How Do I Monitor My Website's Performance?

So you have a new website or an existing website. You want to make sure it’s performing at its best, but how do you do that?

When we’re talking about website performance, we’re talking about a couple different things. We’re talking about speed and user behaviour. Afterall, you can have a great website that’s optimised for SEO with tons of traffic potential, but if the site is slow and users are bouncing, your great website isn’t reaching its full potential.

That being said, there’s a lot more to website performance than just speed and analysing user behaviour. You can also talk about things like uptime, the performance of your database, and other technical aspects of your website, but we’re only going to talk about monitoring user behaviour and general site speed in this article.

Why? Because those are the basics of getting started at monitoring a website’s performance. We’d rather get you started than scare you off with too many technical aspects. And honestly, the technical aspects to do with uptime, databases, and more, are best left to professionals. Professionals like us here at Red Crow Digital. That’s why it’s important to have a good relationship with your hosting provider and your development team.

How to Monitor User Behaviour on Your Website

Monitoring user behaviour on a website is actually pretty easy with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free service from Google that tracks when a user comes to a website, where they’re visiting from (like from a search engine, directly, from social, etc.), what pages a user is visiting, and how long they’re staying on a website. And that’s just the basics of Google Analytics!

To get started with Google Analytics, simply:

• Create a Google Analytics account
• Create a new property
• Install the measurement tag on your website

Once the tag is on your site, you’ll be able to see what sort of traffic the site is getting. From there you can get an impression of the performance of your website and make more educated decisions about site improvements.

What to Look Out For in Google Analytics

Once you’re in Google Analytics, some of the data and reports can be a little bit daunting. But don’t worry, we’re here to help! Here are some of the basic stats to monitor:

• Traffic acquisition: the traffic acquisition report, pictured below, lets you know where your site traffic is coming from. This is useful to monitor so that you know where to put your online marketing efforts and also evaluate success/failure of traffic generating campaigns.
• General user behaviour: within the traffic acquisition report you’ll see a variety of numbers, and it’s all pretty self explanatory. Beyond simply looking at users and sessions, pay attention to the amount of engaged sessions and the average engagement time on your site. What’s considered “good” here will depend on your industry, but again, it’s worth monitoring to evaluate the performance of site changes.
• Pages and screens: the pages and screens report is another helpful report. As the name would suggest, this report lets you know what website pages users are visiting. Here you can get an understanding of what pages are popular, where people are leaving your site, and more.

And that’s just the start of Google Analytics! The good news about Google Analytics is that you can’t really break anything unless you’re trying, so feel free to explore. However, you can also glean quite a bit of information from just a few basic reports.

How to Monitor Website Speed

Monitoring website speed is just as important as monitoring site visitors and their behaviour. Ultimately, a lot of issues you may have with conversions and the amount of time visitors spend on your site can be solved by ensuring that your website is fast. According to LoadStorm, one in four visitors abandon a site that takes more than four seconds to load; you’ll get more visitors if you have a fast site.

The best place to start for monitoring site speed is Google Search Console. Search Console is another free service from Google that allows you to monitor how well your site is doing in search, see how well the site is indexing, and get a good overview of things like website speed.

Once you claim your property on Google Search Console, head over to the Core Web Vitals report. This will let you know how your site is performing in terms of largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift. It may not be possible to completely eliminate all the issues in this report, but it’s a good start in understanding where a problem may lie.

Beyond Search Console, Pingdom is also a useful tool to see what aspects of your website may be slowing things down. Google's PageSpeed Insights is another good tool that's similar to Pingdom, albeit a little more developer focused. Either, you’ll know what to improve.

Get an Expert to Help

While knowing what needs to change is a good start, making the necessary changes may be more difficult. But that’s what we’re here for. We like to create a relationship with our clients. This means that having an educated client who knows what to look out for is beneficial to everyone in that relationship. We’re a team that wants the best for your website.

If you’re seeing problems with the performance of your website and need help getting them fixed, get in touch with us. We’ll discuss the problems, your goals, and come up with a solution.