If your website is slow, visitors will leave and never return.
If your site takes a long time to load, you won’t attract or retain visitors.
If your site has broken links, unhelpful error messages, or insufficient search functionality,
users won’t be able to find what they’re looking for.
If your website has performance issues, users will not only go elsewhere but also tell their friends about their bad experience with your brand.
In other words, the user experience of your website directly impacts whether people keep coming back to it or not.
If you want to build a Site Performance Plan that ensures site visitors have a positive user experience every time they visit your website
– no matter which device they use or what conditions they are in when they access it –
then you need this guide.
Why Site Performance Matters for User Experience
Even if you don’t care about the overall user experience on your website,
there are specific reasons why the performance of your website is critical to your business:
– If you have a poor user experience the general feedback will hurt your brand.
– The bleeding won’t stop at the brand level either it will go as far as killing your online revenues.
– And if that is not enough, your competitors will definitely take advantage of this weakness and capitalize on it both online and offline.
So the need for continuous improvement of your website is a non-negotiable activity that should be taken seriously.
It is for this reason that a website performance plan needs to be put in place.
Steps for Building a Site Performance Plan
In a nutshell, you need to do the following to build a Site Performance Plan:
– Define the scope of your performance plan
– Select tools to measure site performance
– Select tools to measure user experience
– Select tools to measure device information
– Select tools to measure usability
– Summing up
Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps.
Define the scope of your performance plan
The first thing you have to do is to define the scope of your performance plan.
Ask yourself: What are specific metrics, KPIs, and objectives your site performance plan should help you with?
These questions will enable you to establish the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your site performance plan.
For example, if you want to know how many people visit your website,
you need to know the number of unique visitors.
If you want to know the number of people who actually buy something on your site,
you need the number of orders.
If you want to know the percentage of first-time visitors who return to your site,
you need to know the number of repeat visitors.
And so on.
Select tools to measure site performance
Once you’ve established the KPIs of your site performance plan,
the next step is to select tools to measure site performance and overall website health.
This includes the health of your website’s individual pages and sections, as well as the health of your website as a whole.
– Load times
– Page-level metrics
– Site-level metrics
Load times
You can measure the load time of your website in a number of ways.
The easiest way is to use Google Analytics to view the average load time of your homepage.
You can also use a tool such as Pingdom to measure the load time of individual pages.
Google’s mobile-friendly Page Speed Insight tool is another great way to measure site performance.
This test will tell you whether your website is accessible to mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) and whether it meets the criteria for Google’s mobile-friendly designation.
Page-level metrics
To give a general overview of the performance of individual pages on your website,
you can survey page-level metrics such as page loading times, page size, broken links, and unhelpful error messages.
You can also use a tool such as Ahrefs to measure the performance of individual pages on your site.
With this tool, you can view page-level metrics such as page loading times and page size.
You can also detect broken links and unhelpful error messages.
Site-level metrics
To get a high-level look at the performance of your website as a whole,
you can survey site-level metrics such as the number of broken links,
the number of unhelpful error messages,
and the number of pages that have a low click-through rate (CTR).
You can also use an SEO audit tool like SEMrush to measure the performance of your website as a whole.
Examples of SEO audit tools include SEOPowersuite and MajesticSEO.
Select tools to measure user experience
After you’ve surveyed page performance and site-level performance,
the next step is to select tools to measure user experience.
As we’ve discussed, there are many things that affect user experience.
Since there are so many things that affect user experience,
it’s difficult to measure user experience with a single metric.
That’s why we recommend measuring user experience with multiple metrics.
– User satisfaction
– User behavior
– User Perception
This can easily be studied using tools like Hotjar which will give you a heat map of how users browse a page,
where they have issues, and where they terminate their browsing.
With this, you will get insights into their behavior while using your website
User satisfaction
If you want to measure user satisfaction,
you should use customer satisfaction surveys such as the customer experience survey (CES) and customer service survey (CSS).
With these surveys, you can find out how satisfied your customers are (and, therefore, how happy your site visitors are).
You can also use these surveys to collect data such as customer demographics.
While customer satisfaction surveys can provide valuable insights, they are not always reliable.
That’s why you should not rely solely on these surveys to measure user experience.
User behaviour
If you want to measure user behaviour, you should survey the following:
– How people are using your website. With analytical surveys, you can view the number of visitors who visit your website, the number of visitors who abandon your website, the number of visitors who view each page, and more.
– How people are using your site’s individual pages. With interaction surveys, you can view the number of visitors who click each link, the number of visitors who view each form field, and more.
– How people are using your site’s search functionality. With search analytics, you can view the number of people who use your site’s search functionality, the number of people who click each search result, and more.
User Perception
To measure user perception, you can survey the following:
– Website perceptions
– Customer perceptions
With website perceptions, you can view the number of people who view your website,
the number of people who like your website, the number of people who dislike your website, and more.
With customer perceptions, you can view the number of people who like your brand,
the number of people who trust your brand, the number of people who would recommend your brand, and more.
Select tools to measure device information
Once you’ve measured site performance and user experience, you can measure device information.
To measure device information, you can survey the following:
– Device data
– Device features
– Device capabilities.
The best tool to use for this is Google Analytics.
Device data
With device data, you can view the number of visitors who access your website from various devices.
With this data, you can determine which devices your visitors use to access your site and see how many of them visit your site using each device.
You can also view the average load time, the average screen size, and the average screen resolution of each device.
Device features
With device features, you can view the number of visitors who have certain device features enabled.
With this data, you can determine which devices have certain features enabled. This will guide you on how to deal with features that may cause issues with how you website content is displayed or rendered.
Device capabilities
With device capabilities, you can view the number of visitors who have certain device capabilities enabled.
With this data, you can determine which devices have certain capabilities. This will guide you on how best to optimize your website to provide the best user experience for different devices.
Select tools to measure usability
Once you’ve measured site performance and user experience, you can measure usability.
You can do this by surveying various usability metrics.
– Click-through rate
– Conversion rate
– Bounce rate.
The best tool in my opinion for this is Google Analytics because it captures all these data points.
Click-through rate
With the click-through rate (CTR), you can view the number of people who click each link.
The click-through rate in this use case is not an exact science because it can depend on the order of the posts, the title, and the type of content.
But you can use this metric to evaluate the popularity of each post and try to find ways to improve the click-through rate for each piece of content.
Some of the ways include testing different titles for each post, choosing a better order for the posts, and writing better headlines for each post.
Bounce rate
Here you can view how fast people leave a page after landing on it.
In order to decrease this metric, you need to focus on creating high-quality content.
The best way to do this is to ask yourself if your readership would benefit from this content.
If the answer is yes, then you have your topic.
Now you need to focus on making the topic as easy to understand as possible.
You can do this by breaking down complicated topics into simpler terms and examples.
This will make it easier for your readers to understand the content on your site, and in turn increase conversions.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage rate at which people who visit your website actually convert to subscribers or make a purchase.
Now if you understand your user flow and you notice people are not taking the desired action
then you need to interrogate the call-to-action that you have on that page and what happens when you interact with it.
Does it perform as it should? an all devices?
Summing Up
Now that we have come to the end of our site performance plan
let’s take a moment to reflect on what we’ve learned and how we can keep these tips in mind in the future.
A site performance plan is an ongoing process, and you should expect to revisit it often.
Stay on top of your site’s performance, and keep track of its progress.
Keep an eye on your website’s analytics, and be sure to respond to any traffic dips or drops in conversion rate.
Stay in touch with your website provider, and be sure to communicate any changes in your company or website goals.
Stay current with the latest trends and best practices in website performance.
Timothy Mbiti
I am an entrepreneur and co-founder at PicketMaze. I specialize in search engine optimization and digital marketing.
