Website Performance Testing: A simple Guide to Testing Your Site
How do you measure website performance? How do you tell if your website is performing as intended? Is it generating leads? Is it educating prospects about your services? Is it leading prospects down the sales funnel? Is it helping you achieve your goals?
Businesses invest a lot of effort, time and money in developing their websites as well as other online platforms. Indeed, focusing on the site’s layout, graphics, navigation as well as generating high-quality content are critical to providing best user experience. Still, after undertaking these requirements, the next important thing to consider is web performance.
How Do You Measure Website Performance?
1. Check Website Analytics
In testing your site’s performance, you need to know how many people are visiting your site, how many keep coming back, how long they are spending on your site and where they are coming from. This way, you can determine which part of your website receives most visitors and include mechanisms for capturing visitor information like emails. You can also determine which part of your site has the worst experience by checking the duration visitors spend on it; you could include a survey for visitors to help you understand what they don’t like. Tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar are crucial for capturing data on how your visitors interact with the website and go a long way to help you understand how your site performs.
2. Page Load Time
Does your website load in less than 5 seconds? No? Then you could be losing up to 44% of your visitors to competitors. Your online visitors want a site that loads fast. What’s more, Google will also penalize your website if it’s loading speed is lower than 95% of other sites within a similar niche. It is, therefore, important to measure your site’s loading time and ensure that it is fast enough. At Legibra, we recommend our clients to use Google Pagespeed Tools when checking their site load speed. Interesting enough, Japan hosts the fastest loading websites at 4 seconds.
3. Mobile Responsiveness
Did you know that Google penalizes websites that are not mobile-friendly? And it makes a lot of sense especially when you consider that the majority of website visitors are using smartphones. To ensure that your website performance is unbeatable, always ensure that your site is optimized for all screen sizes. You can also use Google Pagespeed tools to check for website responsiveness.
Wrap Up
50% of online visitors will tell their friends if they have a bad experience on your website. Don’t be a part of the statistics. Measure website performance.
Do you need help measuring or improving your website’s performance? Call us now, we are always happy to help 🙂