8 Easy Methods To Check Your Website Performance

So, you’ve already incorporated SEO techniques into your website and content. You’ve been very active in posting social media updates. However, you’re still not getting enough sales.

A marketing strategy is made up of several components, SEO being only one of them. No matter how good you are at it, there will be loopholes. It’s not enough that you only know how to check backlinks and ensure high-quality content. Often, you’ll also need to check and review your website’s performance to know what and where these loopholes are.

Read on to know the cornerstone principles of website performance testing.

1. Site Analytics

Install Google Analytics to discover important details about your website. Among these details are:   

• Page views
• Number of visitors
• The amount of time spent by visitors on the site
• How people get to your site (or traffic sources); you can also use a website traffic checker for more information.
• Most visited pages
• Search keywords used to locate your site

2. Heat Mapping

A heat map is a tool to understand what users do on your web pages. It studies what and where users click, how far they scroll, what they focus on, and which points or pages they ignore. There are a few types of heat maps, namely scroll maps, click maps, move maps, as well as mobile and desktop heat maps.

Simply put, website heat maps let you view the most and least popular elements of your website. These are represented by the colors red, which means it’s hot, and blue, which means it’s unpopular. This allows you to identify which sections or pages in your site you can capitalize on for further engagement. Heat maps also help you answer questions like, “What can I do to increase conversions?” or, “What can I do to compel users to take action and patronize my products or services?”

3. Speed Testing

Most people get annoyed and abandon a site when it takes too long to load. In SEO lingo, the aggregate number of people doing this is referred to as site ‘bounce rate.’

Business owners should avoid bounce rates at all costs. A piece of advice is to make your site load faster; thus, avoid overcrowding it with high-resolution photos and unnecessary sections. You may choose to use one from the best website speed test tools for 2020 for the best results.

4. Readability Testing

One of the basic rules for optimizing content for SEO is to avoid jargons. However, there may be an exception, such as if you’re catering to a highly specific niche.

Depending largely on your target audience, a website should strive to achieve readability for persons around the 6^th to 9^th grade levels, in general. Even if you’re catering to a specific audience, foster inclusivity and make your website understandable to a wide range of audiences.

5. Usability Testing

Being closely linked to user experience (UX), a usability test refers to actions that determine how user-friendly or easy to use your website is according to the end users themselves.

One good way to test the usability and performance of your site is to ask feedback from your users. Surveys can be a good starting point, although there are usability tools that you can use, specifically for first-time visitors.

Besides taking forever to load, another severe technical glitch that can prevent you from attracting potential buyers is a website crash. As such, you always need to make sure your website doesn’t crash.

6. Comparison Testing

Comparison testing pertains to analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your site (or offerings) by comparing it to other existing sites, such as those of your competitors.  The goal is not only to determine your site’s positive and negative points, but to identify the loopholes and make appropriate corrective actions.

For instance, you can actually test two versions of web a page with different layouts, sales copies, headlines, images, and calls-to-action texts, and compare which one drives better sales conversion.

7. Mobile Viewing Test

A high number of mobile phone and tablet users surf the web in search of various information, making it important to optimize your site for mobile use.

There are a few tools you can use to see how your site will look like on a mobile phone, and there are also a few tools to check how your site compares to other sites on mobile.

8. Utilize SEO Tools

There’s a host of SEO tools and sites to test how well your website works for users. Link analysis, rank tracking, and other SEO-related components are influenced by your site speed and performance.

SEO ranking tools are available for free or through paid subscriptions. Regardless of the price, you should focus on the features and functions that the apps offer.

Here are the basic website performance tools you need:

• Site Auditor – This tool automates the process of going through your domain to look for areas that need improvement. With this, you won’t have to spend a lot of time checking each element in your website to boost its performance.
• Speed Checker – Your site’s speed plays a significant role in improving the UX of your domain, which is the primary criterion for measuring its performance. This aspect is also a ranking factor since people won’t want to view a website that doesn’t load properly after a few seconds.
• Site Optimizer – While a site auditor informs you of the parts of your website that need improvement, a site optimizer helps you implement enhancements on these sections to boost their performance.

Conclusion

Monitoring your website’s performance is crucial to your brand’s success in the World Wide Web. Site analytics provide you with insights on the number of views that your pages acquire daily, weekly, or monthly. Heatmapping, on the other hand, allows you to understand which parts of your domain works well in capturing the interest of your target audience.

Speed is another integral element of website performance. It’s also a ranking factor, which makes it all the more crucial. Readability, usability, and comparison testing are UX components that can encourage or hamper people’s enjoyment of your content. Lastly, you must optimize your site for mobile screens since most consumers prefer to use their smartphones and tablets to browse the web.