How to Measure the Performance of Small Business Websites

How can you tell if your business is growing? Is everything working as it should? First, you need to know the metrics that will give you an accurate picture of your business. Your website is the digital representation of your company and must have metrics to track its performance. We’ll discuss the main indicators that your website is working well.

How to measure the performance of your small business website

These metrics will help you identify areas that require improvement. Then, it’s possible to scale up the good work and fix critical issues.

1. Speed of the site

Akamai’s marketing report states that 40% of website users will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. I know that I have quit many websites because it takes too long to load their content.

It is a critical metric to improve. Because only by ensuring that people stay on your site. Can you convert them into paying customers? These are some tips to speed up your website.

• You should run your website through speed testing tools or platforms regularly. To check your website’s speed, you can add a plugin.
• A caching plugin allows you to cache your site so visitors don’t have to load it each time they visit.
• To reduce the image size, you can use an image compression tool
• Upload images to your website only. Use a third-party tool to embed the URL
• Choose a high-quality hosting provider
• Choose lightweight WordPress themes over ones that have too many features.

Site speed is only one of the core web vitals that search engines like Google use to assess site health. Search will add additional user experience web vitals in the coming months. By focusing on site speeds, you can be prepared to keep up with these new factors.

2. SEO performance

When people search for keywords related to your business, it increases their chances of finding your website through search engine optimization.

Your website could get lost in the sea of millions of websites trying to grab people’s attention without SEO strategies. These are some ways to track the optimization of your website for search engine crawling and for appearing in relevant searches.

Keyword research

Keyword research. Use an SEO platform or plugin to analyze your website and determine which keywords are ranking high. It will let you know if your content needs to be optimized

Backlinks

Be sure to check the quality of backlinks. It would help if you did not allow spammy or problematic websites to link to your pages. You can ‘disavow links’ so search engine crawlers don’t consider them spammy.

Mobile-first

Verify that your website is mobile-responsive. Google stated that it would index mobile versions first, then the desktop version. It is because 51% of internet traffic is generated via mobile and tablet devices. Therefore, your mobile website is the most important.

These metrics are not the only ones that impact your SEO performance. Your site’s loading time also has an impact on your SEO performance. You can impact the success of your business by monitoring your SEO performance.

3. Information about the Audience

It can be extremely useful to know who visits your website, what they do, where they come from, and how they got there. An analytics tool is required to get this information.

Google Analytics is a popular and free tool that every business can use. It is powerful and can give you insight into how much traffic your website receives. However, you might find it difficult to use, so you should consider an analytics plugin that generates reports that are easy to use.

Let’s take a look at what metrics you should be monitoring with an analytics tool.

• You can track the number of visits that you receive daily, weekly basis, monthly basis, or for a longer time.
• Which country are they from? Is your visitor local or international?
• Which are the unique visitors? How many are returning?
• Analyze the demographics of your visitors to your website. How old are they? What is their gender?
• What keywords do people use to find your website pages?

These metrics will help you evaluate how your site is performing and tell you what you should do.

In addition, this information will allow you to come up with more topic ideas for your content and help you determine which channels are most important.

4. Sources of traffic

Analytics tools can tell you where visitors are coming from. Knowing your traffic source will help you choose the best channels to target and eliminate those that don’t work. These are the sources of traffic that you need to monitor:

• Organic traffic: This refers to traffic that is generated by people using relevant keywords to locate your site
• Direct traffic: People type your URL into their browser to visit your site.
• Referral sources: These websites link to your content.
• Email marketing: The traffic that comes from email campaigns
• Social media: How many of your visitors come from Facebook, Instagram, and other networks?
• Paid marketing: This traffic comes from PPC (paid per click) ads or other types of ads

You can make the most of your traffic by knowing where it is coming from and what channels bring you the most visitors.

If you find out that your paid ads are making less than they are earning, you can look for other ways to drive traffic. You should also help affiliates and referral sites that do a great job of marketing your site.

5. Conversion rates

You can also track conversion rates to see if your website design is effective.

Conversions are specific actions taken by users. You can determine the percentage of people who do these things by using analytics and back-end reporting

• To sign up for your newsletter, drop your email address in the opt-in popup.
• Download ebooks, content upgrades, and other types of downloadable content
• Click on the link to view a promotion, giveaway, or call-to-action button.
• Complete the forms and click on the submit button

You can identify what converts and what doesn’t on your website to help you make adjustments. For example, to increase subscriptions, you can make more offers or modify the content of your opt-in popup forms.

Your sales conversions are the most important type you can track. Your business must make money. Knowing the pace at which people buy is like having your finger on the pulse for your business.

Keep track of what is important for your business

These are the top KPIs you need to monitor to see how your website is performing. Admittedly, it can be challenging to do this kind of data tracking. But it would help if you did it nonetheless.

You won’t make poor decisions if you are aware of what’s going on in your business. Your leadership abilities and business performance can be transformed by the insights you gain.

Disclaimer. The opinions and views expressed in this article are the authors Shalom Lamm.