10 Tips on How to Track Your Website Performance Metrics

Creating an optimal experience for your website visitors can be tough, but it’s a necessity for doing business on the internet.

While it’s not nuclear science, paying attention to your website performance metrics can improve user retention, boost traffic and keep users coming back.

Today, users have no patience for waiting around for slow loading websites. And the more bells and whistles you add to your company website, the more things seem to go wrong.

But if you use website performance metrics to monitor your website performance you can assess when there’s a problem. And fix it.

Want to know how to monitor your website’s performance?

Let’s get to it. Here are the metrics you need to know

1. Conversion Rate Counts

We all want our web visitors to become customers. So conversion rate is probably one of the most important metrics you want to measure.

A conversion rate is even more important than conversion sales because it informs you if end users are doing what you intended them to do when they’re navigating your site. The way you measure conversion rates is simple mathematics.

Just divide your total of unique visitors by the number of conversions. It’s easy to track analytics in Google Analytics and other analytics applications or plug-ins. Just classify the conversion.

2. Bounce Rate Matters

A bounce rate is usually not a good thing unless you’re sending an end user to your landing page and they sign up the form and leave.

In most other cases, having a high bounce rate means people aren’t sticking around. These “single page sessions”, as Google calls them, alert you that something on your website is turning off your web visitors.

Google takes a website’s bounce rate into consideration when ranking web pages. So bounce rate can affect SEO.

Reasons for high bounce rates include slow loading times, poorly chosen keywords, irrelevant content, difficult navigation, or unattractive web design.

3. Time to Title is Your Friend

Time to Title is exactly how it sounds. It’s the length of time your title appears in a user’s browser once they request to see your company website.

When users see your title immediately, they have more trust in your website. They won’t mind waiting for the page to finish loading, within reason of course.

The speed of delivery from your server to the end user’s browser is what measures time to title.

Testing your website performance metrics notify you if there’s a problem. Then your web developer can fix it.

4. The Connection Time Metric is Important

Connection time is similar to Time to Title. It’s measured by the time it takes your origin server to connect to the end user’s browser.

It’s not concerned with just the title. Instances that slow down connection times are many. It can be the traffic on your server for one. Also, visitors in different geographical locations can experience longer connectivity times.

One way to test it is with exploratory testing. What is exploratory testing? It’s another way to test your website’s performance.

It’s possible you’ll need an infrastructure upgrade. One alternative solution is to load some of your assets onto a content delivery network (CDN).

5. Time to First Byte Metric

Time to First Byte, aka TTFB, is the amount of time it takes the first byte of data to reach a visitor’s browser after it connects to your origin server focused on the unique visitor.

Your visitor will get your content quickly while they wait for more personalized content, which can be slower to load. If this takes longer than it should, you can make minor adjustments in your code to increase performance.

Separate static content from dynamic content. This way, your site visitor will get your content quickly as they wait for more personalized content. This specific content sometimes takes more time to load.

Testing loading times with your website performance metrics will help you identify this problem.

6. Time to Last Byte

Time to Byte, also called TTLB, is mostly measured by the quality of your database queries and your code. When the visitor gets the last byte of your website, your analytics records the Time to Last Byte metric.

Other factors that influence your TTLB are when the server reaches its fullest capacity or when your web server is configured incorrectly. Defining your TTLB will enable you to make the necessary adjustments.

7. Top Pages Lets You Know What Works

Top Pages are the pages that receive the most traffic. You can discover these pages in Google analytics behavior tab.

Knowing about top pages lets you know what content is doing well. Then you create more of it.

While the number of page views is a factor in top pages, the number of social media shares also factors into the equation.

8. Overall Weight and Bytes

The Overall Weight website performance metric is the number of bytes that is transmitted to the visitor from your website. One key relationship is the time it takes between assets since one heavy asset can slow down your website.

Knowing which assets are heavy can let you reassess your website’s assets. This way you can see what assets are needed and which can be discarded.

9. Error Rate Measures Requests

Websites always have errors. But keeping abreast of them can help you get a glimpse of what’s wrong. Your error rate is a metric that doesn’t relate to speed. But it’s still important.

The error rate is measured by comparing the total number of requests to the median of problem requests.

Use various loads to check error rate which is usually influenced by visitors browsing your website simultaneously.

10. Assess Third Party Domains

You don’t have much control over how third-party domains affect your website because they come from other domains. These can be social media widgets or plug-ins from third-party websites.

However, if their functions are affecting performance negatively, you can remove them and find a similar widget that has better performance.