Do you have a website, and you’re looking for ways to optimise content and structure for lead generation? We will review how to analyse your website’s performance and provide some tips to ensure that your website is loading as fast as possible and is as easy to use for the user as well on the front end.

No matter what size or purpose your website serves, you’ll always need to analyse how your website is performing; whether it’s the functionality is e-commerce, or if it’s a food or blog recipe or some portfolio website, it doesn’t matter. Website analysis is crucial.

However, it seems a challenging task for a website owner. They have to start developing content. They have to explore what attracts their audience online. They have to unearth what makes the pages Load faster. Thankfully, analytics have improved quickly. Now, you have the source of how your audience interacts with your content.

As a result, analytics has become much easier to understand, and there are many more tutorials out there that people can follow to ensure that the website performs optimally. So analysing your website’s Performance is something every website owner should be doing throughout the year. But you should set the right metric needed to be reviewed constantly to make sure that your website has the potential to rank higher on Google.

Eventually, You can come up with plans after that to improve your site, and a website can constantly be improved upon.

What is Web Analytics?

Web analytics give you a systematic way to identify weaknesses in your site, and most are free and easy to understand. So there are a lot of different metrics you could go over as a website owner when you’re analysing its performance in relation to content, user experience or behaviour, time to interact, speed, connection time, content complexity, SEO score, error rate, traffic, user journey, and acquisition.

Not to mention you need to focus on competition to figure out your drawbacks and opportunities to overshine. 

However, sometimes it’s best to focus on the ones that matter most. 

So, what does this mean for you when optimising your website?

User experience or behaviour: It introduces how people interact with your website. To do so, you have to measure two main components: usability and intuitive design.

User behaviour includes many other metrics, which are all good indicators of how well your site serves your user’s needs, such as average time on the page and exit rates (keep reading to know more)

Website speed performance: It concerns how long it takes for your site to load. For example, how long it takes your title to load and show up on a browser’s tab. This is important because if it’s too slow, you will lose users who are likely not keen on waiting for anything to load.

Time to interact: it is how long it takes for the page to load to the point that the user can interact with it.

Exit rate: it refers to the time your audience spends between visiting and leaving your website. It is also essential, as you don’t want your audience to become impatient while waiting for something to load. 

Connection time: It refers to how to establish a connection between the user’s browser and the website server. You will find the error when the website is overloaded with pages and content more than the server can tackle.

Content complexity: It consists of metrics such as overall weight and asset count. The overall weight is the total sum of bytes and users received. On the other hand, the overall asset count is the total of your website’s assets, like image count.

SEO: It’s part of content-level metrics essential for analysing your on-page SEO. For example, content readability dramatically impacts how well your content performs in SCRPs. However, SEO includes more than just content. For instance, you have to analyse keyword density and metadata optimisation to get a better SEO score and put your website in a better position. 

Pro tip: You can find many free tools and plugins to optimise your website’s SEO performance, such as Yoast and Ubersuggest. 

Error rate: It is the average amount of problem requests compared to the total requests.

Traffic: It refers to the number of visitors who click through your website link.

User journey or map: it refers to how the user explores or navigates around your website. For example, you will discover the sections your audience spends more time on and others they overlook. It directs you on what pages and parts need to be improved or removed altogether. 

This impacts your conversion rate optimisation “CRO” and your SEO.

Acquisition metrics: These centre around the number of times users have requested to load a single page. It includes the number of page views, referring to the number of users clicking on a link that directs them to the page on your site.

Important: The rate of page views doesn’t have to be a unique view, which means that if a user refreshes the same page, it will appear as two separate page views.

A session: It logs every user’s activities on your site. In other words, the time users spend browsing the website. Each session is reset after 30 minutes of inactivity, but you can customise this according to the nature of your site.

These website performance metrics provide valuable insight and should be noticed when analysing your website’s performance, content, etc. No matter how you feel about setting the time on your schedule to review your website performance, it’s always worth your time.

Things You Need to Consider When Optimising Your Website’s Performance

Website analytics are only helpful if you know how to act on the results. But how to make them work for you?

You need to develop a roadmap to improve each of these metrics. Why? As long as you put your eye on your website score, you have a channel to increase the profitability of your site, generate leads, and set up a great brand positioning. 

Consider Create Blog

One of the strategies that you can implement is getting the right content volume for your industry. Blog posts will help drive traffic to your website, increase conversion rates, and let your customers trust you. There is no optimal word count, but most statistics show that 1,500 and 3,000 words can perform better. Again, this varies from industry to industry.

Pro tip: When you create content, it’s always best to base your word counts on data. So this shows word count versus average traffic. That’s how you can share your expertise through well-targeted blog posts using the right keywords and enhancing your website’s SEO performance.

While analysing your website’s performance, always focus on valuable, informative content that adds something and makes your readers feel something instead of just content to generate traffic.

Why?

Because you might increase your traffic volume but not the quality traffic you’re looking for!

Ironically, websites that write for search engines don’t rank well and usually have many bounces. You want increased traffic, but it’s meaningless if the users only visit your website once.

It’s more important to have a loyal following. 

How do I know that?

On your way to optimising your website by developing content for your visitors, check SCRPs. It will give you detailed insights into how your pages perform in search results. 

Invest in On-Page SEO Techniques 

While creating a website that will be seen and appreciated by the search engine, you need to optimise on-page SEO practices. 

Don’t let your desire to deliver content as quickly as possible make you forget the end goal of your website- gain more exposure and convert more visitors.

But how do you convert them without helping your website be seen by search engines? 

So, start with conducting a keyword search, figuring out the top-ranked phrases used by your target audience.  

Second, consider building internal links between your pages and blog posts. That will give the search engine the green light that you offer a lot of relevant content, so it will keep suggesting it to the right people.

On the other hand, you might succeed in keeping readers on the website as much as possible, which is good for your website’s credibility as well.

Eventually, links that are described well and adequately inserted into the text will help increase your search engine optimisation as opposed to ones that are haphazardly entered in or slapped on the bottom of the page.

Consider Off-Page SEO 

Another thing is to build quality external links. Build relationships with other publishers and link your website and topics with them.

Also, you can think of affiliate marketing, such as partnering with other influencers who will link to your website on their YouTube channel.

Link building is the most efficient strategy- it even overperforms offering fresh, high-quality content.

Why?

Okay, external links serve as applause to your website, which means you have something valuable enough to nudge other websites to refer you. It’s seen as an expression of appreciation for your brand. 

However, keep this in mind: link building is about quality. Shift your focus from sending emails to irrelevant websites to only authoritative websites. At the same time, you can build your link strategy based on new brands as long as they are somehow related to your niche.  

Enhance Your Domain Authority

When analysing your website’s performance, domain authority is another factor you need to consider, which helps you uncover how search engines see your website. The domain authority, which Moz coined, forecasts how far your website will progress through search engines compared to your niche’s competitors. SEO tools and website analytics often score your domain authority from one to 100.

 To make the most of this, it’s important to seek out backlinks from high authority sites, for instance, through guest posting.

What else?

Forget about complex website design. Instead, structure your website to be easily discovered by search engines, which crawl and index each page. 

Pro tip: create a friendly sitemap using Figma or other such tools to organise your website before even designing it. 

Stay away from text and design that users might strain their eyes to read or find very difficult to read.

Use the Right Content Formate

Many website owners have made this basic mistake: overloading their website with content, information, blocks, and more.

Remember: simplicity always wins!

You don’t need to show off here. You need to emphasise how you can help your customers. Keep it clean and neat.

Also, more than having a poorly designed website is needed to strip all credibility and authority from your brand.

The best practice when creating website content is to have easy-to-read paragraphs using subheadings, images, bullet points, CTAs, icons, etc.

Every website owner has a unique way of breaking up content in a reader-friendly manner. You can even use one-line paragraphs to break up the text. You can use headings, videos, and different things to break up long paragraphs. The point is to break up long content so the reader will stay on the page longer and take the time to take it in more effortlessly.

Visitors tend to leave websites that are stuffed with long paragraphs without headings. That will damage your site’s authority. 

You also want to ensure you use an intuitive UI where all users’ questions are answered with a friendly navigation outline once they enter your website.

Many people need to pay more attention to web pages and provide more options for users. However, it’s different from the approach your users expect from you. Why? This often frustrates users because they need help navigating your website to find what they’re searching for.

Having the opposite of the intended effect.

The rule of thumb here is it never hurts to put yourself in the user’s shoes and view your website from their perspective.

Have a Functional Website 

Regardless of what the stage of your website is now, the first thing your audience or potential customers will do is check out your website. 

With a functional design, you will retain these customers for good. Not just that, your clients might form a negative impression of your brand. 

What you need to do is to add more call-to-action buttons. You want to make sure that everything is as easy for the user to use as much as possible. 

How to Analyse Your Website’s Performance: Free Tools & Tips

 Now, here is the good news: you can find loads of free web analytics tools to use to get all valuable information and leverage your website functionality, set up, and understand straight away.

Google Analytics

If you have a site and don’t spend time analysing your audience’s behaviour and how your content is relevant to readers and search engines, you make a huge mistake! You don’t even pay for a new advanced tool.

Free tools to observe your website’s performance are more than enough, and we will start with the best one you can browse for free, Google Analytics, which will give you a helping hand to break down how Google sees your website.

It’s a powerful tool that will provide you with all the website traffic and analytics you need. Simple charts and reports that you, your marketing team, or whoever you want to help with your website analytics can read these numbers!

These numbers will not only give you a direction when you’re lost amongst thousands of reports generated by other tools to analyse your website’s performance. But you will also have a real-time dashboard to monitor the efficiency of your various advertising and web campaigns.

Google Analytics will keep you updated with how valuable your content is, the demographics of your users, and the number of unique users (the number of unduplicated visitors during a specific time, which are tracked by each user’s IP address so that they can be considered an accurate number of unique users.)  

What else?

Here are important materials to consider when checking your website performance. 

The bounce rate: the number of users who viewed your site, but their stay needed longer to count as a visit. So if this number is high, it’s wise to reformat your content.

It will help if you have plans for your content to be as compelling as possible to attract more viewers and keep them on your site for longer. 

Expert advice: You will get important metrics and dimensions to determine your visitor’s intent. Yes, the deep intentions of your visitors can be discovered by looking at how much traffic you generate and how many seconds they spend on your website. 

Everyone who comes to your online space has an intent; if you fail to satisfy them, they will go far away!

Web Traffic Analytics: To understand the source of your traffic, consider checking this section, where you will unearth the medium of your traffic or whether the visitor landed on your page due to email, social media, organic or paid search. So it comes to relevant stats. You’ve got something called direct traffic.

One of the brilliant stats here is referral websites. Why? It will tell you the best quality links that bring traffic to you, so you’d consider investing in them more.

Keywords: This shows the top-ranked key phrases users use to find your site. This can provide valuable insight regarding your content because you know the most relevant topics and what your audience is concerned about.

Engagement Metrics: Now, it’s important to figure out how people are interacting with your website content. What matters is the average site duration and pages per session. You will discover the most visited pages and how much time they spend on each page.

Goal Conversion Rate: It helps you understand your customer behaviour through your website and track actions visitors make or not that you have set before. These actions include purchasing, subscribing to your service, or adding a product to your cart. It depends on the stage your website serves your marketing funnel. 

You can get this through Conversion > Goals > Overview on Google Analytics. 

Expert advice: frequently change your goal conversion rate to understand how your website helps you attain your marketing goals. To get a higher conversion rate, consider adding what convinces people to convert- like CTAs, clear pricing packages, high-quality photos, easily-navigated pages, or enchanting marketing content. 

Matomo

The best alternative to Google Analytics comes with a free version, Matomo, which will help you understand your visitors’ behaviours and manage all your tracking tags from one place. It’s a leading platform to analyse your website’s performance, used by many professionals and marketers who want to leave a positive impression about their brand through their website. 

Subscribe to their paid plans for advanced features, starting at nine dollars a month. 

One of their most significant advantages is that you can host it on their servers in the cloud, which is easier. It’s also extendable, so it can be customised to meet your metrics. 

The best thing about it is that Matomo looks similar to Google Analytics, with almost the same reporting screen.  

All you need to do is install the application and get access to WordPress.

Then you will see these categories on the left:

• Dashboard: an overview panel that includes the key metrics and other widgets.
• Visitors: a place to explore the time your visitors get into the website, where they are based, which devices they use, and other information. 
• Behaviour: You can find each page’s impressions and other reports that unveil your potential customers’ searching patterns.
• Acquisition: It will tell you from where your visitors came to your website (organic search, paid search, emails, and another marketing channel)

Having an online store will be super beneficial, as you will have tools to track products and sales and optimise your current campaigns. 

GT Metrics

Because your website’s performance can make or break your business, you must invest more in multiple analytical tools. GT Metrics is a website check tool to define your website’s speed. This will test your website’s performance in different browsers and countries (more than 22 different locations) to make sure your website is going well and keep track of what’s happening.  

But why is website speed important?

Because people tend to have shorter attention spans, and you want people to stay on your site much longer. If your website loads slowly, they will leave immediately. In terms of the digital world, life is shorter than ever.  

GT Metrics gives you a glimpse of what’s going down on your WordPress site with suggestions on improving your WordPress performance and speed.

Additionally, you can set up notifications to receive a complete report whenever a page performs poorly so that you can figure out what happened and discover any opportunities to improve. 

To use it, install the plugin on WordPress to constantly monitor its performance.

Just go into plugins and click Add New, then click Activate. And that’s it. You will see the GTM metrics tab being added to the menu now.

What metrics and tabs to focus on GT Metrics

Performance: It shows comprehensive insights about your web performance in terms of speed, such as the Speed Index, CLS, and FCP. It’s the most important part of your GT Metrics reports. Why? Because bad performance means bad user experience, which means a bad engagement rate. 

Structure: It provides you with all the assets that impact your overall score. It outlines the problems you need to shift your attention to. You can check each item separately. Then you can send this detailed report to the developer, who can make edits. But if you’re interested in exploring more, you can press the “learn how to improve this” link to get informed about the correct practices, how it works, and how to analyse your website’s performance.  

Video: This feature will enable you to record a page to see what visitors experience when getting onto your site.

Waterfall: This section shows spots of slow loading. You can select each one to know why these parts of your website make it heavier than usual. Take your time to hover over each one to provide the best solution for your website’s health, which might be why your website is not faring well. Improving these drawbacks will significantly increase your revenues, especially if you run an online store.

History: It generates detailed reports, including graphs, of any changes made to the page. It’s a great way to track any progress and figure out pitfalls.  

How to use it

• Set up the API keys (it will be included in your welcome email once you register in WordPress or you can get this from the following steps)

• Register for a GTMetrics account: confirm your account once you get the email. Also, you can register for the free version, but it comes with a limited number of requests per day. 
• Generate an API key: on the dashboard, click on Account at the top of the page. Once you’re done, you want to click on copy and then type in all the information to connect your account. Then click “Save Changes”. 

And now, when you go to the app menu, you can click on Test URL Now to run any performance test on your website.

You can also do custom tests. Just type the URL you want to test its speed.

Ideally, you want to focus on locations closest to your target audience. When choosing the location, if you are based in Australia, you want to pick one of the Australian servers.

However, if you don’t want to add another plugin to your website, it’s also fine to use the GTMetrics website, create an account, and then analyse any website using the GTMetrics website instead of the dashboard.

While doing so, you have two options: type your username or URL. And then, it’ll start analysing the page and testing it for different things. 

Either way, it’ll give you a performance score, highlighting a list of issues you might have. So GTMetrics offers a complete breakdown of the performance of the page that you’re testing, and it uses Google page speed to score your page load.

And then, you will get an overall score as a summary of your website’s performance.

So anything below an A score means there is room for improvement, but this doesn’t necessarily mean your website could be faster.

To understand your score, click on the detailed report at the bottom. And it opens up the URL on the page speed side.

This report offers additional information about your web speed, such as the reason for your slow score, other recommendations on having a website that hits differently, unveiling requests, and byte size to different website files. What’s more, you will be informed about areas you can adjust to improve your page speed.

The best part is when it comes to the outline, and it asks you to change anything; if you click on the toggle, it’ll show you the exact details and what you can be improved, so you don’t need to be a super talented developer, follow the restrictions. It’s a roadmap of improvements. 

What are common issues to fix

Images

One of the most common issues that result in slow loading is that you have large images that need to be compressed. You can do much more to make your website load faster, but pictures would be the top priority if you still need to sort that out. Images that are too big for the website take too long to load. All of them add to your load times, and fixing them can make a big difference.

Images take more time to load than text, and if a page has many images, it slows down your website. On the other hand, images are essential for user engagement, so you can’t avoid them. The solution is to optimise your images for faster page load, and you will still use the same photos but with smaller file sizes.

To figure out where images are putting pressure on your website, you can click on the toggle, and it’ll show you exactly what images are throwing up the issues.

Also, consider using some WordPress plugins such as Smoosh. It’s free and has state-of-the-art features. They have a premium version, but you can do much more with the free version. They will optimise your images with lossless compression, meaning you won’t lose any quality once the image is compressed.

The images will also be optimised upon upload, so you don’t have to worry about uploading them.
Another plugin to optimise your images is Insanity, which is a good one, especially for high-quality, much larger images than ones from Smoosh.

Remember you always have a button to understand how to improve your score, how it affects your performance, what triggers that audit, and how to avoid such problems.

Expert tip: Another way to ensure that your images will only take a slight load time is to compress them before they get added. So using websites like TinyPNG or Photoshop to compress your images before adding them to the site will also help you have a faster website, regardless of how many photos you need to upload. 

Number of media files

It’s not just the size of images that can lead to a website that takes time to reload. It’s also about how many media files you upload on your website, resulting in bloating in your code.  

Web plugins 

Plugins are super, with many features that will help you manage your website effectively. But be alarmed by the number of plugins installed on WordPress that will cause the server to slow down.

Other features you can use when analysing your website’s performance:

Setting up alerts

It’s perfect for monitoring certain accounts and adjusting different page settings.

Testing from a different server

It enables you to retest and compare your website speed in different locations. This allows you to manage it and run tests as you work to improve your website speed and performance.

Eventually, when it comes to improving your website performance, the GT page speed will show you a ton of information to digest why your website loads slowly or even why your website underperforms on search engines. 

Choose the Best Hosting Server: WordPress Hosting

You need to use the best web WordPress hosting to get a better website performance. But it’s something you should consider from the beginning. 

If you’re using a low-quality WordPress hosting provider, then there’s little you can do to improve the performance of your website.

Our web developing experts suggest using Blue Host, a perfect WordPress hosting provider. They have great pricing, and it comes with built-in caching as well. 

Then you have Site Ground, another premium WordPress hosting with multiple built-in features, and it also uses Google Cloud.

Many top-rated WordPress websites will also use Site 4. 

Finally, WP Engine is a top-rated managed WordPress hosting provider with lots of performance optimisation, and they focus solely on WordPress websites. So you know you’re in professional hands when you’re hosting your website with them, and they can also guarantee top speeds to help with your website’s performance. 

Pro tip: If you’re a beginner in the whole thing, you can choose a hosting plan that will give you access to build your website quickly with a trusted company and without worrying about security and maintenance. 

Why should you consider WP hosting?

First of all, you will get superior customer support from experts, where you can find 24/7 online chat to get answers to your questions. Also, you should take a look at community forums to leave your queries or read about similar problems. 

Most importantly, you always have the choice to leverage your website’s security through built-in enhancements such as two-factor authentication, backup features, and limited login attempts. 

So, how do you take advantage of WordPress hosting features to improve your website’s load time?

Set up a caching plugin. Always dig deeper to get more caching plugins to enhance your website’s performance. These add-ons allow your website to load pages from a temporary file instead of running a new request. That’s how you will get a website faster.

So, what is the best WordPress cash-in plugin?

Wp Rocket. It is paid and allows caching and file compression for a better user experience. 

However, some free ones, like Lightspeed Cash and W3 Total Cash, also help you analyse your website’s performance.

There are a lot more performance tools out there, but especially for beginners, it’s good.

SEOability

The other metric that you need to check is your SEO. We have discussed the importance of optimising your website to get a higher rank on search engines. But we offer a way to make it happen with ease, even if you want to avoid hiring a professional or running your small business website. 

There are many free tools you can check to get a quick audit for page SEO and then make a list of what you could do to improve it because all of these will also help you have a functional website that serves your target audience.

So one of the site’s SEO tools is SEOability, a free SEO checker. SEOability will run analytics and audits on your site, giving you a checklist of all the basic SEO points you might be missing, that you might have, and that you can approve of.

It’s an all-in-one SEO software and tool that will give you daily updates about your Google rank, white-label reporting, and keyword suggestions. Taking these notices into action will boost your website to get indexed by search engines.

By crawling your pages, the tool may detect issues like duplicate content and empty pages.

So, how do you use it?
Go into SEOability and click on Try For Free. Sign up with your email, or choose a one-click registration option through Gmail, Facebook, or LinkedIn. You will have a free 14-day trial, and then you have to pay $50 per month. That’s for a complete SEO audit service.
Otherwise, scroll down until you find the SEO Checker icon. Click on Perform SEO Checker. Type in the page URL that you want to test and press Analyse the Website. Similar to something like GTMetrics, they will run a report on your site and give you a list of SEO improvements.

You get a score as well to see overall what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.

SEOability will check things like your title and the quality of the title, length, meta information, page quality, and page structure. You might see suggestions to improve your SEO positioning, such as reducing the number of CSS files to get a faster website, editing the page title to make it better suited to the content, or using alt text for images.
Also, pay attention to your domain, crawl ability, page URLs, and mobile optimisation.
Remember, these elements will enhance your SEO, serving the website’s overall performance.

Site24x7

Another tool to analyse your website’s performance, Site24x7, is excellent software to monitor your end-user experience.

Not just that, it’s a must-have application to observe your server’s health in real time, providing you with instant updates to track any issues from more than 120 locations around the globe.

It helps you with more technical matters when covering bugs in your website’s performance, such as security audits and API testing.

Plus, you can cover customer behaviour by recording real-time user interaction while getting into your website. 

The application enables you to define your capabilities to avoid such problems in the future and create custom plugins to keep an eye on any critical concerns. It comes with a paid plan starting at $8 per month, with the option to customise features according to your needs.

In summary, analysing and improving your website’s performance can be handled using tools specifically designed for website analysis. If you have a high bounce rate, you now know how to fix it. Looking at how user-friendly your site is, your optimisation of keywords, and the quality of your content will put you on the right track for where improvements need to be made. And then understanding your website’s performance metrics will help immensely in knowing where changes should be made in the first place.

How Can Profiletree Help You?

Having a website that loads quickly can change the rules of the game. Just imagine that you are watching a movie on Netflix, and it stops and buffers every time. It’s SUPER annoying, right?

The possibility of continuing to watch comes to zero! That’s exactly what happens when people check your lazy website. They will leave immediately.

So, what we suggest is to book your website analysis session to learn how to have a website that will be a lead generation machine.

The post How to Analyse Your Website’s Performance: Expert Advice to Consider appeared first on ProfileTree.