The Top 5 Things to be Monitoring on your Website Regularly

Running a successful online business isn’t just about setting up your website and leaving it to run on autopilot. To keep your site performing at its best, bring in more visitors, and drive sales, you need to regularly monitor and optimize key aspects of your website. So, what should you be keeping an eye on to make sure everything is running smoothly? Today, we’re talking about the top five most important things to monitor on your website regularly to keep your website in peak condition!


Mentioned Resources

-> Tools to measure website performance:
Google Page Speed Insights
GTmetrix
Web Page Speed Test

-> Tools to analyze your website traffic:
Google Analytics

-> Tools to measure SEO Performance:
Google search Console
Ahrefs
SEMrush
Screaming Frog


Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts

If you're loving my eCommerce Made Easy Podcast, I'd be thrilled if you could rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Your ratings and reviews help me reach more listeners and empower more people like you to thrive in the online business world.

Just click here to head over to Apple Podcasts, scroll down, give us a five-star rating, and share what you enjoyed most about the episode in the "Write a Review" section.

If you haven't hit that follow button yet, now’s the perfect time! I have new episodes coming your way every week that you won't want to miss. Hit the follow button and stay up to date with the eCommerce Made Easy Podcast! Follow Now!

Join entrepreneurs and online business owners just like you in my Free Facebook Group “Website & Tech Tips for Online Business Owners”
 
 Where we help break down the tech and hurdles Online Business Owners encounter!
 
Simply to go ecommercemadeeasypodcast.com/facebook/ and answer the membership questions so we know you are a real, warm-hearted, online business owner.

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:01

So you've finally done it. You have your website finally up, or you've had it up for a while, but you're not quite sure. Is there anything else I should be doing? We want to make sure that our websites are performing at its best so that it can bring in more visitors and drive sales into your business. So there are several aspects we want to be monitoring regularly to make sure that this is the case and that customers can still find you and that your website's in tip-top shape. So today we're going to be talking about the top five most important things to be monitoring on your website regularly to ensure your business stays on track and your customers keep coming back.

Carrie Saunders: 0:41

Welcome to the e-commerce made easy podcast. I'm your host, ke Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine month old my main goal to help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech and to easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to the e-commerce made easy podcast.

Carrie Saunders: 1:16

Today, we're talking about the top five things you should be regularly monitoring on your website to ensure it's in tip top shape. Your website's just like your online storefront. Even with a brick and mortar business, you need to be monitoring and checking things regularly in it, so you need to be doing a similar thing in your online web store. They just come with a little bit different flavor to them, though. So whether you have an e-commerce store or you offer services or run a coaching business, these are five key areas that you need to be monitoring and to keep your website as healthy as possible and your visitors happy.

Carrie Saunders: 1:55

So, first off, we talk a decent amount on this podcast about website speed and performance, so this is super important. I can't stress this enough. In today's fast-paced world, we want to make sure that our visitors are getting our websites nice and quickly, because that's what they expect, so you need to be checking your website speed on a regular basis. I would recommend this at least once a month, because, if your website takes too long to load, recommend this at least once a month, because if your website takes too long to load, your visitors are just going to leave and get frustrated, very likely. It also helps search engine optimization to make sure that your website is fast enough, because search engines take your website speed into account when ranking your website.

Carrie Saunders: 2:41

So there's some several free tools that we'll link to in the show notes, but some of them are the Google's paid speech insights. And then there's GT metrics and web page speed tests. So again, both all three of those will be in our show notes for easy for you to find them. So those are great ways to figure out what is working well on your website and what might be slowing it down. And also, the really good bonus to the Google page speed insights is it gives you mobile performance as well, so there is a tab at the top for both mobile and desktop. So make sure that you're looking at both, and if you are having some speed issues, make sure that you are contacting somebody to help you fix those if you cannot do that yourself.

Carrie Saunders: 3:25

And then the second thing you want to be checking regularly is your traffic and user behavior. This is something you would typically do in something like Google Analytics. Your website software may also have some analytics included in it too. So use whichever one you're more comfortable with, because I want to make sure you're at least doing this. You don't have to use Google Analytics, although it can provide some great insights.

Carrie Saunders: 3:48

So we want to be checking our traffic sources underneath this. So we're talking about traffic and user behavior and then within that, we want to make sure our traffic sources. We want to see where is most of our traffic coming from and you know how. Is it growing or is it declining? Keep an eye on the different sources and how well they're performing so that you know if you need to change or adjust something from the traffic that is coming in. So if a decent portion of your traffic is coming in from social media, we want to make sure that as a growing and not declining, or if it's coming in from or no grant search so somebody searching on the web, on Google or Yahoo or Bing or something like that. We want to make sure that that is staying consistent and we don't have any significant changes in how many people are coming in via those venues.

Carrie Saunders: 4:41

You also may want to see if you have availability to look at the bounce rate and the time on the page. So bounce rate is whenever somebody visits your website and then just leaves and doesn't go to any other pages. So if your bounce rate starts increasing, then you know there's something wrong with either your messaging or the source that you're driving traffic into your website might not be bringing in the correct people to your website, so you wanna be checking that regularly. Also, time on page so the longer somebody's on your page, the more engaged they are with your website. So making sure that this doesn't decline quickly or have a significant change, we want this to be going up. That can help you understand whether the messaging on your website is off or if it's on point.

Carrie Saunders: 5:31

And then number three is search engine optimization performance. This is something that I know a lot of people just kind of glass over and kind of ignore, but it actually is very important to our longevity of our businesses, because we want to be driving people automatically to our website and that's where search engine optimization can really help us. So we want to be driving people automatically to our website and that's where search engine optimization can really help us. So we want to be monitoring our top five to 10 keywords at minimum and making sure that our ranking for those are not going down significantly. We want to see those going up or staying steady, depending upon what they currently are.

Carrie Saunders: 6:08

So you can use some free tools out there as well as some paid tools on checking your keywords, and we will link to those in the show notes. And then you also might want to be using one of these tools to check your backlinks, which are the links coming into your website from other websites. So this helps Google and Bing and Yahoo figure out what's most important out there and that these other people trust you and are linking back to you. So having a decent number of backlinks is very good. And then you also will want to be checking any crawl errors or index issues. So that's kind of a technical term. Crawl errors or index issues so that's kind of a technical term. But if you use Google search console, there are some places in there where you can see if there are errors on you will being able to look through your website and index it. So that's what the crawl air and indexing really is about. So other Google can look through your website appropriately and if you get stuck and have trouble with that, find a trusted developer like us or somebody else to help you fix those issues.

Carrie Saunders: 7:14

And then number four that we need to be checking regularly is website security. I can't stress this enough. I cannot tell you how many customers we have rescued because they didn't keep their software up to date or they were passing around their passwords insecurely or some other reason that their website was insecure and they got hacked and we had to rescue them. So if you're regularly monitoring your website security, keeping it up to date so like say, for example, if you're on WordPress, we need to make sure that we're always updating WordPress and the plugins that you have and making sure any plugins don't go stale and what I mean by stale is the developer stops developing for them, so that leaves a potential for security holes. We want to make sure we're always updating our website software. So if you have an e-commerce store, we want to make sure that software is getting updated regularly, because if not, then security holes will be found potentially most likely, honestly and then people can start hacking into your website as soon as they figure out that you have that vulnerability and that can really destroy a business and I'd hate to see that to happen to any of you. So making sure you have regular updates If you're not sure, if your software automatically updates itself, then you can contact your service provider who provides you that software, or somebody like us, a trusted source, that can look that up for you.

Carrie Saunders: 8:37

And then number five is conversion rates. So this is a little bit more advanced and I'm going to, you know, let this be a little bit optional for you, for the newer people out there, but I want to make sure you're aware of it too. So if you have a new business, I want you to make sure you're aware of this, but conversion rates are very important. So, basically, what that means is how many visitors are coming to your website versus how many people buy in a certain time period, let's say a week or a month. You know, keep track of that, even if you need to do this manually at first. You know, say, you're new with your website and you need to manually keep track of this. Go ahead and do that. Otherwise, you can also use software like Google Analytics, which can help you automatically track your conversion rates. So that's a little bit more advanced technique, but having somebody help you set that up or doing the research yourself is a great idea, so that you can automatically be tracking your conversion rates and making sure that those are always improving and getting better, because when our conversion rates aren't good, then we know there's something blocking the purchase.

Carrie Saunders: 9:42

So we need to then figure out, you know, is it the content of the website? Are we not clear enough? Is there not enough information about the products or services? Are we not building enough customer trust? We have some podcast articles on customer trust too, so those are some factors that might cause your conversion rate not to be very good, and if you definitely see a significant drop in it, you need to be checking out some of the previous items we talked about on this podcast episode to make sure there isn't something they're getting in the way, and definitely reach out to a trusted partner like us if you do need help with your conversion rates tanking, because we can definitely help you with that and there's some other really good developers out there that can help you as well.

Carrie Saunders: 10:25

So that's the top five things that I recommend that you be checking on your website regularly. Most of these, I feel like once a month is a good idea. If you are bigger and more established than definitely probably more frequently, like at least twice a month or once every week is a really good idea, but it's definitely something to put in your routine and make sure it's on your calendar, because if it's not scheduled we typically don't do it. So, again, I highly highly recommend you be checking on these things, because it really helps check on the pulse and the health of your website, which is the livelihood of your business. So that's all I have for this week's episode of the e-commerce made easy podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. We would love to hear from you. There's a neat link in our podcast episode show notes on your favorite podcast player where you can click and send me a text message, and I'd love to hear from you. You can also email us at podcast at bcsengearingcom with any suggestions and we will see you next week.