As a web designer, it’s my job to look at your business goals and your buyers’ personas and design a website that sets you up for achieving those goals. But what happens after the website launches and the excitement dies down? How do you know if your website is working? Let me break it down for you with four simple questions.

Your website is an employee of your company, and, like any employee, it should be reviewed on a regular basis.

Do you have specific goals for your website?

Every website needs to be built around goals that are measurable and time-oriented. If you don’t have metrics to track, you won’t really know if your website is working for you or not.

I recommend setting up quarterly SMART goals for your website. A quarter is long enough to see change and short enough to have bite-sized action items.

Are you looking at the analytics?

Google Analytics and other analytics software hold a wealth of information about your website, and if you aren’t looking at it, you’ll never know! Not only can you see how many people are coming to your site, but you can also see your site’s most popular pages and so much more.

Through your analytics, you’ll be able to understand how a user interacts with your site and if they’re caught in loops which could be negatively affecting your conversion rate. By analyzing the activity, you can determine what you need to test.

Are you getting traffic?

If your site isn’t getting traffic, it will never hit your goals. Getting traffic to your website can be accomplished through a number of ways, and usually it’s a combination of all of them.

  1. Create great content. By creating valuable content on a regular basis, the search engines take you more seriously and so do users.
  2. Publicize great content. Be active on social media. Find your tribe and be helpful.
  3. Run ads. I’ll talk more about this later, but paid advertising has its time and place.
  4. Have an expert check your website’s technical SEO. It’s possible that an erroneous setting is blocking your website from being seen by the search engines, and if the search engines don’t see it, no one does.

Are you converting your website traffic into customers?

Your website may be getting plenty of traffic, but you might not be seeing those users make purchases or become clients. This means your website is not working well for you, and there are a number of things to check.

  1. Does the contact/purchasing process technically work? If it’s been awhile since you’ve tested your contact forms and checkout process, do it now!
  2. Are you building enough trust with your user before asking them to purchase? Trust is an important part of the buying process, so you need to pay attention to it.
  3. Is your copy accurately explaining the problem that you solve for your customers, also known as your unique value proposition?
  4. Have you conducted split (a/b) testing on your website copy, images, and layout? Everything can be tested for optimal performance.

These four things are the essentials to understanding if your website is working for you. If you find that your website isn’t operating at full capacity, don’t despair. Anything can be improved through work and dedication.

Take a look at the website audits we offer if you’re wondering how your website can be improved.