How to Measure Website Performance in 5 Simple Steps

Have you invested a lot of money in building your website?

And it’s not just money – you’ve spent a lot of time choosing the right people to develop it, design it, write awesome content for it, and much more.

And now you have no idea if it pays off. Does it convert? Does it contribute to your revenue at all? Is all of that time and money simply wasted?

Not knowing how to evaluate your website’s success can make you feel confused, and we get it. We’ve been there too.

But if you check out the following 5 steps to measuring your website’s performance, you can say goodbye to confusion and hello to reaching your goals.

Enjoy the read!

Step 1: Set up Your Goals

What exactly do you want to achieve with your website? Once you get clear on that, you’ll also know what metrics and KPIs you need to track.

Your website objectives may depend on your industry and site type. For example, an educational website and an e-commerce website are likely to have different goals. These goals will determine your next steps.

Step 2: Choose the Right KPIs

What are the metrics that will clearly show you whether or not you’re reaching your goals? With so many web performance metrics available in analytics tools, it may be difficult to pick the most important ones.

If you’re aiming at high-quality content interesting to your target audience, tracking the number of pages per session may make sense, as well as scroll depth.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to focus your marketing efforts on the source where most of your visitors come from, you may want to track traffic by source.

Step 3: Measure Your Page Load Speed

No matter what your goals are, page load speed can make or break a user’s decision to visit your website. No one likes to wait and we’re only willing to wait for something we consider very valuable.

But why risk it for new visitors who still don’t know how valuable your content is? Tracking (and optimizing) your page load speed is one of the most critical actions to take when measuring your website performance.

When your page load speed is on point, you can move on to measuring other KPIs.

Step 4: Choose the Right Tools

There are lots of options when it comes to web analytics tools: with Google Analytics and Google Search Console being the most popular… These can give you important insight into your website’s performance and help you visualize data so you can analyze it easier.

Using all-in-one tools is usually a better choice for measuring your website’s performance. That way, you get all your data and metrics in one place, so the analysis is more straightforward.

Step 5: Collect the Data and Analyze It

After you’ve chosen the KPIs, set up your goals and time frames in which you want to complete them, it’s time to analyze your performance.

Check the number of unique visitors you get or the time they spend on your website and see how real-time data compares to your goals. Are you on the right track? If not, you should taje the necessary steps to make improvements: such as optimizing your content, website user experience, or enhancing your off-page SEO efforts, to name a few.

Focus on What Really Matters

Getting a lot of traffic doesn’t mean much if you don’t have any qualified leads. It’s easy to get carried away by vanity metrics, so make sure you’re always on track and measuring the KPIs that really matter.

If you measure your website’s performance regularly, you’ll be more likely to provide an excellent user experience for your visitors, build trust in your brand, and, finally, get more conversions and increase your business revenue.