to combine it with traffic metrics. You can have a website with low traffic, but if your conversion rate is high, it shows your website is performing well. On the other hand, if you have high traffic but a low conversion rate, it means your website needs improvements.
- User-experience metrics
User-experience (UX) has become one of the most important factors when creating a website or mobile apps. With this in mind, ease of navigation, loading speed, and visual appeal of your website are placed into focus. Even Google prefers websites that provide a good user experience. To accomplish this, you should consider a couple of UX metrics like:
- Mobile performance – With so many different devices in use, your website should be adjustable to any screen, especially smartphones. This is where responsive design comes into play.
- Page loading speed – this metric measures the time to load the entire content of a page. Because no one wants to wait forever to open a website, which can directly affect your profit; visitors who are quick to leave can easily go to your competitors.
- Time to Interactive (TTI) – Another factor in close connection with loading time is the TTI. It’s the time from opening the page until it can respond to user input.
In the end, regardless of the type of your website, the only way to satisfy all your visitors’ needs is to combine quality content with high performance. To accomplish this, you should closely learn which are the most important metrics for your website performance. By doing so, you will ensure relevancy, know how to improve your SEO, and learn to create an intuitive and efficient design.