How to analyze website performance and attract more customers?

Even with social media in full swing, having a website remains fundamental for an effective digital marketing strategy. But do you know how to analyze website performance and attract more customers? Well, contrary to what many people think, it's not enough to just put a website online and let it “stagnate” on the web.

That's why we invite Duda, platform, website creation at scale, to write about how to analyze the performance of your website

To attract more customers, your website needs constant performance analysis and optimization. Yes, the terms sound complicated, but the idea is simple. 

By carrying out periodic performance analyses, you will diagnose your performance and identify opportunities for improvement.

It is these improvements that will allow you to offer a better experience for your users and gain positions on Google, attract more visitors and increase conversions. In other words, they will help you to have a website that delivers the best possible results. 

But how do you perform this website performance analysis? That's what we'll cover in this article. 

What is website performance analysis?

Here at Duda, We believe that the main objective of any website should be conversion. 

Of course, there are other important objectives, but at the end of the day what practically everyone wants is a website that attracts leads and helps turn them into customers. 

Website performance analysis is an auditing process that helps identify, track, and correct areas of concern that impact its performance. With this process, you can achieve more results from your website and increase your conversion rate. 

The conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of visitors to your website by the number of conversions – which can be sales, lead generation, or another goal you've defined for your website.

You must be wondering, what would be a high conversion rate for a website? Well, the numbers vary greatly depending on the company's industry. The ideal scenario is for you to benchmark with other websites in your sector. 

But, just to give you a reference, an overall average conversion rate is 2.35%. In other words, out of every 1,000 people who visit a website, just over 23 will convert (buy your product, leave their contact information or another objective you've defined). 

What you should analyze on your site

Now that you know why it's important to analyze your site's performance, let's start detailing HOW you can do this analysis.

A website's performance is impacted by many aspects, but they can be grouped into 3 broad categories: design, content, and technical aspects. 

These are quite broad items, covering practically everything related to your website. Therefore, in this article, we will focus only on the main technical aspects: speed, responsiveness, security, and SEO. 

Speed

It's the page loading speed for users. It is, by far, the main critical point for a website's performance. 

If a page takes just a few more seconds to load, a visitor might give up, close the page, or worse, look for your competitor's website. 

Here's an overview of Some numbers from a Google playbook that demonstrate the impact of speed on website performance:

• 53% dos visitantes que utilizam dispositivos móveis abandonam o site que leva mais de 3 segundos para carregar
• Every 1 second less on website loading time means 27% more conversions
• The probability of a bounce (user giving up/leaving the site after a single visit to the page) increases by 32% as the page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds

Slow loading times can also cause your website to lose ranking positions in Google search results. 

Additionally, in May 2021, Google launched a new set of metrics called Core Web Vitals, which includes the loading speed of the largest content element of the site as one of its metrics. 

And what causes a site to take so long to load? Excessive image size, unoptimized images, unnecessary code in the site's programming and server performance are some of the main factors. 

This means that choosing a good platform for your website development and a good server are crucial for your website to have good speed and, therefore, good performance. 

Responsiveness

A page is responsive when it adapts to different devices: desktop, smartphone, or tablet. 

This functionality is essential for your website to offer the best possible experience for your visitors, regardless of the device they are using to access it.

Just like speed, mobile device compatibility is also one of the main factors for a website's good performance. This is because, since 2016, the number of people who access the internet worldwide via mobile devices has surpassed desktop users. 

This is why Google began considering responsiveness as one of the ranking factors. According to the search giant, there is a 61%% chance that a person will abandon a site that is not suitable for their device. 

So, it's no use having a great website on your computer if it's slow and difficult to navigate on your phone. 

To have a mobile-friendly website, you can use responsive design, you can create a mobile version (m.exemplo.com), apply the dynamic server (same URL for mobile and desktop, but different HTML and CSS) or use AMP pages (Accelerated Mobile Pages).

Opting for a website builder with responsive design or dynamic serving can make your life a lot easier and will certainly improve your site's performance. 

Learn more about responsiveness in this article: What Is a Responsive Website or Responsive Web Design?

Security

According to a survey by the digital security Sophos Lab: 30 million sites suffer hacker attacks every day. Hackers use automated tools to scan a large number of sites and search for vulnerabilities.

If your site is a victim of attacks and malware, As a result, the data of your company, your visitors and your customers could be stolen. In addition, the attack could take your site offline, emails from your company's domain could be classified as spam and your site could be excluded from search engines. 

Therefore, offering security is essential for your site to perform well. When users feel insecure about navigating and entering their data, they may give up on their visit without making the conversions you want.

That's why a website performance analysis should also focus on security. Check the following points:

• Invest in a good hosting service
• Install SSL certificates
• Update your systems
• Use plugins from reliable manufacturers
• Back up frequently
• Don't use weak passwords and change them often

Some website development platforms already consider many of these factors. 

Find out more with our article on: Website Maintenance 2024: How to take care of your website the right way

SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) seeks to increase website traffic and performance in search engines such as Google and others. 

In this case, site analysis seeks to map out all the possible errors in optimizing the site. site that is harming its indexing or search engine ranking.

As we've already seen, speed, mobile compatibility and security are ranking factors, but a complete SEO audit encompasses many other issues.

A SEO audit you can look for problems and opportunities in the following areas:

• Site structure (technical SEO): pages not crawled, errors 4XX and 5XX, file robots.txt missing or with errors, missing or with errors sitemap.xml file, Flash pages, uncompressed JavaScript and CSS files, among others.
• Website pages (On Page SEO): internal linkage, repeated or duplicated content, empty or repeated meta description, empty or repeated title tag, broken images, images without alt attribute, among others.
• Your site's relationship with other sites (Off Page SEO): backlinks of dubious sites, low-quality content, low authority scores, incoherent anchor texts, etc.

5 Tools to Analyze Your Website's Performance

The list of items to be analyzed to evaluate a site's performance is long. However, some tools can help you analyze your site and point out optimization opportunities. They are an excellent starting point. 

• Google PageSpeed Insights

O PageSpeed Insights is a great free resource offered by Google. It analyzes your site's performance and gives it a score from 0 to 100. 

The tool provides information on the site's loading speed and also on the display of content. Each of the items evaluated is classified as good, needs improvement or bad.  

There are two separate evaluations: one for access from mobile devices and another specifically for desktop devices.

PageSpeed Insights is very easy to use. Simply enter the URL of your site and click on “Analyze”. The system will examine it and generate a report containing a list of errors, suggestions for improvement and points that have already been optimized. 

Be sure to take the test to get a general idea of how your site is performing. 

• Web.dev

Google's site measurement tool for developers, the web.dev, Lighthouse, which evaluates the overall quality of a web page in a laboratory environment using a tool called Lighthouse. It provides information on several of Lighthouse's quality categories, including performance, accessibility and SEO. 

While PageSpeed Insights uses lab data (Lighthouse) and field data (Chrome UX Report), web.dev/measure delves into a single URL in the lab. 

That's why the tip is to use PageSpeed Insights to optimize the Core Web Vitals. And use web.dev/measure to measure and optimize a broader set of quality signals for a page.

• Pingdom Website Speed Test

Just like PageSpeed Insights, the Pingdom Website Speed Test also presents a rating for the analyzed website. 

In addition, the tool displays loading time, page size and a percentage showing how much faster your site is compared to those tested with the same system.

The report also includes individual notes for specific aspects, indicating areas needing more attention for improvement, and a graph showing the loading time for each of the page's files.

These functionalities are free, but Pingdom also offers a paid version, which automates performance tests to monitor website availability and speed frequently.

• GTMetrix

The free version of GTmetrix It offers quite similar features to previous tools. Its differentiating factor is providing a recommendation on what your priorities for site improvements should be: high, medium, or low. 

The paid versions offer the ability to analyze more URLs (the free version allows up to three), hourly monitoring, and video recording to visually demonstrate page loading.

• Google Test My Site

The last tip on our list is another free tool offered by Google. The Test My Site The Think with Google platform wants to help you improve your website's performance on mobile devices. 

The evaluated information includes: loading time, estimated visitor loss (in %) due to loading time, comparison of this time with that of other companies in the industry (excellent, good, fair, or unsatisfactory), and what the loading time would be if all proposed adjustments in the report were implemented.

To receive the report, simply click on “Receive the free report,” enter your email, and click “Send.” The system will then send an email with recommendations very similar in style to PageSpeed Insights and a suggestion to learn more about AMP technology.

Finally, how can I ensure my website has good performance?  

As we've seen, simply putting a website up won't guarantee more results for your business. 

You need to constantly analyze your website's performance and identify optimization opportunities in terms of speed, responsiveness, security, and SEO. 

A Duda It's a scalable website creation platform specially designed for digital professionals and agencies. We are leaders in Google performance Core Web Vitals and we deliver excellent results in the technical aspects we've seen above. 

I and Upsites is one of the Brazilian agencies that uses the Duda for building professional, high-performance websites. 

So, if you need to build a website from scratch or improve the performance of your current website, ask Upsites for a quote. 

And check if Duda is the ideal CMS to meet your needs and help transform your website into a true client attraction and conversion machine.