Improving Your Company’s Website Performance

Most local Gloucestershire businesses have started to wake up to the need to utilise the Internet as part of their overall business strategy. Whether they have, or intend to have a fully functioning transactional website selling products online, or perhaps a more basic site which only provides information about the company and its product or services, they know they need to be online.

The difficulty for a lot of smaller business is understanding what they need to do to maximise their online presence. They may have grasped the need for a website, but then what do they do with it, how do they measure success or progress? On top of that the Internet is fast moving and new buzz words are being bandied about every week; Twitter, Linked In, Google AdWords, Social Media and SEO are some examples. For most smaller business’s the problem is that unless the owner or decision-maker is “tech-savvie” and prepared to dedicate time to developing their own knowledge then all of these buzz words are likely to have as much meaning as someone talking to them in Norwegian.

At its most simplistic level the performance of a website should be measured by traffic volumes (number of visitors) and conversion rate. A conversion could be a purchase, or getting a visitor to do something you want such as fill in an enquiry form. If a company sells products online it should also measure its average order value. All of these figures can be collected by installing tracking software such as Google Analytics which is both incredibly powerful and free! Together, these three basic measurements provide the fundamentals for tracking site performance. More importantly though it is by addressing each of these fundamental measurements that site performance can be improved.

Once these measurements are in place the company can then set about improving them. However they should not focus purely on one measurement in isolation without addressing the performance of the others. The temptation for most businesses is to focus on increasing traffic, but it should be remembered that a half of one percent increase in conversion rates has exactly the same effect as a fifty percent increase in traffic on an e-commerce website. Having said that, traffic is undeniably important and we’ll look into methods to increase it soon.