Analysis and analytics

Having good analytics set up on your site is crucial to understanding how visitors are interacting with your site.

Your hosting may come with stats / analytics, or you might want to use some good free software such as Google Analytics. By looking at indepth stats, you can see how people reached your site (through search engines, through other websites, directly by typing in your address, etc.), where they ended up on your site, how long they stayed there, whether they hit your home page and moved on (bounce rate) rather than going to another page of your site, and what browser they were using.

This kind of information can help you learn a lot about your site and your visitors. You can make ammendments where necessary, or you can just build on what you’ve already got with this new information to hand. For example, if you can see that more people come to your website for a certain phrase, you can make the information about that topic more readily available through your home page, or expand on it and variations of it. Meanwhile if you find that people aren’t staying very long on your website (your bounce rate is high) you can look to address whether information isn’t obvious on your home page (or which ever page they’re landing on and then bouncing off) or what other messages there could be instantly putting them off.