How to analyze website performance?

If you own a website, it is extremely important for you to regularly analyze its effectiveness. Without it, it's hard to understand how well your website solves your business tasks, whether it's convenient for users, and what your growth points are. Web analytics allows you to make informed decisions about website development based on real data instead of guesswork.

In this article, we'll take an in-depth look at what web analytics is and how to conduct it correctly. You will learn

• What indicators and metrics are important to track
• What tools will help you get the most valuable information about your website
• How to evaluate the convenience and attractiveness of the site for visitors
• How to identify technical errors and problems that affect website performance
• How to understand how your website is optimized for search engines
• How to compare your website with competitors and find new opportunities for growth

Let's start with the most important thing: defining web analytics and its key tasks.

What is web analytics and why do you need it?

Web analytics is the systematic collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data about the operation of a website in order to improve its analytical performance and user experience.

The main tasks of web analytics:

1. Assessing the effectiveness of a website in solving business problems. For example, for an online store, this will include sales and revenue, for a blog - the number of readers and the depth of views, for a service site - the number of requests and calls.
2. Identify growth points and weaknesses of the site. Analytics helps to understand which pages and sections are most popular and which have a high bounce rate. This allows you to prioritize website improvements.
3. Analysis of the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and traffic sources. With the help of web analytics, you can evaluate the effectiveness of various channels of attracting visitors - search engine optimization, contextual advertising, SMM, email marketing. And based on this, optimize your marketing budget.
4. Improve user experience and website conversion. Web analytics tools allow you to track the entire path of a visitor on a website, identify at what stages and for what reasons they leave the resource without performing the targeted action. This data helps to optimize the navigation, content, and functionality of the website.

Regular analysis allows you to quickly identify and eliminate any errors in the website's operation - for example, a sharp drop in traffic may be the result of an incorrectly compiled robots.txt file or sanctions from search engines. Analytics also gives you an understanding of how the preferences and needs of your audience are changing and how to adapt your website to them.

For example, let's say you've noticed a high bounce rate on the mobile version of your site - about 20%, while on desktop devices, this figure is only 5%. This is a clear signal to analyze and improve the display and operation of the site on smartphones.

Without implementing web analytics, you lose the ability to make informed decisions about the development of your website and risk falling behind more advanced competitors. Nowadays, having a user-friendly and technically advanced website is a prerequisite for success on the Internet. That is why we will analyze how to analyze the effectiveness of your web resource.

Key metrics and indicators for evaluating website performance

To evaluate the effectiveness of your website, you need to track a number of key metrics. Here are the main ones:

Traffic and its sources. Shows how many visitors come to your website, through which channels, and how their number changes over time. The main sources of traffic:

• Organic search (referrals from search engines)
• Direct visits (entering the website address in the browser)
• Referral links (clicking on links on other sites)
• Social networks
• Paid advertising

Example: let's say your website has 30,000 monthly visitors, of which 20,000 (66.7%) come from search engines, 5,000 (16.7%) from direct traffic, 3,000 (10%) from social media, and 2,000 (6.6%) from advertising.

Bounce rate and view depth. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave the site without taking any action. Browsing depth is the average number of pages viewed by one visitor per session. These metrics allow you to assess how interesting and relevant your website is to your audience.

For example, if your site's bounce rate is higher than 60% and visitors view only 1.2 pages per visit on average, your site is likely to fail to meet the expectations of your audience or have problems with usability and speed.

Conversion and user journeys. Conversion rate shows what percentage of visitors performs a targeted action on the site - a purchase, application, call, or subscription. User paths demonstrate which pages and in what sequence visitors go through before making a conversion. This allows you to understand how people make decisions on your website.

Example: out of 10,000 visitors to your website in a month, 300 made a purchase. The conversion rate is 3%. At the same time, 30% of them visited the Delivery and Payment page before making a purchase, and 70% visited the Testimonials section.

The technical parameters of the site include page loading speed, the absence of errors, and adaptability to mobile devices. These factors directly affect the usability of the site and its position in the search results.

Tools for web analytics

Special tools can help you get all the data you need to analyze your website's performance. For example, we will list the most popular tools for a specific purpose. The goals are divided into several main categories:

Systems for collecting and analyzing traffic statistics:

• Google Analytics is a free service with great capabilities for analyzing traffic, user behavior, and advertising effectiveness. It allows you to customize goals, funnels, and custom reports. It is a de facto standard for most websites.

Tools for usability audit and analysis of user actions:

• Hotjar - allows you to build heatmaps of clicks, scrolling, and mouse movements, record visitors' actions on the site, and conduct surveys. It helps to identify problems in design and navigation.

Tools for technical website audit and SEO analysis:

• Screaming Frog is a program that scans all pages of a website and checks for errors, broken links, duplicate pages, problems with meta tags and headings. It allows you to make data slices by many parameters.
• PageSpeed Insights is an online tool from Google for analyzing website loading speed and getting recommendations on how to improve it. It rates websites on a scale from 1 to 100 and provides a list of optimization tasks.
• Ahrefs and Serpstat are professional SEO services for auditing website optimization, analyzing link mass, selecting keywords, and analyzing competitors in search results. They allow you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your website in terms of SEO.

To get the most complete picture, it is recommended to use a combination of tools from different categories. For example, traffic data from Google Analytics should be supplemented with information about user behavior from Hotjar.

Ideally, website performance analysis should be carried out regularly - at least once a month, and preferably once a week for all key metrics. This will help to identify problems and opportunities for growth in time.

Audit usability and user experience

The ease of use of a website (usability) and the overall impression it leaves on visitors (user experience) directly affect behavioral metrics and conversion. Therefore, it is important to regularly analyze these parameters:

Navigation and site architecture

How easy is it for users to find the information they need or perform the targeted action? This requires analysis:

• The structure of categories and sections of the site - it should be logical and predictable for the user.
• Availability and operation of the site search.
• The presence of breadcrumbs and a sitemap.
• The number of clicks to the target action is optimal, if no more than 3-5.

Hotjar and Google Analytics tools allow you to track the typical paths of visitors to your site and identify bottlenecks where they get stuck or leave the site.

Content and microtexts

Evaluate how useful, informative, and understandable the content is for your audience. Check the texts for typos, grammatical and stylistic errors. They can significantly spoil the impression of the site.

Also, pay attention to microtexts, such as headings, captions for images and buttons, and error messages. They should be clear and encourage action. For example, by replacing the standard Send button with Get a consultation, you can increase form conversion by 10-20%.

Adaptability and cross-browser compatibility

Ideally, a website should display equally well on screens of any size and in any browser. Open the site on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop and check whether the layout is jittery, whether the texts are readable, and whether the buttons and links work.

Google Analytics shows you which devices are most often used to access your website. Pay special attention to adapting to the most popular screen resolutions and browsers.

Design and visual layout

The look and feel of a website is the first thing visitors pay attention to. It should meet the expectations of the target audience, inspire trust and a desire to stay on the site. Evaluate:

• Compliance with the corporate identity and correct use of the logo, colors, fonts.
• Quality and relevance of images and videos.
• Visual hierarchy and arrangement of key elements.
• Compliance with typography rules and text readability.

Use services for analyzing visitor engagement (Hotjar) to identify which visual elements attract the most attention and clicks.

Technical SEO audit of a website

Search engines have hundreds of requirements for the technical parameters of a website. If you don't comply with them, your website's rankings in the search results can drop significantly. Therefore, it is important to regularly conduct a technical audit in the following key areas.

• Loading speed and optimization. Test your site in PageSpeed Insights and Serpstat, get a speed estimate, and get recommendations for optimization. The most common problems that affect speed:

1. Lack of image compression and code minification
2. Not optimized scripts and styles
3. Lack of caching and compression on the server
4. Poor quality hosting

Achieving high website speed means increasing the chances of good search rankings.

• Correct layout and structured data. The website must have valid HTML and CSS code, without errors and warnings. This is important for the correct display of the site in browsers and for crawling by search engines.

Check your website for validity in the W3C Markup Validation and W3C CSS Validation services. It is also important to use HTML5 semantic tags and Schema.org micro-markup correctly to provide search engines with structured information about the site's pages.

• Indexing and crawling of the site. In the robots.txt file and meta tags, you need to specify which pages of the site are allowed or prohibited for indexing by search robots. Ideally, search engines should crawl and add all the main pages of the site to the index, but not service and technical pages.

To analyze the indexing, ask Google for information on the site and host operators. Compare the number of pages found with the actual number of pages on the site. You can also use the Screaming Frog or Netpeak Spider tools to analyze indexing in detail and find errors.

• Broken links and redirects. Regularly check your website for links leading to non-existent pages (with a 404 response code). They worsen the user experience and interfere with correct indexing.

If you change the URL of any page, be sure to set up a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one. But avoid long chains of redirects with 3 or more steps - they slow down indexing and reduce the weight of the transmitted link signal.

Professional SEO services are great for finding broken links and analyzing redirects. For example, Ahrefs has a special Broken links report where you can see all problematic links grouped by the type of response code.

It is recommended to conduct a full technical audit of the site at least 1-2 times a year, and selective checks for certain parameters once every 1-2 months. This will help you keep your website in good technical condition and avoid traffic drops due to poor optimization.

Content and semantic kernel analysis

High-quality, user-friendly content is one of the main factors of website success. Search engines evaluate the content of a website by many parameters and take it into account when ranking it. Therefore, it is important to regularly audit your content in the following areas:

Content completeness and uniqueness. Each page of the website should fully disclose its topic and contain a sufficient amount of information. At the same time, duplicate content and borrowing content from other websites are not allowed.

Serpstat and Ahrefs can show you a list of pages with insufficient text.

For example, if more than 20% of your site's pages contain less than 500 characters of text, it's a reason to add content. And if the uniqueness of individual pages is below 80%, it is advisable to rewrite them to avoid filters for unoriginality.

Relevance and regularity of updates. Try to keep your site's content up-to-date by updating information in a timely manner. Adding new content on a regular basis is also important, especially for websites with blogs and news sections.

Google Analytics allows you to evaluate user engagement and the popularity of your content. If you see old articles with low behavioral indicators, add fresh information to them and re-optimize them.

Formatting and readability. Large layers of text without formatting are off-putting to readers. Use subheadings to make it easier to read:

• Headings and subheadings
• Lists and tables
• Short paragraphs of 3-4 sentences
• Adequate spacing (line spacing)

Google typography for a website and you will find a lot of useful rules for improving the readability of text.

Optimize meta tags and headings. Title, description, H1 are the most important tags for search engine optimization. They should clearly correspond to the content of the pages, include keywords, and catch the attention of potential visitors.

Services such as Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider allow you to collect all meta tags and site titles in convenient tables, identify duplicates and pages with empty tags.

Use the following recommendations for rewriting tags:

• Title - up to 60 characters, includes the main keyword
• Description - up to 120 characters, focuses on the benefits for the user
• H1 - up to 70 characters, clearly reflects the essence of the page

Make sure that your site does not have pages with the same meta tags and titles - this will be a duplicate for the search engine.

Content relevance to search queries. Pages that should drive traffic from search should be optimized for relevant keywords. Analyze the frequency and competitiveness of queries in your topic using Ahrefs, Serpstat, SemRush services.

Then make a semantic core - a structured list of keywords distributed across the pages of the site. Regularly monitor the site's position for these queries, identify pages that have fallen off, and improve them in time.

Competitive analysis and benchmarking

It is always useful to know the strengths and weaknesses of competitors in order to be equal to the best and avoid other people's mistakes. To do this, conduct a competitive analysis by the following parameters:

Website visibility in search. This is the percentage of queries for which the site is present in the top 100 search results. The higher the visibility, the higher the potential search traffic.

Ahrefs and Serpstat have domain visibility reports where you can compare your dynamics with competitors. If you have 10% visibility in Ukraine, and your closest competitor has 25%, it means that you have 2.5 times less traffic and need to speed up your SEO work.

Link profile and domain indicators. Backlinks (external links) remain one of the main ranking factors. Therefore, it is important to compare your link count with competitors.

To do this, use DA and DR indicators - algorithmic domain authority metrics developed by Moz or Ahrefs. The higher these values are, the more weight links from this site have.

If you have a DR of 50, and your competitors have more than 60, you need to increase the number and quality of links. Special reports in Ahrefs and Serpstat will help you with this, for example, by anchors, types of donors, and link mass dynamics.

Quality and volume of content. Assess how well your competitors cover topics on their websites compared to you. They may have useful materials and sections that you do not.

Compare the number and average length of articles for yourself and your competitors. Take a look at their blogs and news sections, and evaluate the frequency of publications. All other things being equal, sites with a lot of quality content get more traffic and rank better.

Functionality and types of content. Look at what features and tricks competitors use to engage their audience. These can be:

• Calculators and tests
• Quizzes and surveys
• Interactive infographics
• Online courses and webinars
• Games and entertainment modules
• Online consultants and chatbots

The presence of such elements can significantly reduce the bounce rate and increase the depth of website browsing, which has a positive impact on SEO and conversion.

Commercial factors. If you have an online store, compare your working conditions with your competitors:

• Prices and product range
• Cost and delivery options
• Availability of pickup and delivery points
• Speed of order processing
• Quality of packaging and service
• Loyalty programs and discounts

Conversion from a visitor to a customer directly depends on these factors. If competitors offer better conditions, there is a high risk of losing some customers. Conduct customer surveys, identify areas of development, and offer more favorable conditions than other stores in your area of expertise.

A full competitor analysis should be conducted at least 1-2 times a year, and selective comparisons by individual parameters can be made on a monthly basis. This will allow you to keep your finger on the pulse and respond quickly to changes in your niche.

Drawing conclusions and recommendations based on analytics results

After you have collected and analyzed all the necessary data about the website, it's time to draw conclusions and make an action plan for improvement. To do this, you need to.

Systematize the identified problems and growth points

Gather a list of all the gaps and potential areas of growth that you have identified. Group them by content, for example:

• Technical errors (broken links, duplicate pages, slow loading speed)
• Usability issues (inconvenient navigation, unreadable text, unclickable buttons)
• Content issues (non-unique texts, poor optimization, rare updates)
• Lagging behind competitors (in terms of traffic, links, assortment)

Also, highlight a list of hypotheses and ideas for website development that emerged during the analysis.

Prioritize tasks for website improvement

When the list of problems and hypotheses is ready, evaluate each item according to two parameters:

• Importance (how much this problem affects the business performance of the site)
• Complexity (how much time and resources it will take to fix it)

This way you can identify quick and easy tasks that will bring tangible results. And vice versa - identify the site's pains that need to be solved first, even if it requires serious efforts.

For example, if you have an online store and you find that more than 50% of visitors leave the checkout page, you need to solve this problem immediately, otherwise you will lose real sales.

Develop a step-by-step action plan

Once the priorities have been set, make a clear plan of what will be done, by whom, and in what time frame. Summarize all the tasks in a single table or Gantt chart, and specify for each item:

• Task description
• Deadline
• Responsible executor
• Expected result

If you have a large amount of work, divide it into several iterations lasting 2-3 weeks. This will make it easier to monitor progress and make timely adjustments.

Predict the effect of the planned changes

For each major task on your list, predict how its implementation will affect the target site metrics. For example:

• Speeding up page loading to 2 seconds will increase view depth by 15%
• Redesign of the home page for the audience aged 18-25 will increase conversion to subscription by 10%
• Increasing the link mass by 50 donors per month will allow you to increase the site's visibility in search by 30% in six months

Of course, these are approximate figures based on your experience and market benchmarks. But they will help you set measurable and achievable goals instead of guessing on coffee grounds.

Having done this work once, you will learn how to structure and analyze information about your website, find insights and growth points. Regular web analytics will turn into a routine but very useful process that will help you make the right decisions.

Conclusion.

We have analyzed in detail what stages a comprehensive website performance evaluation consists of and how to conduct it correctly. Let's briefly recap the key points:

• Regular web analytics allows you to track your site's business performance and improve the user experience based on real data
• Analysis should be carried out in four main areas: traffic and user behavior, technical condition, content, and competitors
• To collect and analyze data, you need a set of tools: web analytics systems, services for auditing usability and technical parameters, tools for evaluating content and competitors
• Based on the identified problems and growth points, you need to draw up an action plan to improve the site with clear goals, deadlines, and responsibilities
• The task of regular analytics is to turn website development from one-time chaotic actions into a smooth, continuous process aimed at increasing business metrics

If you have never conducted a comprehensive audit of your website or do it irregularly, we strongly recommend that you do not put this task on the back burner. Take a day or two to collect all the key data about your site, analyze it carefully, and make a plan to fix the problems you find.