Why Monitoring Your Website’s Performance Will Pay Off Big Time
Your website is intimately connected to your business. It’s the digital face of your company, a place where people can look you up in a convenient way and get a feel for your product or service. Your website makes a certain impression on visitors and provides a convenient avenue to engage with your business. Keeping tabs on how well your website is doing is crucial for its long-term health and, indirectly, for the health of your business.
Here, Techie Moon explains why website owners should actively monitor their websites:
1. Build more accurate buyer personas
Buyer personas are fictional ideal customers – the people most willing to pay for your product or service. Your website is one of the best sources of information on buyers. It’s a first-hand, unbiased, and, most importantly, economical source of information. By tracking visitor behavior, you can figure out preferences, purchase patterns, trends, dislikes, and more. You can then create precise buyer personas and adjust your product, service, marketing efforts, and business in general to better appeal to them.
2. Rank higher on search engines
Monitoring your site performance is a key step in improving your search engine optimization (SEO), reports Across the Board. Search engine optimization is changing constantly, with new best practices popping up seemingly every other week. The only way to keep up and remain in a competitive spot on search engine ranking pages (SERPs) is to monitor the effectiveness of existing SEO efforts and tweak things periodically. Your site’s overall performance is a good indicator of the success of your SEO efforts. You can always, of course, track individual SEO metrics too.
3. Safeguard against hackers
Websites are a favorite target for hackers, who often attack servers and take them down or over for their own gain. Furthermore, they often steal customer information or hold it for ransom. One of the best protections you have against hackers is active website monitoring, which allows you to spot trouble in real-time and then quick action. For instance, you can keep an eye on incoming traffic and verify its legitimacy – such as by country of origin. If there is suspicious activity, you can temporarily take your website down, clean your servers, restore a backup, and be back up and running again in no time.
4. Improve site performance
Your site’s technical performance – its speed, uptime, reliability, safety, small-screen friendliness, and more – needs to be excellent. Not only do customers expect it, but so does Google. Slow-loading websites are a major turn-off. Again, monitoring your site actively allows you to spot problems. For instance, you can find 404 errors (page not found) and make quick fixes. Similarly, you know which pages are loading too slowly and need to be fixed.
Make sure you measure the right metrics
Not all metrics matter, and some matter more than others. Most businesses actively focus on a handful of metrics and ignore the rest. Two of the most important metrics, according to a Torque piece, are the number of unique visitors and average active time on any page. The number of unique visitors is the people you’re successfully attracting to your site. It can be taken as a measure of your popularity. The average time on a particular page is an indicator of how attractive your content is. By measuring these metrics, you gain insight into the overall health of your website, which can help you to improve your online presence.
Business process management: Improving user experience
One of the main goals of monitoring your website is, of course, to improve it to better appeal to customers. There is a technique for improving and managing processes, called BPM, that you can use to understand how best to align your website for improved user experience. BPM works by analyzing how people, systems, and data interact in a particular digital process. Then, it attempts to optimize (and often automate) the process. In terms of website design and performance, it can help you provide an improved UX. Upon creating a BPM framework, you should monitor the effectiveness of the system and then make improvements to it based on the gathered data.
Conclusion
You don’t need to manually monitor your website, fortunately. Most modern-day CMS comes with in-built data-collection features. You can also use third-party tools to collect relevant data. Then, using techniques like business process management, keep upgrading the website over time. The rewards will be heightened traffic, happier customers, and, ultimately, a stronger business.
