How Do You Know If Your Website Is Actually Working?

This post is part of an ongoing series tackling the real questions business owners ask about their websites. Each post stands on its own, but if you want the full picture, start here.

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So you invested in getting your site designed and built months ago. It looks great. It looks professional. You’ve gotten compliments and you’re feeling good about it. Awesome. But now what? This is the point that can separate good websites from effective ones and that means revenue might be slipping away.

How can you tell if your site is doing what it’s supposed to do? Do you even know what it’s supposed to do? If you’re unsure how to answer these questions, keep reading.

Define "working"

In the context of this article, "working" doesn’t mean whether the site is functioning from a technical standpoint. It’s more about how it serves your business. A working website looks different depending on what your business needs though.

For a service business, it might be form submissions or intro call bookings. For an e-commerce site, it’s completed purchases. For a content creator, it could be email signups. Whatever your business, your site should have a primary goal—the one specific action you want your visitors to take. If you haven’t clearly defined that, and if your web studio hasn’t designed or built your site with that goal in mind, you don’t have much of a baseline to measure against. To put it simply, if you don’t know the purpose of your site, nothing else matters.

To be clear, the purpose or primary goal of your site needs to be set before it’s designed, let alone built out. Not after. If that wasn’t the case when you hired your web designer or developer the good news is that it’s not too late. Better late than never, but it does mean you’re working backward which can be a bit more difficult and can mean more investment into your site.

Traffic is just the start

You probably already know that a website should be generating consistent traffic. But that can’t be all it does or your traffic just becomes a vanity metric. It’s understandable though—it’s the number that becomes most visible in analytics tools and often what marketing agencies tend to lead with in reports.

You see, a website that gets, let’s say, 10,000 or 100,000 visits a month sounds impressive, but if none of those visitors are doing anything, then who cares? Raw traffic numbers feel really good, but they don’t tell you much about whether your site is actually doing its job.

The real question is not how many people showed up; it’s how many out of those did what you wanted them to. That could be filling out a contact form, signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, donating, or something else. If that isn’t happening, something needs adjusting.

Conversion rate is what matters

Once you know exactly what your site’s primary goal is, then conversion rate becomes your top indicator for whether your site is working.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete the goal you set for your site. It’s the clearest signal of whether your site is persuading people or losing them. Everything else, be it bounce rate, time on page, or scroll depth, provide supporting context and helpful information, but the buck stops with conversion rate.

It’s important to keep in mind that there’s no universally "good" conversion rate/number. It varies significantly by industry, traffic source, and goal type. Instead, it’s better to track your own rate over time and look for movement. In other words, set your own benchmark based on your own history. That’s going to be more actionable than chasing an industry average you read about somewhere online.

Continuous adaptation

While your goal may stay the same for years, the strategy and tactics likely won’t. That is, once you have your site working (i.e. converting), you don’t just leave it and move on indefinitely. Traffic patterns will shift. Your audience may change. And what worked a couple of years ago may start to underperform today.

Building a simple habit of checking a handful of key metrics monthly is what separates organizations that catch conversion issues early from the one’s that wonder why leads dried up. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be a deep, hour+ session each month. 

A simple fifteen-minute check with a checklist or short list of questions is generally enough to catch most problems before they become major issues. And it’s important to remember that you don’t want to react to data noise from one bad week. Instead, look for and respond to trends (such as three months of declining conversions). Conversely, if there’s a big spike in conversions it’s a good idea to take a deeper look at that and see if you can repeat it on a more consistent basis.

What’s next

If you’ve made it to this point then you now know what your site is supposed to do and how to tell if it’s actually doing that. 

But if you’re still unsure, the first thing to do, if you haven’t already, is to define your primary goal. Write it down. Make sure it matches what your site is set up to capture. Then review your conversion data for the last ninety days or so. If you don’t have that data yet, then that’s your starting point.

Once you have your data you’ll know where your site stands—either it’s doing really good (no changes needed yet), good enough (some light changes would help), or it’s not doing well at all. If it’s not doing so great, your site likely needs more focused adjustments. And, if you'd like a fresh set of eyes on your site's performance, that's something we can help with.