The world is becoming a technology hub. Businesses and people depend on World Wide Web. Online presence is the new essential for trade and business. Having an efficient, quick, informative website with the right content is a must. In spite of putting up the best designs and investing considerable money and energy sometimes, a website does not give desired results. So, where is the problem? The problem lies in not analyzing website performance.
How to analyze a website’s performance? If your website is not giving the expected outcome, you must divert your energy and take a break. This is the right time to review data collected by analytics tools of your website. It is essential to interpret this data and improve your website performance.
Website Performance Metrics
The metrics that we are going to discuss here gather the data from the interactions of a user with the website. This data is collected on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. A lot of interpretations can guide you to move in the right direction. These numbers and percentages collected are what you need.
Page speed
Speed is a measure of efficiency. People always prefer a website that shows up immediately after typing its URL. For the success of a website, Page Speed is a vital factor in the content-driven web world. Most of the leading analytics tools give high credit to page speed. Higher page speed guarantees a better user experience and enhanced user trust. Thus, it has a significant place in measuring in-page rankings for SEO algorithms.
Page speed is measured between 0-100. As per Google Analytics, a page speed of 85 and above is considered good. If your website has a lower score on page speed then it definitely has scope for improvement. With these figures in your hand, you must identify the factors that are lowering the speed. The common reasons are heavy images and videos, un-optimized code, excessive redirects, and server response time.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the promptness with which a user presses the back button on the browser. It is the time that he takes to return back to the previous page without clicking on the page. This is a direct indication that the objective of the site is not as expected by the visitor. He was unable to find anything interesting on the webpage. Another reason can be a poorly designed webpage. A bounce rate of more than 60% is a really serious issue to be tackled. It needs immediate changes in content quality and presentation to hold a visitor on the page.
Conversion Rate
This website performance metric points out how successfully you have fulfilled the website goals. You can use analytics tools like Google Analytics to define various goals with which you have created the website. These goals can be anything like a page visit, a form filled, a query to the database, a download, an addition to a mailing list, a view of a video, etc.
Whenever a defined goal is achieved it is a conversion. For a website, the conversion rate is calculated as a ratio of visits finalized as conversion and the total number of visits. A conversion rate higher than 2% is a measure of a well-performing website.
Average Time on Page
People appreciate the things that they find attractive and worthy of their time. The longer a user stays on a page indicates that the page contains the right content for a user. If the content and design are not motivating and inviting, a visitor will leave the site in haste.
On average if a user stays on your webpage for more than two minutes it is happy news. But if your page average time is lesser then you must make the content appealing and worth visiting.
Exit Rate
The website which is defined with a specific goal also defines the target pages that visitors must visit. If the visitors abandon your site on other pages than your desired ones then it increases the exit rate. A high exit rate is not good for your website. Pages of your site that display an alarmingly high rate of exit need possible design enhancements to check the visitor leakage.
Conclusion
These are a few important website performance metrics that must be monitored regularly. The analysis of these figures is essential to avail an opportunity to make your website achieve your desired business goals.
Awesome post.