Analysing Website Analytics for Better Redesign Outcome
Conducting a website redesign can be a significant investment, and you want to make sure it’s worth the effort. By examining website traffic, bounce rates, conversion rates, and engagement metrics, you can gain valuable insights into your website’s strengths and weaknesses, helping you make informed redesign decisions. This is where having things like Google Analytics, Google Web Console etc. set up on your website can assist in your decision making and auditing.
Website Traffic
Examining website traffic provides insights into the number of visitors to your site, where they’re coming from, and how long they’re staying. By analysing traffic trends and patterns, you can identify popular pages which should be kept and content and pages that are often overlooked or ignored that should be tweaked if you intend on keeping them. This information can guide your redesign decisions, such as updating or removing content that isn’t resonating with your audience.
Bounce Rates
Bounce rates refer to the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. The goal of each landing page is to keep people on your site longer so that they are more inclined to purchase from you. High bounce rates could indicate that visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for, or that your site is difficult to navigate. By examining bounce rates, you can identify problem areas on your site and make adjustments to improve user experience. This could include redesigning your site’s navigation, improving page load times, or making content more accessible.
Conversion Rates
Conversion rates measure the percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your site, such as making a purchase, filling out a contact form, or subscribing to a newsletter. Low conversion rates could indicate that your site’s design, messaging, or user experience needs improvement. Analysing conversion rates can help you identify what’s working and what’s not, and guide your redesign decisions to improve your site’s performance. One important thing to remember with conversion rates is that it can take a period of interaction over time from potential clients before they actually sign up or purchase. It’s not the be all and end all, but it can help work out what’s happening.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics provide insights into how visitors are interacting with your site. This includes metrics such as those above as well as time on site, pages per session, and click-through rates. By analysing engagement metrics, you can identify opportunities to improve user engagement and retention. This could include redesigning your site’s layout to encourage visitors to explore more pages, or adding interactive features that encourage visitors to stay longer on your site.
At the end of the day, a performance analysis is there to give you a guideline of what has worked and what may need re-tweaking if you are keeping the content the same. It’s an interesting and eye opening component before a redesign but not necessarily important if you are completely changing everything about the website.
