New year, new website goals!
As you set your resolutions for 2025, make sure to include a few for your company’s website.
Northwoods has been here to help with new year’s website checkups since the long-gone days of Y2K, and we’re still at it. So, let’s take a fresh look at site performance and user experience.
Are You Fully Tracking Your Website’s Performance?
You need data to understand how users interact with your website. If you haven’t already, update your tracking to 2025 standards. Consider adding the following tools to your site to better understand its performance. (Bonus: They’re all free to use!)
Google Analytics
Google Analytics should be everyone’s first step in monitoring website performance. This free tool tracks how users interact with your site. If you haven’t set it up already, now’s the time.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is step two, after Google Analytics, toward a deeper understanding of your website’s performance.
Google Search Console
Ever wonder how search engines view and use your website? Set up this great tool and wonder no more!
Heatmap Tools
Heatmapping reveals the hot and cold zones of user interactions with any web page. This can be incredibly helpful when updating your site to improve user experience. We recommend Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar; they work well, and they offer free subscription plans.
Google Looker Studio
This great data visualization and reporting dashboard integrates with many other reporting tools, from Google to social media and more. If you share data with colleagues and executives about the performance of your site and related marketing efforts, Google Looker Studio is an excellent option.
Once you’ve set up these tools, it’s critical to make sure you’re using them successfully. Here are some tips.
Key Website Data to Capture and Review
What Pages Are Users Visiting?
If you’ve been managing your website for a while, you probably think you have a pretty good idea of why users visit it. But do you have the data to back up your intuition?
Start analyzing site performance by taking a close look at the pages that attract the most visits. The content on those pages will tell you why people come to your site. Those pages are answering their questions and/or delivering the products and services that they seek – or maybe, failing to answer and/or deliver.
Data from these most-visited pages can tell you a lot, including, but not limited to, the following:
- Are visitors landing on outdated content? Time to update it.
- Which pages engage users for long durations? Do you want users to park on those pages, or would you prefer that they spend their time elsewhere?
- Are navigation hiccups regularly guiding visitors to not-so-helpful pages?
Access your most viewed pages in Google Analytics. We typically recommend looking at a year’s worth of data at a time.
What Are You Ranking for in Search Engines?
Every site manager hopes that searches draw large numbers of qualified potential customers.
But, unfortunately, this doesn’t happen by magic (though that would be nice!). Optimize your site to help search engines help people who would be happy to find you, whether they know you and are searching by brand or they’ve never heard of you and are searching generically by product or service. Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily want them to land on your home page; ideally, they will land on the page that helps them the most.
Find out what user search queries are bringing them to your site. Use an SEO reporting tool (such as Semrush or ahrefs) to see general terms you rank for. Or use Google Search Console to see the exact phrases that led to your site being featured in search results or that resulted in clicks to your website.
It’s important to know which terms are missing from your SEO efforts and which terms are attracting an irrelevant audience. This knowledge can guide content creation and refinement aimed at optimizing search for both reach and quality.
Are Users Interacting with Your Calls to Action?
Every website has calls to action (CTAs): contact us button, donate, request a quote, sign up for an event or newsletter, fill out a contact form, and so on. CTAs represent the purpose of your content and the website as a whole.
It’s incredibly important that users can easily find and interact with CTAs. After all, they’re most likely visiting your website to do something. Help them take that next step.
While Google Analytics is great at telling you whether users are visiting your most important web pages, it’s not great at telling you what they do on those pages.
That’s where heatmap tools come into play. Heatmaps show hot and cold zones of interaction on a website. For example, do users click on the great big button at the bottom of the page? Or do they not scroll down far enough to see that button?
Heat maps can tell you. If users are, in fact, doing what you expect and want them to do, great. If not, you might need to relocate content or CTAs on the page.
Are You Tracking What You Need to Be Reporting On?
Many website managers encounter this scenario:
You’re in a meeting, reporting on your website’s performance to a company leader. The leader asks a question about a certain key feature; you realize that you have no data at all about it. What do you do?
Your new year’s UX checkup is a great time to make sure you’re tracking everything you need to track to ensure the success of your website (and to look sharp in meetings).
- Do you know how often users click on your CTAs?
- Do your team leaders keep asking about customer usage of a particular tool?
It’s a good idea to have ready answers – that is, ready data – about the most important aspects of your site based on your key goals and objectives.
Google Tag Manager helps with this by going beyond the basics tracked by Google Analytics. It enables set-up of detailed tracking that’s specific to the needs of your website. If you’re missing something, GTM is great place to start.
Need Help with Your UX Checkup?
UX is a lot to take on without help. We offer UX checkup services to help bridge the gap. Contact us today to get started.