When you plan to design a website for your business, there are several website performance metrics that should be a part of your design plan.

Why?

Well, the objective behind creating a website is to provide a digital communication channel for the consumers to interact with your business.

Now, the success rate of a website in achieving the goal, of converting potential users into loyal customers, would depend largely on how interactive and engaging it is; overall.

And, that part is ensured through effective UI/UX design implementation.

These website performance metrics help not only the developers but, also the UI/UX designers to understand what your target audience likes on your website and what is repelling them.

So, it is very important that, as the business owner, you understand these website performance metrics and implement them in your web design plans.

What are these metrics?

Let’s take a look!

Know more about theimportance of UI/UX design in this article.

Page Loading Speed

Imagine there’s a new burger joint that has opened in your neighborhood that many have been telling you about.

Now, intrigued, you visit the joint and find out that you have to get in a queue, which is moving at a snail’s pace,  only to see what’s on the menu; even before you can decide whether you even want to place an order or not.

There’s a 68% chance that you’d leave the café than waiting to reach the counter to check out the menu.

That’s exactly the percentage of users who leave a website with a low page loading speed.

Use of heavy image files and othermulti-media content on your website, to make it look fancy, increases this load time substantially.

Industry standards have kept 4 seconds as the maximum threshold for a website page to load. If your website pages are taking more than that to open, the users won’t stick.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate, as the name suggests, signifies the number of users who ‘bounced’ back from your website; after visiting just one page.

Now, usually, a higher bounce rate is considered to be bad and, the most prominent reason is irrelevant content on the landing page.

However, here’s where the bounce rate can be slightly tricky.

A higher bounce rate may not necessarily mean that your webpage content is irrelevant, incomplete, or incorrect.

For example, a user may visit your webpage through an external search result link, spend a few minutes to read an article, finds a CTA, clicks it to complete an off-site action. 

In Google Analytics, this is technically a bounce rate even though the user took the desired action.

It is, therefore, required to consider your nature of business and other connected KPIs.

Of course, if you have an abnormally high rate of bounce-rate for every important page on your website, there’s a problem that needs to be addressed right away.

Average Time Spent

This is arguably the most helpful website performance metrics with respect to the overall UI/UX design implementation.

The average time spent on a page, on your website, signifies whether your webpage design has been successful in engaging the users through relevant and quality content.

The longer a user sticks to your website pages, the higher is the average time spent, and the better is your website design.

2-3 minutes is the industry standard for a good average time spent.

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors are the users that are visiting your website for the first time.

The more unique visitors land on your website, the better it says about the performance of your website.

And, since, a unique visitor is counted on the basis of their IP address, combined with a cookie on the browser they are using, even if the same person visits your website 30 times a day, it would be counted as 1 unique visitor.

Understanding this metric of your website design helps you in planning your promotions and special offers.

You’d know which pages are getting the most unique visitors and at what time of the day (or week or month).

Accordingly, you can place your banner ads to get higher conversions.

Start Render Time

Start render is the duration of the first glimpse of your website content that the user gets to see after clicking on the search result.

It can be indirectly related to the page load speed for your website.

Start render lets the users see that something is happening with the website which gives them the hope to wait till the entire page is loaded.

It could be just the heading of your website page or the background color showing.  

Direct Traffic

This may sound something similar to the “unique visitors” website performance metrics. But, it’s completely different; and a useful metric for improving the website results.

Direct traffic shows the number of users who visited your website directly without any external influence.

For example, someone typed your website’s URL in the browser to visit your website or used an untagged link from your email or newsletters.

This metric signifies how good you are doing with your email designs and channels where your website may have been mentioned but, not linked directly.  

Top Landing Page

As the name suggests, the top landing page is the page on your website that witness the majority of traffic inflow.

This will be the page that largely works as the gateway to your website for visitors.

Now, it could be your homepage, or a blog page, or any other page of importance (something that includes a conversion action).

Knowing your top landing page can help you in optimizing its overall UI/UX design to cater to your target audience.

You can ensure that your website visitors get what they are looking for and complete a necessary action parallelly by keeping a close watch on this website metric. 

Top Exit Page

Of course! When you have a top landing page, you surely would also have a top exit page on your website. And, knowing which one is it, is equally important for the overall performance of your website.

As the name suggests, the top exit page is the page from where the majority of the visitors leave your website.

So, it is important for you to understand what’s making them leave your website from that particular page.

Is it the visual hierarchy? Or is the content?

As the website owner, you want your website visitors to stick around for as long as possible. So, understanding the factors which are compelling them to leave can help you increase the average time spent as well.

Conversion Rate

This one is a given. The main objective of a website is to finally convert a potential user into a loyal customer.

All the detailing and designing done for the website is eventually to achieve this particular goal.

Conversion rate can be measure from Google Analytics where, through “event tracking”, you can understand where the conversion happened and what prompted the users to complete the goal.

Event tracking allows you to set values for each component required in Google Analytics and a conversion will be counted when all of the conditions you set are true in the website.

This allows you to track any interaction that doesn’t result in a new page view. Consider clicks, video views and plays, social media button shares and clicks, mouse hovering, page loads, and even right clicks.

Eventually, this will help you understand what you did right on a particular page that helped with the conversion, and replicate the same on other pages of your website.

To conclude…

A website is the strongest pillar for a business in the online world. And, therefore, it is important, especially, for small business owners and startup entrepreneurs to ensure their website is designed appropriately by keeping all these website performance metrics in mind.

If you are not sure how to implement these metrics to create a custom website design for your business, we can help.

Simply send us an email with your requirements at support@graphicszoo.com