How to evaluate the efficiency of a website

Overview

In the era of the Internet, websites are the medium to demonstrate your services and products to the world. Your website will be the first impression showcasing your work and offers. In our article, we will have a look at the key factors involved in ensuring the effectiveness of website. We will also see how to improve the performance of websites.

Website effectiveness can be determined by how a web page performs and communicates with end users. B2B websites need to be effective in terms of accessibility, intractability, and usability. The goal should be to attract visitors and convert them into leads. How do you evaluate the effectiveness of a website? That’s one of the key questions that we should answer.

Factors involved in determining website effectiveness and quality 

Below you can see a few points that should be kept in mind while designing a website. If you already have a website, we highly recommend you analyze its efficiency. It can be done manually but also with the help of various tools that provide all the necessary features for conducting a website efficiency test.

Customer/Client Perspective:

While designing a website, we should examine and view it from the perspective of a potential customer in mind. What will they think about it? Or what will they be looking for on a website? You should find answers to these questions if you want to generate potential leads. We should make our website about the customer and not only about the company. Also, there should be an easily accessible call to action for customers so that they have the possibility to proceed further and contact you. To increase your website efficiency, you should make it clear to everyone.

Website Content:

Website content should include long-tail keywords to boost on-page SEO. You can also hire professional copywriters to impress customers with great content and engaging sales pitches. Your content should creatively define the value proposition (benefits of the company’s products or services over competitors), it will help your business to stand out from the row and increase website effectiveness.

Website Design and Performance:

Many recent studies have shown that more than 50% of online traffic now comes from mobile devices. With the mobile revolution, it is now mandatory to make your website mobile-friendly. The design of the website should ensure easy navigation between the pages. To ensure website efficiency, pages should be well-organized to facilitate intuitively clear interaction with your website. They can include images, infographics, and custom videos. Infographics and custom videos establish a sense of connection and trust. Thanks to such formats, customers can better understand what a company has to offer. 

Website traffic:

This parameter shows how many people have visited your website. It is measured in so-called sessions and it is one of the most commonly applied ways to estimate website effectiveness. Though this criterion is an important one, we recommend you not concentrate only on it. It is also vital to see not only how many users visit your web pages but also how they interact with them.

Quality of a website:

User-friendly communication, SEO, consistency, and performance together constitute the quality of a website. Appropriate fonts, color combinations, and pictures help to ensure a good user experience and the effectiveness of website.

Bounce rate:

Bounce rate is a parameter that should be taken into account together with website traffic. It will show the percentage of those people who have opened your website but have left it without performing any actions like making an order or clicking on a link.

The efficiency and performance of a website play a major role in diminishing bounce rates. Customers should not feel overwhelmed while the website is loading. Websites need to load swiftly to improve end visitors’ experience. Website load speed also boosts SEO to rank it higher in searches.

Average time spent on a website:

The average time spent by users on web pages across different industries is around 54 seconds. This time is enough for people to understand whether they can find anything useful for them on your website. For evaluating the efficiency website has, this parameter is very contextual and depends on many factors. For example, for pages that contain valuable content, it is rather important to see whether users really study the provided materials and not just skip them. However, in the case of checkout pages, if people spend too much time on them, probably there are issues that act as obstacles to conversion.

Cost per conversion:

This parameter will help you measure converting a lead into a customer. To calculate it, you need to divide the cost of your marketing campaign by the conversion number. If you have invested $2000 in a campaign that has brought 100 conversions, it means that the cost per conversion was $20.

Website speed:

Website efficiency is closely related to its performance. And its speed is one of the key criteria that allow you to estimate whether your web page performs well enough. Given the modern standards, the recommended load time for one page should be under two seconds.

Returning visitors:

When you want to evaluate the effectiveness of website, it will be useful to have a look at the figures that demonstrate how many people return to your web page again. Though returning visitors can be a good parameter that will show that people like your content and/or services, in some cases it can be also an alarming sign that people can’t reach their goals just at once and need to open a website again. Here it will be important to have a look at the performance of your site and check whether there are no errors in its functioning. You will also need to analyze its UI to understand whether the offered navigation is clear enough.

Why increase your website efficiency?

Your website is the door to new opportunities. It communicates externally to customers, investors, and stakeholders. It portrays the company’s image to the world. Hence, the improvement of your website effectiveness must be taken as a priority. Getting valuable traffic and funneling leads should be the key goals of any B2B website. Performance or page speed plays a major role in enhancing the overall experience of end users.

Methods to improve the efficiency and performance of a website

In today’s busy world, no one has time to WAIT. Everyone expects instant results and wants everything at the tip of their fingers. Websites are publicly available for users. Numerous users may interact with web pages at the same time doing the same activity. It may result in poor performance of your web pages if multiple user activities are not handled properly. 

Performance is the most important factor for user interactions that will help in gathering traffic. With poor performance, you won’t be able to ensure the desired website effectiveness.

We will now discuss a few methods that will help you in improving your website performance:

1. Image Size

Images are a vital part of a website. eCommerce websites need to use very high-quality images for displaying their products. Using images of large size may affect the performance of your website. So, image compression techniques may help you to reach the required website efficiency. Also, it is recommended to use HTML responsive images.

2. JS and CSS files

Javascript and CSS files are part of website source codes. However, due to bad coding practices, developers may forget to remove/delete unnecessary JS and CSS files. This leads to the slowness of the website. It is very important to clean the files before the deployment of the website.

3. Plugin optimization

Plugins are necessary for adding features to the website. Plugins should be updated with time. As the website grows, we need to add/update/remove the plugins when it is required. However, removing unused plugins is mandatory since they use a lot of resources which may affect the efficiency and performance of a website.

4. Hosting

There are many companies offering hosting services. To make the right choice, we should check their server reliability. Also, it is sensible to opt for hosting servers that are geographically close to your end customers. If a major part of a customer base is from a specific region, you should choose servers located close to that region.  Of course, it is not always possible to take such measures to increase the website efficiency. But if you can do it, you can be sure that it will bring its fruits.

5. CDN

A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers placed at different locations for providing services to specific regions. In this case, the request/response is handled by servers based on the location, whereas a standalone server has to respond to all the requests as it is the only server available for services. In such a situation, the time for processing requests may increase. Thus, a CDN is a better option to increase the performance of the website.

Conclusion

A website gives the first impression of your company. The success and effectiveness of website are measured by the way it supports the business of the company. In our article, we have shared some tips on making your B2B websites better in terms of aesthetics, performance, and client conversion. If you need any help in analyzing and further improving the efficiency and performance of a website, we will be always happy to help you.