Your practice’s website is a sum of many parts. Likewise, the performance of this “online home” for your business transcends a “silver bullet” or singular driver or measure of success. So, when analyzing the health and vitality of one’s website, it is important to measure and account for several factors and aspects of your website. Only when you can gauge where you are “at” regarding these varied contributors to your website’s effectiveness can you effectively identify, develop, and deploy smart strategies.
These strategies should not only address weaknesses, but they should also build upon your team’s and digital presence’s existing strengths. Often, we do not adequately harness or amplify those strengths and progress. The majority of one’s business growth and profitability may be secured by building upon what you already do well and areas where you already have substantial momentum.
Get clarity around your goals.
In order to set goals, it is important to isolate and monitor website metrics. A few of these key metrics include:
- Bounce rate – The percentage of users who load one page and do not visit any other pages
- Page views – The total number of times a page is viewed
- Page duration – The average time that is spent on each page
- Session duration – The average time that users spend on your website in general
- Pages viewed – The average number of pages that users look at during each session or visit
These indicators can be quite telling. They provide considerable insights into how specific pages may resonate with your community. If a certain page’s performance is lacking, you can zero in on it to see if the quality of content issue is to blame. Or, you may find that something else is at play, especially if the session duration is generally low and many pages have a lackluster duration. After all, performance does not “just” come down to reliability and trust garnered by “what” you say and convey; other fundamentals can elevate or inhibit your website’s performance. For instance, nothing may turn off a user more than a website that loads too slowly, is not properly optimized for mobile, and is overly clunky or hard to navigate.
When establishing goals around the findings associated with such metrics, ensure they align with your broader practice goals. As an example, how long has it been since you really assessed or reassessed the changing dynamics of your neighborhood or community? Today’s ideal patient may be a significant departure from your target demographics of a few years ago, let alone five-plus years ago. Your online strategies should be enmeshed with your offline strategy. So, always see the big picture and the clear relationship between the two presences, your physical space and digital hub.
Assessing for speed and more
Minding and improving your page load times as needed is absolutely essential to your website’s health and a favorable conversion rate. Basically, this metric refers to “converting” a user or visitor, getting them to engage with your site and to respond to an “ask,” be it participating in an online chat, submitting a query via a “contact us” form, or calling your office with a question or to schedule a consultation. This measurement also plays a vital role in sales growth. Researchers have found that delays of just one second in page loading times contribute to $1.6 billion in sales losses for major retailers online each year. Furthermore, it’s estimated that four out of every 10 Americans will abandon a shopping site if it doesn’t load in three seconds (even though these sites often feature tons of images, which can contribute to slower speeds in general).
The first step toward a swift, conversion-boosting, and bounce rate-fighting load time is to accurately measure speed/responsiveness using online tools (i.e., Google’s PageSpeed Insights). These tools provide suggestions to accelerate your unique website’s speed. Such suggestions are divided into two categories: mobile and desktop. These detailed findings cover everything from the impact of outdated systems on modern browsers to the influence of third-party code. The next steps” for your site may include actions such as reducing the number of redundant third-party providers and optimizing the code for modern browsers while still supporting legacy browsers. Here again, the suggestions can be quite detailed and are very specific to your situation.
Continuous improvement, courtesy of A/B testing
Like other aspects of your practice, website performance requires continual assessment and improvement. Even the most robust website will likely not stay that way if one fails to properly update the infrastructure that supports it and the content featured within. You can glean considerable insights into how marketing campaigns will be received by conducting “A/B” testing. Consider two different versions of marketing and communications collateral. You showcase version “A” to one-half of your community, whereas you share version “B” with the other half. You can then compare how the differing versions perform.
This process can take the guesswork out of new or evolving content in its myriad forms — everything from the printed product or articles on your website to the specific designs, graphics, or authentic photos that may be featured. Such split testing truly supports the changes that fuel the likes of higher conversion rates and lower bounce rates. Do not hesitate to “test” content before investing resources in collateral that may not engage your key audience.
Sources:
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/page-load-time-conversion-rates
- www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cost-amazon-16-billion-sales
- https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis
- https://developers.google.com/speed
- https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/performance-scoring
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-do-a-b-testing#what-is-testing
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-bounce-rate-fix?hubs_content=blog.hubspot.com%2Fwebsite%2Fengagement-metrics&hubs_content-cta=Bounce%20rate
