If you have a website for your firm—and if you don’t, stop reading this right now and go get one!—you’ve likely gotten some sales emails from companies claiming your website is too slow and at risk of penalty from Google.
First, that’s false.
Second, these sorts of sales emails tend to work on people because they don’t truly understand what metrics indicate a healthy website. This article is about to fix that problem by highlighting the four metrics you should monitor to gauge the health and effectiveness of your website.
1. Time to First Byte (TTFB)
Here’s something a lot of SEO and web design companies don’t want you to know about: Google PageSpeed tests (those tests they claim to run on your website that show tons of errors) are full of a lot of irrelevant information. In fact, Google itself doesn’t address the concerns on their own properties based on a PageSpeed report.
Don’t believe us? Run a PageSpeed test on YouTube, arguably Google’s biggest property. You’ll find that YouTube miserably fails most of the metrics on that test.
The only metric that really matters is Time to First Byte (TTFB), the milliseconds it takes for the first piece of data on your website to load. If you’re below 500ms, then your website speed is where it needs to be.
2. Average Session Duration
These final three metrics can be found on Google Analytics. Average Session Duration indicates the total amount of time each visit lasts on your website. While there isn’t going to be an industry standard to aim for because it really depends on how much traffic you receive overall, the more time spent on your website, the better.
In other words, if you normally average 100 website visits per month, you want a higher duration. If you receive thousands of visits each month, that number will be much lower, especially if you’re running digital ads that lead to a single landing page.
For reference, we receive about 1,300 website visits per month, and our average session time is 40 seconds. Between the time it takes to read a blog like this (3-5 minutes) versus arriving at a landing page and submitting a form, that number makes a lot of sense and tells us our website is doing pretty well.
3. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave the site after viewing only one page. If you’re sharing a lot of content on social media and in email like we do, you can expect a higher bounce rate. Percentages as high as 80% aren’t unheard, nor are they necessarily cause for concern. (We’re currently averaging 72% for the year).
If you have a well-designed website that is easily navigable so that people can click through to other pages during their visit, you can expect a lower bounce rate. However, as long as you’re not seeing numbers over 90%, you don’t have much cause for concern.
4. Traffic Sources
While it’s important to receive traffic to your site, it’s also important to know where that traffic is coming from. Unfortunately with various privacy laws and settings, Google Analytics will almost always indicate that your most common source is Direct/None simply because they can’t track the IP address of the visitor.
However, you should still be able to see several other sources, including Google/Organic (meaning they found you on a search), or from Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other referral sources that may have linked to your website. This can tell you where people are engaging with your content and how well it’s working.
Remember—don’t get fooled by a vendor telling you that your website is suffering and in desperate need of an overhaul. It likely isn’t true. If you can check these metrics and feel good, then your website is performing adequately at the very least.
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