Why Your Business Needs to Evaluate its Website Performance

How’s your website performing? And why do you need to know?

Regularly evaluating the performance of your website is critical to the success of online businesses. Online businesses spend large amounts of time and money designing a website that attracts their audience, building functional online stores, creating marketing materials, and writing savvy content to draw in visitors. All of this work is meant to boost engagement and encourage quality traffic that turns leads into sales. Yet they aren’t receiving the conversion rates they expected, even if they have high traffic.

Without measurement and evaluations, determining what’s hindering your website’s success becomes a guessing game. Businesses won’t know how well or how badly their website is performing, but most importantly, they won’t know how to fix it. By running analytics on your website, it becomes much easier to determine which areas of your website are performing better than others.

Often, the root of poor website performance lies in an inefficient server, which dramatically affects page loading speeds and response times. Numerous studies have shown that even a few tenths of a second start decreasing a visitor’s desire to use a website. Despite quality web design, graphics, or content, slow load speeds can immediately alter a visitor’s perception of the website’s quality and their decision to use its services. In addition, page load speeds also determine where a website will rank in search engine results, majorly affecting a business’s SEO.

Page speed is often neglected in many businesses website planning processes. Overly enlarged images, unoptimized images, many different plugins or customizations, and inefficient coding can all bloat and slow down a website. However, a website’s hosting services and its server also have a major impact on speed and response times. Depending on a business’s hosting services, a crowded shared server could dramatically slow a website’s speed since it forces users to compete for resources. As a result, another website’s high traffic could slow down and even crash other websites on the same server. Though shared servers are cost efficient for many businesses, its instability can lead to lost sales.

Depending on the business’s size and budget, switching to a more powerful server may be the answer. But running regular evaluations and analytics on a website’s performance shows owners where they can optimize their current server and make the changes needed to improve its overall performance. Fast response and loading times have been proven to increase positive performance results and conversion rates, leading to higher quality traffic, increased sales, and higher search engine rankings.

Find Out Where Your Website Stands

Regularly evaluating your website will keep your business on track to meeting your objectives. Sun Sign Designs offers a free audit of your website’s loading performance and provides solutions to further improve it. Discover how your website is performing and learn ways to optimize it now.