How to Assess Your Website Performance from the Front End

We’ve already taken a brief look at back-end website performance assessments. Today, we’ll examine the front end of a website and discuss how to test and assess its performance.

Websites are comprised of code, text, images, and other media. Visitors view the website through a browser, and the code tells the browser how to display the site’s content.

The code says “Put the logo up at the top. Below that, place a navigation menu. Over on the side, let’s display some links. And right in the middle, let’s put a big block of text.” The back end of your website is all that raw stuff from which your site is made — the stuff that your website developer manages for you.

The front end, however, is the side of your site that is publicly accessible. When you open a browser (such as Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, or Internet Explorer) and visit a website, what you’re seeing is the front end.

For metrics, we track website performance from the back end. How many visitors come to the site? Where do they come from? How long do they stay? This information helps us understand how the site is being used and whether it’s successfully selling our products and services.

Website Performance from a User’s Perspective

Front-end website performance assessment looks at a website from a user’s perspective. Also known as quality-assurance (QA) testing, these types of assessments provide feedback that will help you keep your site friendly and functional so visitors will be more likely to stick around and soak up your content, products, and services.

Here are a few questions that are answered by looking at website performance from a user’s perspective:

• How does the site look across different platforms and browsers?
• Are any links or images broken?
• Is the site user-friendly and easy to navigate?
• Does the site clearly communicate its purpose?
• Is the content presentable and relevant?

QA Testing

Cross-platform and cross-browser testing involves viewing the site from different operating systems and browsers. The two most common types of platforms are Mac and PC. There are several popular browsers in use today and your site should be thoroughly checked through each browser and platform combination.

Broken Links and Images

For your website to be fully functional, you have to identify broken links and images, and then fix them. Broken links can be hard to catch, especially if your site has a lot of written content and external links. You have no control over external links — if someone moves a page or changes the content on another website, your link to that URL becomes faulty. You have more control over the images that are displayed on your site. Users have a better experience with your website when all links and images are fully functional.

Functionality

User friendliness and a navigable structure are essential. If you site is difficult to use, visitors will quickly click away in search of friendlier pastures. Make sure it’s easy for users to get around the site with a clearly labeled navigation menu. Also, ensure that the site displays properly and that everything works as it should — for example, make sure that all videos play and contact forms work and issue confirmations.

Clarity

It’s tempting to use clever language on a website, but this can confuse visitors. Nothing scares off a potential customer faster than cryptic sales messages that they can’t decipher or vague offerings that they don’t understand. Be especially conscious of using internal or industry-specific jargon. If you’re a web designer, you probably want to talk freely about FTP, HTML, stylesheets, and flash animation, but if your visitors already know all that stuff, do you really think they need your services?

Content

Your site’s content should be easy to access and relevant to the site’s overall purpose. Every word, image, video, and link should be working toward a common goal. That goal might be to get more subscribers to your blog or newsletter. Perhaps you’re trying to sell products using e-commerce. Maybe you want visitors to pick up the phone and give you a call. Whatever your goals are, the content should be directly related to achieving them.

When to Assess Your Site

Your first quality-assurance review should take place after the design is done but before the site launches. You should also do a careful website performance assessment after any major redesign. Whenever you update, add, or change the content, a quick check is in order to make sure it looks good and works properly.

You should also think about doing an annual assessment of both front-end and back-end website performance. It’s too easy to notice a broken link and think, “I’ll take care of that later,” only to completely forget. After all, you’re a busy entrepreneur. If you schedule regular reviews, you’ll be more likely to catch problems and get them fixed.

Scribizzy offers a full suite of website performance reports and assessments. Ready to clean up your site? Get a quote online.

An Introduction to Website Performance Monitoring and Assessment

Most small business owners and independent professionals invest considerably in their websites. They pay good money for design and content, and in return, they expect the site to perform well.

But what does that mean? How do we measure website performance? And what are the benefits of website performance monitoring and assessment?

Some website owners track their statistics obsessively. They log in to their statistic tools several times a day to see how many visitors they’re getting. We’ve come to think of website performance purely in terms of traffic. How many hits? How many pageviews? Then we go out and try to increase these numbers, forgetting that a proper assessment is far more involved.

Website Performance Monitoring Tools

There are a vast number of website performance monitoring tools available. Your website hosting company may provide a statistics tracking tool as part of your hosting package, and if not, there are plenty of options to choose from. Some of these tools require payment while others are absolutely free.

My favorite statistics tool is Google Analytics, and it happens to be one of the free options. It offers plenty of detailed information that you can use to understand how your website is performing.

Google Analytics uses your Google account, so if you have Gmail or use Google Reader, then you’ll already be logged in, which makes for fast and easy access. Plus, if you use Adwords or any of Google’s webmaster services, everything is nicely connected and easy to use.

Basic Statistics

At the most basic level, you want to have an idea of how many people are visiting your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Additionally, you should know what the visitors are doing while they’re on your site. How many pages are they viewing? How much time are they spending on your website?

Below is a list of datum that Google Analytics and most other statistics tools provide so you can assess your website performance:

Visits is the number of times your website was visited in a given period of time (most statistics tools allow you to specify a time period). This is also sometimes referred to as the number of hits your site is getting.

Absolute Unique Visits provides you with the number of unique visitors to your site. One person might visit your site five times in a week. This statistic tells you how many visitors you had instead of how many total visits.

Pageviews indicates how many pages on your site were viewed. One visitor might have looked at five pages, so comparing the number of pageviews to the number of visitors can help you determine how much content the users are experiencing.

Time on Site shows how much time visitors spent on your website. This number is averaged to show you how much time each visitor spent perusing the site. Keep in mind that visitors might have your site open in their browsers when they’re not actively exploring your site, so this data has the potential to be misleading, however, it is worth noting.

Bounce Rate tells you the percentage of visitors who “bounced” away from your site immediately. If your bounce rate is high, that means visitors are not sticking around to check out your content. If it’s low, that means folks who visit your site are exploring it in more depth.

All of these statistics help you gain a basic understanding of your website performance. But knowing how many visitors are coming to your site may not be very helpful in a true website performance assessment. To get a better perspective, you’ll need to dig deeper and ask relevant questions.

Asking Questions

Before you engage in any kind of website performance assessment, your first step should be to identify your website’s primary purpose. The purpose may very well be to attract as many visitors as possible, in which case the basic statistics could tell you almost everything you need to know.

However, most businesses are concerned with another primary goal: turning a profit. So, the real question is not how many visitors are coming to your site, but how is your website performance contributing to the overall growth of your business and revenue? Are the visitors who are finding their way to your site looking for what you offer? When they get to your site, are they responding to your call to action (clicking on a link, subscribing, or making a purchase)?

Let’s say you’re a makeup artist who provides services for bridal parties. In your bio, you’ve stated “I started learning how to apply makeup when I was nine years old. My mom was a beautician and she always let me experiment with her cosmetics.”

One day, you check your statistics and are thrilled to discover that your site is getting over 1000 visitors per day. You sit back, thinking that business is going to boom any minute now. But what if out of those 1000 visitors, 999 were searching for “how to apply makeup?” Those folks weren’t looking for your services, and it’s doubtful they need your services at all.

Advanced Statistics

Digging deeper into your statistics will help you assess your website performance in a meaningful way that contributes to your business and online success, and this means going beyond the basic number of visitors or number of pages those visitors are viewing on your site.

Let’s look at some of the more advanced statistics that you can use to assess your site’s performance:

Traffic Sources: How are people finding your site? Are they entering your URL into their browsers? Are they using a search engine? Are they clicking on a link from some other site? Understanding the channels through which visitors are arriving is essential, especially if you plan on growing your traffic.

Traffic source information will not only tell you how visitors are arriving at your site, it will specify which sites are sending traffic your way. You can also learn which search engines send you the most visitors. Then, you can leverage this information to your advantage during future development and expansions to your site.

Keywords is one of the most important statistics because it shows you which keyword searches are generating traffic to your site. Why is this so important? Because this data tells you whether search engine users who are landing on your site are a match to your business offerings.

Going back to our example of a bridal makeup artist who is gaining most of her website traffic from the phrase “how to apply makeup,” one would assume that folks searching for “how to apply makeup” are not looking for a makeup artist, but are probably looking for articles or tutorials that deal with application of cosmetics. Instead, our makeup artist should work at gaining traffic that is more targeted to her service offerings.

Content gives you an in-depth look at which pages on your site are most (and least) popular. You can extract an ordered list that shows your most-viewed and least-viewed pages. If your goal is to lead the majority of visitors to your sales pages, then this information can tell you whether you are reaching that goal.

Top Landing Pages shows you which pages are the point of entry for visitors. There’s a good chance most visitors are landing on your home page, but you might want to make some adjustments if visitors are instead landing on a less desirable page (especially if they’re then quickly clicking off-site).

Top Exit Pages gives you the same information, but focuses on which pages visitors are looking at when they decide to leave your site. Perhaps you’ve got a link that’s driving visitors (and perspective customers) elsewhere.

There are additional statistics that you might want to look at. For example, let’s say you’re planning to redesign your website and want to use some advanced technology in the new design. It would be helpful to know which operating systems and browsers your visitors are using so you can figure out whether those visitors will have access to your flashy new site (or whether it will crash their computers).

Assessing Website Performance

When you are assessing your website performance, it’s essential to first identify your website’s core objective. Then, ask thoughtful questions about which statistics will provide you with the data you need to properly assess whether your website is fulfilling its purpose.

Once you know what basic data to collect, you can use that data to draw conclusions about how your website is performing. You can also use this information to make decisions about how to move forward with your website, especially if you’re planning to expand or redesign your site.

Once you know which information is pertinent to your objectives, you can conduct regular website performance monitoring. This will help you stay abreast of how your website is performing in the online marketplace.

Don’t have time to monitor your website performance? Need help putting together a detailed assessment? Scribizzy offers a number of website performance reports and assessments, and they are all designed specifically to help you make smart decisions about the future of your website so you can increase your success on the web. Get a quote online!