Know your statistics: Audit and Monitor your website performance

Your website is the face of your business.

It’s probably also one of the most expensive marketing assets you ever bought. And the bad news is that you need to keep injecting money to make it work for you.

But in order to generate money from your site, you need to audit and monitor so that you know what to invest in and how to evolve your online presence.

1. Website loading time

Your website loading time is one of the first metrics to look at. If you have problems with this - everything else is compromised. So by giving this priority, you remove a big potential down-side. This is especially true if you sell products online.

Here are some real-life examples of how this affected some well-known brands:

Amazon experienced a 1 % loss in revenue per 100 ms site load delay

Walmart increased conversion rate by 2 % for every 1 second of load time improvement

Mozilla improved conversions by 15.4 % by reducing load time by 2.2 seconds

2. Broken Page Links

Links that lead to nowhere on your website are called 404 error pages. Whether a broken link is caused by a misspelling or a resource that was moved or deleted, they make you look bad and unprofessional at best. At worst people leave your site right away, never to return. There are some very easy to use tools that do a great job of finding your broken links.

3. Analyze and Monitor the Traffic

Another important metric is the overall traffic. This an obvious one, but if your traffic increases without increasing your sales, then it can also be an alarm bell that signals that you need to make some drastic changes to the structure or lead harvesting tools or lead-nurturing processes.

4. Pages Per Viewer

The number of pages each viewer looks at is a good indicator of how interesting and easy to navigate your website is. So watch these metrics and if possible use tools like Hotjar or Crazyegg to record user experience on your site and improve the navigation and layouts.

5. Bounce rate

This is probably the most worrying metric but it is on average quite high even if you’re doing pretty well. Google Analytics describes it as one-click interactions with your website.

That said, it should be your goal to reduce it as much as possible. The average bounce rate is 45% according to a study carried out by Rocket Fuel.

By monitoring these performance points, you lay the foundation for a better website. Which indicators do you use for your website performance monitoring? Would you like help to identify a few more? Book a free consultation here...