How to Measure Your Website Traffic and Performance

It’s valuable to have an easy-to-understand view of key performance indicators (KPIs) for your website and how they’re changing over time. Tracking your website performance empowers you to make strategic, data-based decisions for your brand. 

Tools for website analytics help you avoid guesswork, set goals, and measure your success over time. Whether you want to get more eyes on your online portfolio, measure the success of your marketing campaigns, or understand more about how people interact with your website, analytics give you meaningful insights into your online presence. You can use those insights to prioritize website updates or shape marketing strategies.

Here’s how to understand your website traffic data, set measurable goals, and improve engagement on your web pages.

View your current website performance

Take time to understand how your website is currently performing, whether your site is well established or you just launched it. With Squarespace’s analytics tools, you have access to all the key data you need. You’ll want to pay attention to things like:

• Total web traffic

• Unique visitors and repeat website visitors

• Traffic from organic search vs. other sources

• Pages that get the most traffic

• Conversion rate (purchases, newsletter sign-ups, etc.)

• User behavior (number of pages visited, time on page, etc.)

If you’re just getting started, track these traffic metrics to establish your baseline performance. Check them regularly and compare changes to better understand your audience.

1. Website traffic and traffic sources

How many visitors does your website attract each month? Where are they coming from? If you just launched your website, you can establish a baseline for a monthly number of visitors. Traffic sources will help you understand how people are finding you online. 

If your site has been live for several months, see if you can link any peaks and valleys in your traffic with social media posts, emails, press coverage, or other events. Analyzing your traffic will help you understand what brings people to your website. 

Learn more about viewing traffic and traffic sources for your Squarespace website

2. Audience engagement metrics

These metrics can help you understand how your audience navigates through your website and engages with your content.

Time on page

This is the average amount of time users spend on a single page before navigating to another part of your site. For example, when the average time on page is higher for a specific blog post or page with audio or video content, it can mean that the content on that landing page is more engaging than other areas of your website.

Exit rate

This is the percentage of views of a given page that didn’t result in more pageviews on your website. In other words, exit rate measures how often a particular page is the last page viewed before someone leaves your website. 

Keep in mind that it makes sense for some pages to have higher exit rates. Context matters here. For example, maybe you wrote a blog post that intentionally directs readers to a resource or event page outside of your website. A high exit rate on that blog post’s URL would mean that the post is doing what you hoped it would.

Bounce rate

This is the percentage of visitors who entered your site on a page, then exited your site from that same page without visiting any other parts of your site. In other words, bounce rate is measured when a landing page is the first and last interaction someone has with your website. 

If a page has a high bounce rate, it may not be effectively encouraging visitors to engage with other areas of your website. Or it might not be giving them the information they were looking for. 

Learn more about viewing audience engagement metrics for your Squarespace website

3. Search keywords

Your website’s traffic and performance are influenced by how it ranks in search engine results. This is why it’s important to understand your audience’s search intent—or the reason for their search engine queries. 

For example, people finding your website through search engines might be interested in buying a specific product that you offer. Other people might want to learn more about a topic that you’ve covered in your blog. When you understand why your audience is finding you, you can start to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) to make your website more easily discoverable.

Focus on keyword relevance. That means choosing keywords that align with your audience’s search intent and the search terms they’re using to find your website. Use these search keywords to inform your SEO strategy. Incorporate top-performing keywords throughout your website—including landing page copy and SEO titles—to help people find you online. 

Squarespace integrates directly with Google Search Console, making it easy to view the keywords your customers and visitors are using to find your site. If you make SEO updates strategically, you can use that keyword information to see if your changes are making a difference to your organic traffic stats.

4. Site search

If you have enabled search on your website, you can also see what visitors are looking for on your site. This is a great way to learn what your audience is interested in. Then you can connect them directly with the content that matters most.

For example, say you run a wellness blog and visitors are regularly searching for information about herbal remedies. You can surface this content front and center on your blog homepage. Or if you haven’t already, you can create content focused on that topic and enhance your SEO strategy. 

Site search can also help you learn which products people are searching for in your online store. This can inform everything from how you promote products on your homepage to whether you want to develop and sell a new product that aligns with what people are already looking for from your brand.

Learn more about adding search to your Squarespace website

Taking stock of your website traffic, audience engagement, and search keywords will enable you to improve the user experience and SEO of your website, and strategically build new, relevant content.

Identify your goals and set website KPIs

Do you want to increase the amount of traffic to your website from search engines? Increase subscriptions to your newsletter?

No matter what you want to achieve, make sure you set measurable goals. Identify three to five KPIs. Then, make a plan to improve the metrics attached to those website KPIs over time. If you just launched a new online portfolio or blog, this might mean making targeted content changes to reduce bounce rate or improve time on page. If you’re launching a new product every month in your online store, you might have a KPI to drive traffic to new product pages when they launch.

As you set your goals, keep in mind that metrics improve at different speeds. For example, when you update your website’s SEO, it can take a few months before you start to see your work reflected in your traffic analytics.

Track your performance over time

Think about your website as a living, breathing online presence. Adjust your strategy and test changes as you monitor your website’s performance. For example, if you update the copy on a product page in your online store and notice an uptick in pageviews for that product over time, consider making changes to all of your product pages to optimize the rest of your store for search engines. Tracking your website performance over time will help you grow your reach and stay connected to your audience.

This post was updated on March 8, 2023.

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