A good website is a basic requirement to develop a strong online presence. A website not only acts as your brand’s face in the digital marketplace but also allows you to establish credibility as a business.
However, to get the most out of your website, it is important to regularly review its performance and optimize it accordingly. Measuring your website’s performance, therefore, plays a very important role in determining what changes need to be made to your site. Though the process can seem tricky, monitoring your website and making adjustments can improve its performance in the long run. Here are some of the top Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can help you effectively monitor and analyze your business’s website.
Number of Visitors
With this KPI, you can easily determine the volume of traffic that explores your website over various time frames. This metric helps you analyze the lags and spikes in the number of visitors you get and the reason behind them. For instance, websites may see a surge in the number of unique visitors on a specific date or time. Similarly, you can figure out during which days and weeks during the year website traffic decreases. This helps you figure out when to launch your promotions and can help you create a refined content calendar to optimize the performance of your content.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate shows you the percentage of visitors that leave after only visiting one webpage on your website, and is one of the most important metrics to use when measuring website performance.
A high bounce rate can be a sign that users aren’t finding what they need on your webpages, and can result in your pages being penalized and ranked lower by Google and other search engines.
It’s important to remember that each website will have a unique bounce rate based on site content, user behaviour, and other factors. Bounce rate data is most useful when evaluating trends over time, comparing page performance, and finding ideas to adjust website user flows with A/B tests.
Session Duration and Pages Per Session
Session duration and pages per session are important metrics to gauge how users interact with your content. These KPIs assess the interest and curiosity levels of your target audience while they interact with your website. Long session durations indicate that your website is interesting to your visitors, and high page per session rates indicate that users are engaging with your website’s content and clicking through to view multiple pages. For instance, a website with a low average session duration indicates that users are unable or unwilling to find the information they were looking for, or that they did not find the website engaging.
Unique Website Visitors
Unique website visits are a great metric to gauge your website’s traffic metrics over time. Here, visitors are identified by their IP address and are counted as a visitor only once during the reporting period (unless they delete their browser cookies, in which case they’ll be counted as a new visitor again upon returning to your site). It’s important to separate your unique visits from your total visits to identify what percentage of your traffic is unique visitors and what percentage of it is returning visitors.
Average Time on Page
Just like pages viewed per session, average time on page is another important indicator that helps you gauge the average amount of time that users spend on each of your pages. This metric allows you to analyze your website’s quality and the relevance of your site’s content. If your website is engaging, the average time on your pages will likely be higher.
Average Page Speed
Average page load speed is an indicator that shows the loading speed of your webpages. If your pages take too long to load, it might negatively impact how your visitors interact with your pages and negatively impact your site’s search engine performance. Lengthy loading times can make visitors lose interest and exit from your pages. This can, in turn, increase bounce rates and lead to lower rankings in search engines. Therefore, carefully tracking page load speed and optimizing each page to load as fast as possible can help keep users satisfied and returning to your site for more.
Now It’s Time To Start Using the Right Website KPIs
Selecting the right website KPIs is an essential part of monitoring your website’s performance. These metrics not only help you to find the holes in your website design and strategy but also allow you to continuously refine your site to achieve better results.
