Harris KhanYour website represents you, your company, and your brand. It is therefore vitally important to consider the key performance indicators – or KPIs – which determine how well your website is performing. What are some of these key indicators? And how can your company benefit from them?
Uptime
The time that a website is available to users, uptime is a major indicator of its overall performance. Measured in percentage, uptime is vital for the health of an ecommerce site and its revenue and any outage – or downtime – can result in costly consequences, such as a loss of customers or money. The longer the downtime, the less the site is accessible for use and so your company is in danger of losing revenue. Most organisations expect a small amount of downtime and so try to aim for an uptime ratio of 99%.
Traffic
The number of users who visit a website is an effective way to measure how well it’s performing. The higher the traffic to a website, the more likely it is to be successful and profitable. Traffic can be direct, where visitors reach your site by typing the URL into their browser or by referral, where users access your site via another website. Organic search traffic refers to traffic that comes from users entering a keyword into a search engine and happening to find your website. This is why SEO strategies are important when creating successful content for a website.
Retention rate
Now that you’ve succeeded in attracting visitors to your website, how do you encourage them to come back and use your site again? Your website’s bounce rate informs you of the percentage of users who visit your site and then leave immediately rather than sticking to view the content. The lower the bounce rate, the more likely your site offers a better user experience or faster loading speed. Methods that encourage visitors to your site should aim to reduce the bounce rate and therefore improve retention rate.
Engagement
In line with retention rate, a healthy indicator of a good website is if it encourages some kind of engagement with users. Online companies, such as retailers, gaming sites, and news platforms might offer users the chance to contribute via comments or to read content rather than view the site’s products or use its services. Sites such as GGPoker, for instance, have blogs on their main sites, which not only makes these platforms more interesting and diverse, but helps to encourage site traffic and improve retention rates.
Connection time
A good indicator of a healthy website is the time it takes for a connection to be established between a user’s browser and the origin server. Visitors connecting to your website will experience different connection times depending on which geographical region they’re in, so it’s advisable to consider this and try and make sure that users can access your site regardless of where they are located. There are several tools, such as GT Metrix, Pingdom, and others, that site owners can use to measure connectivity speed in different locations.
User satisfaction
A customer-focused KPI, such as user satisfaction, is a strong indicator of a healthy website. Customer reviews that are presented on the site where new visitors can see them is an effective tool, but website owners can also benefit from measuring user satisfaction. The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) are two examples of quantifiable methods that ecommerce companies can use.
User friendly
If a site is user-friendly, it’s more likely to attract new visitors, as well as retain them. Another point to think about is a website’s optimization for mobile. With more and more users now accessing the web on their phones, it’s vital that companies design their online presence to be mobile-friendly.
A healthy website not only reflects the owner or the brand, it must contain a number of key indicators to ensure that it performs to the best of its ability.
