How To Know If Your Small Business Website Is Working

So you have a website online already for your business and are considering doing a redesign, but you aren’t sure whether to go through with it or not. The worst thing you could do is to do a complete redesign on a site that’s already working extremely well for you and is bringing in a solid amount of new customers. But how do you know if your website is working or if it just plain stinks?

Well, the first thing is to figure out if you’re actually getting new leads or customers through the site. We encourage all of our clients to ask everyone who calls them where they found out about them. This is Marketing 101. You need to know whats working for you and what isn’t. If no one has found out about you from your website, then chances are it isn’t working. If no phone calls are coming as a result of your site, no emails are coming through, and no one is filling out your contact form, you’ve got some trouble!

Let’s say you do have the odd phone call and email come through as a result of your site… You need to figure out if it could be better. I’d highly suggest installing Google Analytics on your site and having a look at the data. There main thing you need to figure out is your conversion rate. What is the percentage of new visitors who come to your site and end up contacting you? If you sell products through your site you’d need to determine the percentage of visitors who come to your site and end up buying something.

If your conversion rate is extremely low (say, below 5%) then you could definitely do some things to improve it. Now, you might not need a totally new design but you’d at least need to make some tweaks and do some further testing.

You should also look at your bounce rate. A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter your site and only view one page before leaving your site. If it’s over 30% you’ve got some problems. If it’s over 40% you’ve got some major problems. Most of the sites we design have bounce rates from 10-15%, which is extremely good.

If all this sounds a bit confusing, you could always contact us and we could have a look at your site. Chances are we’d know right away whether or not your site is going to work for you even without looking at Analytical data.