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Monitor Your Website's Performance

Would you spend $1000, $3000, $6000 or more, and never check what the outcome of your investment was? What has your website contributed to your business in the last 12 months? Two years? Longer?

This will take some time, brainwork, communication with your customers, and maybe a brushup on your maths skills.

Budget time, energy and $ to gather feedback on your website's performance and to improve it. Could you spend 30 minutes (for a small site) to 60 minutes (for larger sites) each month reviewing your site's look, words and images, and its functionality? Compare them against your current business goals.

And the sooner you respond to your findings, the better it will be for your business.

Define "success"

  1. Set website goals in accordance with your business plan and vision. Relate these to improved sales/site visitor responses if you can. "More site visitors" only matters if they are the right visitors.
  2. Set up your site with these goals in mind.
  3. Review online sales & site visitor data regularly.
  4. Update photo/text content, product lines and stock availability.

How is your site performing?

Customer feedback

Do customers like your website? Do they find it hard or easy to navigate, uninformative or helpful? Which pages do your customers find the most useful?

We all tend to design websites which appeal to us. We need to see our websites from the site visitor's viewpoint.

  • Font size, typeface & colour - easy to read?
  • Fancy graphics can look great at first sight. Do they fall down on legibility?
  • What information are people looking for? Can they find it quickly?
  • Long sentences & endless paragraphs are hard to digest.
  • Typo's & spelling mistakes irritate some people. Mis-spelled keywords miss out on online searches. Proofread your website from time to time for typo's that sneak through.
  • If writing for the web isn't your forte, don't settle for second rate content. Get help.
Web statistics

Keep an eye on how many times your site is visited, how long site visitors stay, what keywords lead people to view your website, monthly online sales income vs no of site visits.

Some website owners are fascinated by site analytics and pore over them. Others ask us for a short summary and recommendations. You can try both routes and see which works best for you.

Web analytics only tell us so much. We suggest you look for trends, rather than sweating over exact figures. No method for collecting website usage data is perfect. Google Analytics and AWS measure site traffic differently, which delivers different results: eg on no of visits from mobile phones. Spam/rogue robot traffic can also distort statistics.

Respond promptly

Edit your site using Bizazz or ask us to add your new content for you.

Encourage customers to check out your website from time to time. They'll come back if you put new and useful information up regularly:

  • new product lines
  • discounts and specials
  • how to use/clean/maintain/get the best from products
  • photo updates
  • community news...