What Metrics Matter Most When Deciding to Redesign Your Website?

It’s the start of a new year and maybe your company is deciding it’s finally time to redesign your website.  A website redesign is not something you should decide to do on a whim and expect it to be successful.  There is strategy behind a redesign, and there are certain metrics that you should focus on when you decide it is time to redesign your website.

Visits

Visits to your website are obviously important.  But the type of visitors you get are obviously important, as well.

Unique Visits

Unique visits are the number of new visitors you have to your website.  After a redesign, you want to see your unique visits trend upward, meaning that your content is driving new visitors to your website.

Repeat Visits

Repeat visits are an important metric to track, too.  Repeat visits mean that people find your content compelling enough to come back for more.

Traffic Sources

It’s important to track where your sources of traffic are coming from so you can decide if you need to change up your content, or if what you are doing is working.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is traffic you get to your website when somebody directly types in your URL or gets to your website from a link. This type of traffic is similar to unique visits, meaning that people may be typing in your website because they like the content that you have to offer.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is traffic that is coming in through search engines.  This type of traffic means that you are probably ranking for certain keywords in google.  This is a good thing, as long as your content marketing strategy aligns with your business goals and the keywords you are ranking for are relevant to your business.

Engagement

Looking at the engagement on your website is also an important metric to track. If people land on your website and then leave without doing anything, it may mean that visitors don’t understand what your company does or what you offer.

Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate is a key engagement metric that matters.  This is the percentage of visitors that leave your website without an interactions.  As it was mentioned above, this could mean that your visitors don’t understand what your website offers, or maybe your calls-to-action are poorly place, or your navigation needs to be moved. There are several possibilities on why you may have a high bounce rate, but that is why you absolutely have to track it when you decide to redesign your website.

Engagement Time

This is the average amount of time visitors are spending on your website. If this number is just mere seconds, it means that your website may be boring people, or that your content isn’t targeting the proper audiences. Regardless, if your engagement time is low, you need to look more intently at what may be causing that, and a website redesign may help this number go up.

Landing Page Conversions

Landing page conversions are the percentage of prospect that navigate to a landing page and fill out a form, giving you their information.  This is one of, if not the most important metric to start tracking with your website redesign, because landing page conversions are what gives you leads.  Without leads, it’s hard to acquire any customers, and without customers, it’s obviously hard to stay in business.

When you decide it’s time for a website redesign, make sure you are tracking metrics so that you can see what is working, and what is not.  These metrics above can help you determine if your website redesign is going well, or if some aspects of your website may be performing poorly.

Have you seen a boost in certain metrics since your last website redesign?