What Are The Top 3 Website Performance Metrics To Monitor
Website performance metrics are important to be monitored as it helps to drive business success by identifying the effectiveness and overall user experience. Through regular monitoring, it can help to ensure that the website meets the user’s expectations and requirements. If you’re wondering what are the top 3 website performance metrics to monitor, in this article, we explore the crucial metrics all website owners should track:
What is website performance?
Website performance refers to how effective and well it functions by delivering content to users or dealing with user interactions. If the website has high performance, some of the features include fast loading speed, smooth navigation, and seamless user interactions.
What are website performance metrics?
Website performance metrics include the loading speed, how well a user interacts with the website, as well as how smooth the website loads based on how the content shifts while the page loads. There are specific metrics to provide these performance insights such as time to interact (TTI) and first contentful paint (FCP).
Why is it important to monitor website performance metrics?
It’s important to ensure the website has high performance by consistent monitoring as it can reduce bounce rates and enhance the user’s experience.
A high-performance website also helps to boost the search engine optimization (SEO) rankings as it’s one of the factors that contributes to the ranking positions of search engines.
Besides that, a high-performing website also helps to increase revenue and conversions as users are able to perform an action easily.
What are the top 3 website performance metrics to monitor?
There are many different website performance metrics to monitor. However, here are top 3 website performance metrics that should be monitored frequently:
1. Bounce Rate or Average Duration
The bounce rate or average duration makes a difference as to how well your website is performing. If your bounce rate is high, it means that your website isn’t performing well as users are leaving your website quickly instead of staying longer and exploring other website pages.
How to monitor: Some of the ways you can monitor the bounce rate is to use Google Analytics as it displays the bounce rate and average session duration of users.
How to improve: You can improve your bounce rate by ensuring your navigation menu is smooth and simple. Another way is to improve your website loading time and ensures that it loads quickly within 3 seconds.
2. Website Speed
Website speed refers to how long it takes for a website to load and respond to the user’s interactions or actions. Most users expect fast loading speed as they can’t wait long to perform an action or to find out information about a product/service.
Time to Title
Time to Title measures the time taken for the user to see the title of your website. If the Time to Title is too slow, it will turn users away and increase the overall bounce rate. Time to Title is also useful to identify or spot any problems with the website that should be fixed to enhance the user experience.
Time to Start Render
Time to Start Render measures the time taken for the user to view the first visual element on the website. This metric helps to identify any potential issues which affect the user experience. If it’s too slow, it may be a sign that your website needs to be optimized to improve the loading speed and boost user experience.
Time to Interact
Time to Interact measures the time taken for a user to interact with the website. If the Time to Interact takes too long, it’s a sign that your website could be loading too slow, which will affect the user’s experience as users can’t interact with your website quickly.
How to monitor: To monitor these metrics, you can make use of Lighthouse, which is a tool that can easily be installed on your Google Chrome web browser. All you need to do is download the extension and you’re good to go.
How to improve: The best methods to improve your website’s speed is to optimize your images and compress them as well as minify the JavaScript, CSS and HTML of your website. You can also enable Lazy Loading on your website as it will only load the content once the user scrolls down the website.
Server Response Time
Server response time refers to how long it takes for a web server to respond to a request made by a user. A slow server response time can affect the overall user experience and reduce the loading speed.
Time To First Byte (TTFB)
The metric that measures the server response time is Time To First Byte (TTFB), which is the time between an initial request that is sent to the web server and the browser that receives a response.
How to monitor: Some of the ways you can monitor the server response time is to use Google PageSpeed Insights as they provide information about the TTFB. GTmetrix is also another tool that provides information about the server response time.
How to improve: You can improve your server response time by upgrading your web hosting plans or ensure proper caching is implemented on your website. You can also consider using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) so that your website can make use of multiple servers.
3. Website Traffic
Website traffic refers to the number of users that visits your website. This also includes the channel or platform used to view your website as well as their user behaviour of your website. This also helps to measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
Types of Website Traffic
Here are the common types of website traffic:
Organic Traffic
Organic Traffic refers to the traffic that comes from search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. If you have high organic traffic. It means that your search engine optimization (SEO) is good.
Direct Traffic
Direct Traffic refers to traffic that comes from a user entering the website directly into the browser’s search bar. If the direct traffic is high, it means that many people know about your brand.
Referral Traffic
Referral Traffic refers to the visitors who visit the website through other websites. For instance, website B includes a link to website A. If the user clicks website A while on website B, then it will be considered as referral traffic. This shows how well-known and credible your website is.
Paid Traffic
Paid Traffic refers to the visitors who visit the website through paid marketing methods such as Google Ads or social media ads. This helps to measure how well the return on investment (ROI) based on the current ad spend.
Social Traffic
Social Traffic refers to the visitors who visit the website through social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram. If your social traffic is high, then it shows that your social media visibility is high too.
How to monitor: You can track website traffic through Google Analytics, Ahrefs or SEMRush. These are popular digital marketing tools that offers more than just analytics for website traffic.
How to improve: You can improve website traffic through various efforts based on each platform such as implementing SEO strategies, boosting social media efforts by posting useful content, and run paid advertising campaigns such as Google Ads to drive more traffic.
Conclusion
So hopefully this guide provides the right answers if you’re wondering what are the top 3 website performance metrics to monitor. It’s important to monitor the these website performance metrics to ensure that you can boost the user’s experience and improve your overall business growth. Find out more about how to improve your website’s speed with our handy guide.