Conducting a website analysis is essential for any business or individual aiming to optimise their online presence. Your website serves as the digital front door to your brand, and understanding how it performs is crucial to ensuring a seamless user experience, strong SEO, and higher conversion rates. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to fine-tune an established site, a detailed analysis can highlight areas for improvement and offer insights on how to keep your site performing at its best.

A good website analysis dives into various key areas: site speed, user engagement, SEO performance, mobile compatibility, and overall design. Each of these factors contributes to the overall effectiveness of your site, influencing both how visitors interact with it and how search engines rank it. By examining metrics like bounce rates, traffic sources, and user behaviour, you can uncover hidden issues and opportunities for optimisation. Using the right tools, such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, or Hotjar, helps make this process more manageable and actionable.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the steps of conducting a comprehensive website analysis, covering both technical and user-experience aspects. We’ll explore the metrics you should be tracking, the best tools for the job, and how to translate data into actionable improvements. Whether you’re focused on improving SEO, enhancing usability, or driving more conversions, a website analysis is your roadmap to making informed, strategic decisions that lead to lasting success.

What Is a Website Analysis?

Website analysis is the process of evaluating a website’s performance and overall effectiveness in achieving its goals. The purpose of this process is primarily to identify areas for improvement, optimise user experience, boost search engine rankings, and increase conversions.

No matter the reason you created your website for, you’ll have to analyse its performance, and you’ll have to do this multiple times throughout the years.

Luckily for you and all other website owners and marketers on the planet, there are a few metrics, or say quantitative measurements, that can help you conduct this analysis. Let’s look into three of those in a bit of detail.

Performance Metrics

Website performance metrics are essential for evaluating how well a website functions and delivers content to users. Key metrics like page load time, time to first byte (TTFB), and time to interactive (TTI) measure the speed and responsiveness of a site, ensuring visitors have a smooth, fast experience. Slow performance can lead to a poor user experience and higher bounce rates, which, in turn, affects SEO rankings.

In addition to speed, other important metrics include session duration, and conversion rate. These metrics reveal how users interact with the site and whether it meets their needs.

Content Metrics

Content metrics tells you whether or not your website’s content is performing and engaging your audience. These metrics include various factors such as readability, keyword density, and overall content quality.

For instance, readability scores help determine how easily users can comprehend your content, influencing their likelihood to stay on the page and absorb the information. Monitoring keyword density ensures that your content is optimised for search engines, helping improve visibility. Additionally, analysing the overall length and complexity of your content can provide insights into user preferences and help tailor your approach to meet audience expectations.

Another vital aspect of content metrics is user engagement, which can be gauged through metrics like average time on page, social shares, and comments. A high average time on page typically indicates that visitors find the content valuable and engaging, while social shares can signal how well your content resonates with your audience.

User Acquisition Metrics

User acquisition metrics measure whether a website is effectively attracting and retaining visitors. Key metrics in this category include the number of unique visitors, page views, and traffic sources, such as organic search, paid advertising, social media, or referrals. All of those help website owners assess the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and allocate resources efficiently.

Another important user acquisition metric is the conversion rate, which indicates the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. A higher conversion rate suggests that the site effectively guides visitors through the customer journey.

How to Conduct a Website Analysis

Performing a website analysis is a crucial step in understanding how your site is performing and identifying areas for improvement. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you conduct a thorough website analysis:

• Define Your Goals: Determine what you want to achieve with your website analysis, such as increasing traffic, improving conversion rates, or enhancing user experience.

• Analyse Website Traffic: Use tools like Google Analytics to gain insights into visitor behaviour, traffic sources, and demographics. Focus on metrics such as bounce rate, session duration, and pages per session.

• Check SEO Performance: Conduct keyword analysis with tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to identify driving keywords and assess rankings. Perform an on-page SEO audit to evaluate title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and URL structure. Use Screaming Frog or Google Search Console for a technical SEO check to address issues like broken links, duplicate content, and XML sitemap errors.

• Evaluate User Experience (UX): Assess the navigation structure, mobile responsiveness, and overall design. Use tools like GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights to analyse page load times and identify areas for improvement. Understand user interactions using Hotjar or Crazy Egg.

• Review Content Quality: Ensure your content aligns with user intent and provides value. Assess readability using tools like Hemingway App or Grammarly, and refresh content that is outdated or inaccurate.

• Analyse Competitors: Compare your site against competitors regarding traffic, SEO performance, and user engagement. Identify areas where competitors excel, such as content quality or backlink profiles.

• Monitor Conversion Rates: Set up goals in Google Analytics to track conversions (e.g., purchases, sign-ups) and experiment with different elements (e.g., CTAs, layouts) to improve conversion rates.

• Check for Technical Issues: Ensure your site has an SSL certificate and is secure. Test across different browsers and devices for consistent performance.

• Continuous Monitoring: Schedule periodic analyses to track progress and adapt to changes in user behaviour or market trends.

Web Analytics Tools

At this point, you understand the theory behind web analytics, but what tools should you use to analyse your website? Here are a few reliable free tools you can start using today.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that will provide you with all the website traffic analytics you need. These site analytics are presented through simple charts and reports your marketing team can read to assess the efficacy of your various advertising campaigns.

Here are the relevant web traffic analytics they provide:

Website Visitors Section

This section deals with all statistics relevant to the users viewing your site. It provides valuable content regarding the demographics of your viewers, time spent on your site and the following unique stats:

• Absolute unique visitors: Each user’s IP address tracks this, so this can be considered as an accurate number of unique users.
• Bounce Rate: This is the number of users who viewed your website, but their stay was insufficient to count as a visit. If this number is high, it is wise to reformat your content. You should aim for your content to be as interesting as possible to attract more viewers.

Web Traffic Sources Section

Another important section when you analyse your website revolves around the sources of your traffic. Here are some of the most relevant stat for your website:

• Direct Traffic: The number of users who have reached your website directly by entering the URL.
• Referral sites: This counts the number of users that reached your website through another linking website.
• Search Engine: Viewers that reach your website through a search engine. To improve this statistic, check out our search engine optimisation strategies.
• Keywords: This shows you the most popular keywords that users have used to find your site. This can provide you with valuable insight regarding your content, as can be seen in our content strategy guide.

Content Section

This final section deals with the formatting of your website. It is a measure of the engagement of your content as well as your most popular pages. This allows you to optimise your content further to suit your viewers to increase traffic.

Matomo

Matomo, formerly known as Piwik, is a versatile and free web analytics software that offers a unique approach to tracking your website’s performance. Unlike many other analytics solutions, Matomo requires users to download and host it on their servers, which requires a certain level of technical proficiency to set up and maintain.

However, the effort invested in using Matomo is often rewarded with its powerful features and flexibility. Here’s an elaboration on why Matomo is a popular choice for web analytics.

First of all, Matomo’s self-hosted control offers complete authority over your data, making it an appealing choice for businesses and individuals prioritising data privacy and security. You have the flexibility to decide where your analytics data is stored and who can access it, ensuring that sensitive information remains secure. Additionally, Matomo provides unlimited storage for your analytics reports, allowing you to retain extensive historical data, which is invaluable for trend analysis and informed decision-making.

Another key feature of Matomo is its robust mobile app, enabling users to access analytics data on the go. This is especially beneficial for website owners and marketers who need real-time insights into their site’s performance, regardless of their location. Furthermore, Matomo stands out with its high level of customisation, allowing users to create unique statistics tailored to their specific business goals and objectives, ensuring that the analytics align with their needs.

Matomo also offers a wide range of reports to help you understand your website’s performance comprehensively. Some of the commonly used stats to track include:

• Segmentation: Analyse visitor data, page views, bounce rates, and demographic information to gain insights into your audience.
• Sources: Understand where your website traffic is coming from, whether from search engines, referrals, or direct visits.
• Content: Monitor metrics like time spent on pages, the popularity of specific pages, and the keywords that bring visitors to your site.

Matomo offers customisable reports that can be tailored to meet your unique needs, allowing you to focus on the metrics that matter most to your business. You can also create multiple user accounts with varying access levels, which is particularly beneficial for involving your marketing team in optimising your website. This feature enables you to grant access to specific reports, ensuring that team members can view and analyze data relevant to their responsibilities.

UXtweak 

UXtweak is a great UX research platform that is focused on optimizing website performance from the users viewpoint. It will help you improve user acquisitions, resolve navigation issues and advance accessibility of your web designs, ultimately resulting in better conversion rates. 

UXtweak offers vast functionality for user research with features such as usability testing, card sorting and tree testing, preference tests and many more. You can conduct both moderated and unmoderated research with this tool. 

If you don’t have the participants for your research just yet, you can recruit them with UXtweak’s User Panel and get quality feedback from every person in the test group.

The most popular website analytics features that UXtweak offers are: 

• Usability Testing: Perfect for identifying issues associated with design intuitiveness and unclear user journeys. It also helps identify malfunctioning design elements and improve CTAs. 

• Prototype Testing: It is vital to test your prototypes and wireframes with users if you wish to save time and money on future redesigns. With prototype testing, you can identify potential design problems and enhance UX from the very beginning. 

• Card Sorting: Great for analysing the best way to categorise information on your website to create the most intuitive navigation menus. Card sorting can also be used for A/B testing of design elements. 

• Tree Resting: An amazing option when the research is aimed at intuitiveness of the already existing website information architecture. 

• Session Recordings: These are a very effective way to analyse users’ mental models, their preferences and behavioural patterns. 

Conclusion

Conducting a thorough website analysis is key to maintaining a high-performing, user-friendly site that drives results. By regularly assessing metrics such as site speed, SEO performance, user engagement, and mobile compatibility, you gain valuable insights that can guide your optimisation efforts. The right tools and a data-driven approach enable you to identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions that enhance both user experience and search engine visibility.

Remember, a successful website is not static—it evolves with user behaviour and industry trends, making regular analysis an essential part of your digital strategy.

FAQs