visitor tracking stats on computer

Tips for Improving Speed and Visitor Tracking on Your Website

Website Tips and Tricks

Approximately 64 percent of small businesses have a website.

If you’re part of this group, you’ve definitely got an advantage over your competitors. It’s not enough just to have a website, though. You also need to have a website that runs well and provides you with essential information about the people visiting it.

Not satisfied with how your website is working? Not sure where to begin when it comes to fixing it? You’ve come to the right place.

There are lots of steps you can take to improve the speed of your website and enhance your visitor tracking. Read on to learn more.

Why Website Speed Matters

The faster your website loads, the better. There are lots of benefits that come with having a fast-loading website, including the following:

  • Better conversion rates
  • Lower bounce rates
  • Better user experience

This last one is especially important. When your website visitors have a positive experience, they’ll be more inclined to check out your website again in the future.

Even if they’re not ready to make a purchase today, they’ll have positive associations with your website and may be more likely to return when they are ready to buy.

Why Visitor Tracking Matters

Visitor tracking — which involves monitoring who’s visiting your website, why they’re there, and where they’re at in their buying process — is essential to the success of your website, too.

The following are some specific perks you’ll enjoy when you start using visitor tracking tools:

  • Get to know your visitors
  • Figure out where they’re coming from
  • Refine your marketing methods
  • Personalize marketing efforts for better conversions
  • Find out what your customers are looking for
  • Find out where you’re losing customers

Visitor tracking also helps you figure out how to better optimize your website. This, in turn, can help you attract more visitors and experience a boost in sales.

Improving Website Speed

Okay, you’re convinced that website speed and visitor tracking are important. Where do you begin when it comes to improving these aspects of your website, though?

Start by taking these steps to speed up your website:

Reduce Image Sizes

Featuring images on your website is a good way to make it more engaging and eye-catching. However, if your image sizes are too large, you could end up slowing your website down without realizing it.

Take some time to compress and minimize your images and see if that helps to speed things up. Try to keep them under 100kb whenever possible.

Update Your Hosting Option

If you’ve had a business website for a while and have been used a shared hosting plan, it may be time to upgrade to a virtual private server (or VPS) or a dedicated server. This will give you greater server bandwidth and could help to speed things up.

Updating your hosting plan can be especially beneficial if your website has seen a significant increase in traffic recently.

Get Rid of Redirects

Having a mobile-friendly website can help to improve website navigation and make your website more accessible to a wider audience.

However, if your mobile visitors have to be redirected to the mobile version of your website, that’s going to slow things down and could end up losing your visitors. Get rid of redirects and take mobile visitors directly where they want to go.

Use a Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (or CDN for short) is a system of servers that delivers webpages to users based on their geographic location. Using a CDN can help to get web content to users at a faster speed, which helps to improve page load time and ensure your visitors remain satisfied.

Improving Visitor Tracking

If you want to improve your approach to visitor tracking, start by making sure you’re tracking the right things. The following are some essential factors you need to track:

Traffic Sources

There are three main types of traffic you need to monitor:

  • Search traffic: This is the traffic you get from search engines like Google
  • Referral traffic: This is the traffic that comes from links to your website
  • Direct navigation: This is the traffic that comes from people typing in your web address or accessing it through a bookmark

When you monitor these traffic sources, it’s easier to figure out where the greatest number of people are finding your website.

Search Engine Keywords

Tracking search engine keywords will help you to figure out what kinds of terms people are typing in when they come across your website.

When you have this information in mind, you can better tailor your web content (whether it’s a landing page, a blog post, or any other type of page) so you can continue bringing in more members of your target demographic.

Conversion Rate

When you track your conversion rate, it’s easier for you to see how many people are taking a specific, desired action. That could be signing up for an email newsletter, downloading a free eBook, or clicking on a particular link.

Tracking conversion rates helps you figure out whether or not your content is effective and how you can improve future types of content to get better results.

Exit Pages

Don’t forget to track exit pages as well. An exit page is a specific page a person is on before they click away from your site. Tracking exit pages helps you figure out where you’re losing your visitors.

This, in turn, can help you make improvements to your website (or your business in general) to keep people around longer. For example, if lots of people are exiting your website when they get to your prices page, that could indicate that your prices are too high.

Give Your Website a Boost Today

Faster website speeds and better visitor tracking can work wonders when it comes to improving your website.

Have you been overwhelmed or unsure of how to get started with these improvements? If so, hopefully, this article has given you some practical advice on how to proceed.

Keep these tips in mind and you’ll be amazed at how much better your website runs (and how many more people start checking it out).

Don’t forget to look into some of our other articles on website enhancement. We’ve got lots of helpful resources you can start referencing today!