Today, nearly all types of businesses have a website. Suppose you have a website dedicated to your construction business, for sure (like everybody else). In that case, you exert more effort in retaining your competitive edge by delivering a great User experience (UX) to your audience. While this is the common goal, you still need to improve when it comes to the knowledge and skills to measure the performance of your construction website.
Note that monitoring your website performance is very important, especially in this highly competitive digital environment where almost 72.6 percent of internet users access the web via smartphones, looking for businesses and services. The ongoing growth of smartphone use is a great opportunity for your construction business to get more leads via mobile internet.
So, make sure you know the nitty and gritty of web performance monitoring and its critical metrics to get ahead of the competition. And in this blog, we will tackle web performance monitoring, its top indicators, and the best tools to keep track of your web performance.
What is Website Performance Monitoring?
Web performance monitoring is the set of practices and tools that can help monitor web applications using different metrics and technical parameters, mainly affecting the user experience and page load speeds.
In addition, it is also about tracking critical data to make sure a website is user-friendly. Through this process, one can determine areas for improvement and gain insights before taking actions to boost search rankings.
Website performance monitoring is a continuous process. And if you plan on getting started, you can take a couple of steps – by keeping track of the metrics and using the right tools.
Top Indicators for Web Performance
We hope you have a clear understanding of web performance monitoring. Now, here are the ten web performance indicators that every website owner like you must track regularly:
1. Uptime
Uptime refers to your construction website being available and accessible to online users. Therefore, downtime is when your website needs to be within reach and completely inaccessible. If downtime happens all the time, it may result in web traffic and revenue loss.
To solve this issue, make sure to improve your uptime scores. Uptime monitoring is a critical web performance indicator in a website. So, as a website owner, you should strive hard to achieve the so-called “five nines”. Five Nines means that your construction website should have a 99.999% Uptime.
Check your website uptime from time to time in multiple locations. By far, it is one of the best practices you can do to ensure your website is always active and accessible.
2. Time to First Byte (TTFB)
TTFB assesses the responsiveness of your server. In particular, it measures the time between a browser requesting a page and when it just receives the first byte of data from the server. As a website owner, you must at least find out the status of your TTFB and check your site’s availability, transaction paths, and page speed. You can go first on checking how your server responds during on and off-peak hours.
Below are the three main actions that TTFB is measured:
- Sending requests to the server
- Processing, evaluating, and generating the response
- Sending the responses back to the client.
3. Broken Links
Hyperlinks constitute the whole website. Therefore, it is unavoidable to have broken links. Any website with links often leading to 404 errors may be a simple problem. However, in reality, it can be disastrous.
Check all your hyperlinks and see if any of them is broken. Perhaps, you may misspell the destination URL, or the linked page no longer exists. The bottom line is that broken links are bad for your website and your SEO performance and could seriously affect your construction business.
Ensure you always perform regular maintenance and check out any broken links. Otherwise, these existing broken links can:
- Frustrate your site visitors and might damage your reputation.
- It affects your conversion rates.
- It gives the impression that you do not perform web performance monitoring.
- Broken links might hinder your web page ranking optimization.
4. User journey
Another important web performance indicator is the user journey. It helps you big time when continuously improving your website performance. User journey determines if you have the right workflow patterns. A great workflow ensures all your web users have a great user experience.
For example, your construction website has a newsletter sign-up workflow. Go check if this workflow functions properly. Make sure there are no errors, especially during the subscription process. Be aware that having too many errors during the subscription process may result in a potential loss of customers.
5. Database performance
Why does your site’s database performance matter? The majority of websites today contain dynamic content that is pulled out straight from a database. Having a database with great performance is another vital indicator that guarantees a smooth-running website.
When you feel your construction website has a slow response, it might have a poor-performing database. Thus, you should track the response time on your database queries. Look for queries that are somehow taking the most time. Then, you can perform optimization.
6. Geographic Performance
With the dawn of fast internet, a website’s availability and speed from all parts of the world is no longer a problem.
Geographic performance is an indicator that ensures your web visitors experience seamless access to your website regardless of location. If your company caters to clients worldwide, then geographic performance is an indicator that is crucial for globally active companies like yours. You can leverage data analytics to determine the status of your website’s geographic performance. Choose the locations you want to focus on and use data analytics to track the performance of a certain location and overall global performance.
Google Analytics – a website tracking tool that allows you to collect and analyze all sorts of data from your websites and apps. You can collect user data, including their locations and how they interact with your construction website. Overall, this platform is best used to track website performance and collect visitor insights.
7. Website quality
Website quality is another performance indicator. You may know all the technical performance indicators, but you must keep an eye on the quality of your website. Conduct a website audit and make sure to perform it regularly.
When you perform an audit of your site, make sure to provide answers to the following questions:
Is my website IU appealing and appropriate?
- Does every page of my website have a clear and intentional purpose?
- Are all texts readable and well-structured?
- Is the writing style appropriate for my target audience?
- Does it offer valuable information to my web visitors and users?
Need to up your game? We offer a website audit for free and help you identify performance problems on your site.
8. Web server hardware
Monitoring free disk space is crucial for website operations, and many errors are usually brought out due to less disk space. It specifically includes log files, database entries, video files, and photos that consume a significant amount of disk space, resulting in higher CPU load and website failure.
Regular monitoring of CPU usage prevents many types of failures that may affect your web server. If you consistently experience a higher CPU, consider upgrading your hardware.
Get to Know Your Tools
The main tool you will be using when it comes to measuring the performance of your website is Google Analytics, which we already mentioned above. This web tracking tool can be challenging at first. However, it is a powerful tool once you finally set it up.
Some additional we highly recommend include:
- Google Search Console: It helps you improve your Google search performance and helps you shine in search results.
- Ahrefs: This helps you get helpful insights on your SEO and competitors.
- PageSpeed Insights: This helps you measure and evaluate your website’s technical performance, which can impact the visitor experience.
- Clearscope: It helps you improve your writing for Search Engine Optimization.
Need Help in Monitoring Your Web Performance?
It is crucial to keep track of your website performance to know how functional it is at any given time. And as you create room for improvements, note the performance of all your metrics about the adjustments you have made.
If doing all of this feels overwhelming, look for the experts like us.
ConstructionMarketing.io is one of the top digital marketing agencies that offer a complete suite of services and has been proven to provide quality services to its clients.
Both website development and web performance are our specializations. The focus of our marketing efforts is how to improve the structure and overall performance of your website. Our team of experts will carry out advanced strategies, like adding new locally-focused optimization, working on page load speed and other metrics, and assessing landing pages – all of that impact your overall website performance.
With our team’s expertise and continuous efforts, expect to see an increase in your lead acquisition. There will be a growing number of conversions your construction website generates, and there will also be more phone calls, contact form submissions, and email subscriptions.
If you are ready to partner with an expert, contact us today.