The company’s website is a direct link to customers. With the effective navigation it offers, the answer to their questions, and therefore to their expectations: products, product description, payment method, delivery, after-sales services… and many other points related to each activity, the site can become the first person we turn to when we have a request. How to evaluate the performance of your website?
According to a 2019 study by Databox, about 41% of websites have an average session duration between 2 and 3 minutes: 55% of sessions have an average duration of less than 3 minutes, and only 27% of sessions exceed 4 minutes. The best strategy to increase average session duration is to include visual elements – like relevant videos, charts and infographics.
Scoring a website allows you to determine whether or not its performance is outperforming its competitors. This operation affects the positioning of the site and the comfort of Internet users. At the same time, it allows you to identify gaps and areas for improvement and determine the best way to do so. There are various ways to evaluate the performance of your website, some of them we will discover in the development that follows.
Determine the number of visitors from the engine
A high performance website has flawless visibility and attracts more visitors. It turns out that the number of visitors from Google is a relevant element for defining the site’s performance. In order to facilitate the estimation of the number of visitors, it is necessary to determine the keywords that actually generate traffic.
Visit quality and retention rate
It is not enough to have a lot of visitors, you have to consider the quality of the visits. This includes differentiating visitors based on their origin. This makes it easy to determine the time they spend on the page, discover the actions they took (consulting with offers or making a purchase) and find out if the page is really interesting to them. In addition, it is necessary to define the rate of customer loyalty. To calculate this rate, we need to record the number of customers who buy two or more items per year and compare it to the total number of customers within the community.
Time spent per page
A successful website turns into an engaging website. If its content interests the visitor, he will spend a few minutes or even a few hours on this page. A company can optimize the performance of its site by estimating the time a visitor spends on each page. She can modify specific pages by referring to those that have achieved record times. However, shopping online shouldn’t take a lot of time. Customers should be able to shop quickly, easily and securely.
Number of links clicked
A successful page gets a significant number of clicks. There is software available to count the number of links people click on, such as screenshots. A low click-through rate can have a significant negative impact on a page’s positioning. In this case, a review of the company’s strategy is necessary.
Take an online speed test
Several websites offer online tools that allow businesses to evaluate their website. To guarantee the reliability of the results, you should not hesitate to run the test on other software. Professionals in this field recommend that companies regularly check the performance of their sites, because Internet users do not like to wait. He needs an immediate response. If the waiting time exceeds 8 seconds, the site risks losing more than 47% of its visitors. There is a risk of really jeopardizing its performance and positioning on search engines.
5 basic tools for website analysis
SemRush
This tool allows you to analyze and optimize the performance of your website. You can monitor your positioning in search results, analyze your competitors, conduct audits of your site.
Google Analytics
This tool allows you to analyze your website’s audience. You can get detailed information about your audience, traffic sources, conversion goals, etc. It is a free tool that allows you to have a view of the overall health of your website and analyze user behavior.
Ahrefs
This tool offers many features like backlink mining, keyword analysis, positioning tracking. Ahrefs is especially useful for studying SEO referencing your website.
Similarweb
This tool allows you to know the traffic statistics of any website. You can get information about traffic sources, organic keywords, referring pages, etc. This is a great tool to track your competitors and understand how they drive traffic to their site.