5 Essential Website Performance Metrics You Must Measure

5 Essential Website Performance Metrics You Must Measure

Your website is your most powerful marketing tool, one that can be developed and maintained at much lower costs than traditional advertising methods. As a business owner, you have invested significant time, effort, and resources to create and maintain your website. For this reason, it is necessary to ensure that your website is performing at its best at any given point of time.

So how do you measure the effectiveness of your website? By monitoring the website metrics, of course! And what are the important website performance metrics to focus on? Now that is the question you really need to seek answers for – there are too many metrics connected to a website’s performance. Monitoring all of them is simply not practical or useful. 

This is exactly why your online marketing team must ideally narrow down the list to the most important metrics relevant to your particular industry or product. The trick lies in finding which metrics matter most to your business and focusing on them.

Why is it vital to monitor website performance metrics?

Monitoring performance metrics help you identify if your website is functioning as expected. What if you receive huge traffic to your website, but only a meagre number converts into sales? Unless you monitor your conversion rate metric, you will remain unaware of this fact. But once you know this, you can implement steps to provide a better user experience for your customers. And if your customers are impressed, the sales will obviously spike.

Website performance metrics offer you a reliable and scalable method to accurately assess the effectiveness of your website across a range of aspects. It will highlight areas that demand improvements and verify which aspects are going strong. Optimizing these areas can radically enhance the functioning of your website and transform it into an unmatched marketing asset for your business.

Website performance metrics to watch out for

Here is a look into what are the important website performance metrics you need to keep track of:

1. Website traffic acquisition

This refers to how well your website works in attracting people to your products or services. Rather than an estimate of the general traffic volume, you will receive a deeper insight into the demographics of your site’s visitors, the physical location of these visitors and how they found their way to your site.

This particular metric enables you to assess the efficacy of various marketing campaigns and what channels contribute most to attracting the right kind of customers.

2. Page speed

Page speed has a far-reaching impact on the user experience of your website. Used to hyper-speed in almost everything, your customers will not have the time or patience to wait for your webpage to load. They will simply leave and turn to the next website.

If your page speed seems to be lagging anywhere from the point your server receives a request to full page display on a browser, you need to implement ways to speed things up. Load time is the amount of time it takes for the content on your website to fully load. A faster load time is generally better, as it leads to a better user experience and can also help improve your search engine rankings.

3. Bounce rate

Just as the term suggests, this means the rate at which users ‘bounce’ away from your site with minimal or no interactions. The reason behind this may be manifold ranging from slow loading time to lack of information that appeals to prospective customers.

If you notice a high bounce rate, a few basic improvements will help set it right. It will also be a good idea to rework your content so that it is more relevant for your targeted traffic. It is necessary to note that a high bounce rate may not always be bad in all cases. Read our blog on high bounce rate to understand more on this topic.

4. Conversion rate

This website performance metric indicates how many website visitors actually convert into customers. Several aspects related to the overall user experience need to fit together perfectly to accomplish high conversion rates. This includes attracting the right kind of visitors, having excellent page speeds and implementing unmatched marketing strategies.

5. Error rate

No matter how well optimized your website is, it may run into errors once in a while. This metric will offer an indication of how often errors occur and what kind of errors are more frequent. For instance, the error rate may be high during the holiday season when the number of users swarming to your website is unusually huge. Being able to foresee such situations and employing necessary measures will go a long way in improving the user experience.

Monitor metrics, make changes, repeat!

Continual monitoring of your website metrics can go a long way in helping you understand how well your website is working in fulfilling its intended goals. As you bring in improvements based on the metrics, do keep an eye on how the metrics respond to these new changes. It is a great way to measure what is actually working and what is not.

Understanding what the important website performance metrics are, monitoring them and making useful inferences requires time, effort and expertise. If you’d rather professionals look after the task, contact us right away.

Keep track of these metrics to stay ahead of your competition, enhance customer experience, improve conversion rates and help your website excel in its digital ventures.

Jargon Busters

Page Speed – The amount of time taken for a webpage to load – the amount of time between a request and the browser rendering the content.
Bounce Rate – The rate of visitors that leave a site without further interacting with it.