If you want to thrive with online marketing, your website must be successful.

How can you know whether it is actually working? The trick is to consider website performance data.

The issue is that Google Analytics and other tracking tools provide access to a vast number of indicators. It can be difficult to tell how well your website is working, let alone which data to track.

From bounce rate to page views, the numbers that influence your site’s traffic can be difficult to understand.

Furthermore, several of those metrics have little long-term significance.

In this blog post, I’ll present ten website performance metrics to help you understand your web site’s overall performance.

Why is it important to monitor website performance metrics?

Aside from the significant money or time investment required to construct and manage a website, analyzing website performance data provides insight into how users behave on your various pages.

By identifying acts and motions, you may determine whether they are following the course you have set for them. If not, you can tweak and optimize your sites to direct users to the desired conversion.

Website analytics can also assist you in tracking and diagnosing issues such as:

  •     Effectiveness of your content strategy
  •     Keyword Ranking
  •     The top traffic sources
  •     Successful paid ads and conversion rates.

Essentially, if you want to know if your internet marketing efforts are paying off, you must monitor your website performance indicators. The specific metrics you track, however, can differ depending on industry, target demographic, and even where users are in the marketing funnel.

How to Determine which Website Performance Metrics to Track

Website analytics provide a clear picture of your company’s performance. While the term metrics may appear intimidating at first, it should not; these figures can only benefit you.

Before you begin tracking every conceivable indicator, determine which metrics are most important to your organization.

This can be determined by examining your goals. If you want to be number one on Google’s first page, you need to track data related to search performance. That could entail tracking the terms you rank for with a service like ubersuggest.

If your quarterly objective is to boost web sales, you should monitor conversions, as well as how users interact with your site and when cart abandonment occurs.

In summary, the metrics you track should be directly related to your goals. While it may be tempting to cherry-pick the metrics that paint the best picture of your company, true change and opportunity come from identifying areas that need development.

Top 10 Website Performance Metrics to Track

While the metrics you follow will vary depending on your specific objectives, there are ten website performance metrics that provide a 360-degree performance analysis independent of business criteria.

Website Speed

While the term “website speed” may merely refer to load time, insights into this measure are considerably more in-depth.

As attention spans shrink, you must assess how your site performs in a variety of speed-related operations.

Time to Title

This time measurement relates to the amount of time between a visitor’s website request and the moment your site title appears in the browser tab. This is important to visitors since a quick title appearance assures them that your site is legitimate.

Time to Start Rendering

This time measurement relates to the amount of time between a user request and when content appears in the browser. Similar to time to title, the faster this occurs, the more likely the visitor is to remain on the page.

Time to Interact

Time to engage, which refers to the time it takes between request origination and when the visitor can take an action (click on links, scroll the page, type, etc.), is also important in determining how long a visitor will stay on your site.

While there are more in-depth metrics related to website performance, starting with these three can be a good place to start when looking to improve your site’s overall speed.

A free webpage speed test tool will help you get these statistics for your individual pages.

Top Ten Website Performance Metrics to Track: Website Speed

Number of Assets

The term “assets” refers to the materials that make up your page. Consider text, audio, video, and other types of material. Behind the scenes, each of these items need time to load. As you add more assets to a page, the page-load time will slow down significantly.

There are numerous methods that can determine the size of your page and assets. If you see that your assets are slowing down load speed, you may always try hosting them on an external site to improve on-page load time.

Error Rate

This indicator measures the percentage of request issues your site generates in relation to the total number of requests. If you notice a surge in these data, you know you’re about to face a significant problem. Keeping an eye on your error rate allows you to diagnose and repair problems before they arise. However, if you do not keep an eye on your mistake rate, you may encounter issues that cause your entire site to go down and force you to rectify in real time.

Bounce Rate

This indicator relates to the number of users who leave your website shortly after arriving. In addition to affecting conversions and overall performance, a high bounce rate can be detrimental to SEO because it indicates that your site is not delivering on its promises.

To check your bounce rate in Google Analytics, go to Behavior>Site Content>Landing Pages Report and scroll down to view bounce rates for individual pages.

Unique visitors

This word refers to a single browser that has visited your website within a specific time frame—which can be daily, weekly, or monthly. This measure is useful since it represents growth.

While repeat visitors might be beneficial, if you’re looking to expand your business, you should see a steady increase in the number of unique visitors.

This indicator is easily accessible through the Audience tab in your Google Analytics account.

Traffic Source

Instead of relying solely on volume, tracking traffic sources allows you to determine where your traffic is originating from.

This is important since it allows you to identify where your visitors are coming from: organic search, social media, or referrals. When it comes to traffic sources, you should aim for an evenly weighted bag. If it’s leaning more toward one source, you can re-balance your content approach accordingly.

To discover where your traffic is coming from, navigate to Google Analytics > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

Conversion Rate

Convert, convert, convert is a typical marketing catchphrase. Tracking your conversion rate provides insight into the quality of your leads as well as the overall effectiveness of your website.

For example, if you have a low conversion rate but a high traffic rate, you can conclude that your on-page conversion strategies are not as effective as those used off-site.

This information enables you to modify the features of your website to better match the demands of your visitors.

To see your conversion rate in Google Analytics, go to Conversion and then Overview.

Top Page Website

You should constantly know which pages on your website are performing the best, whatever that means for your specific aims.

To this end, keep track of which pages convert and which do not. Identifying what works allows you to repeat that success on other pages throughout your website.

When determining which pages perform best, keep track of landing and exit pages as well.

Landing Pages

These are the pages that users arrive at when they visit your website. Because we all know there is no second opportunity for a first impression, these websites must be optimized and run smoothly.

To see how these pages are performing, go to Google Analytics and then select Behavior, Site Content, and Landing Pages.

Exit Pages

An exit page is the last page a user sees before leaving their session. Identifying these pages allows you to further optimize them and encourage visitors to remain longer.

To view your exit pages, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > Exit Pages.

Keyword Ranking

Although search rankings are always changing, a sudden, significant drop can raise alarm.

Keyword ranking should be the most important SEO metric you track.

Why?

These terms allow you to double-check that your SEO approach is effective and can help you track your development.

Looking for a tool to track these metrics? UberSuggest can assist.

Lead Generation

You understand that lead creation is critical to your organization’s growth. You are also aware of how difficult lead generation may be, as well as the ambiguity of the landscape.

To acquire a more analytical perspective on your lead generation approach, you should monitor three essential website performance metrics: bounce rate, average session duration, and click-through rate (CTR).

While we discussed bounce rate above, here is why you should monitor CTR and average session time.

CTR

This indicator indicates the percentage of site viewers who interacted with a certain CTA and is critical in calculating overall lead success.

Average Session Duration

This indicator measures the average amount of time a person spends on your website. A longer duration suggests highly engaged users, while the contrary shows that modifications and optimization are required.

Conclusion

Whether you’re building a new website or simply looking to improve the performance of an existing one, the 10 website performance metrics listed above will help you acquire a clear picture of user behaviour on your site as well as how it’s functioning overall.

You may make your site considerably more user-friendly by optimizing functions over which you have control, such as site performance and asset count. Visitors will be encouraged to stay on your pages longer as a result..

While you cannot technically control how your users interact with your site, you can surely optimize content to drive behaviour.