Website Performance Metrics: What They Are and How to Interpret Them

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July 18, 2024

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If you want to know what attracts users to your website and what you can better accordingly, then website performance metrics will be useful for you. It can give you valuable insights into the performance of your website, and an idea of which direction to take in improving user experience for your visitors.

Whether you buy advanced or cheap VPS with PayPal or cryptocurrency, you can improve your website’s performance by having a clear idea about its performance metrics.

Now, let’s go ahead and dive into what website performance metrics are all about, what are the key parameters, and how to interpret them.

What Are Website Performance Metrics?

Website performance metrics are parameters that show the intricacies of your website’s functioning. Considering that much time and investment went into creating and maintaining the website, learning its performance metrics can enhance the process of optimizing the website for users. By understanding how users interact with your website, you can evaluate whether they go through the path to conversion you’ve designed for them, and to what extent.

Website performance metrics can help you evaluate:

Conversion rates
Traffic sources
The quality of user experience
The level of brand perception
Marketing strategy efficiency

Basically, if you want to know how well your website design and marketing strategy are performing, website performance metrics are the right way to go.

Key Website Performance Metrics

To fully understand the performance of your website, you need to track certain metrics. The parameters we list here can give you a comprehensive view of what’s going on for your website in terms of functioning. Many of them are focused on website speed since it’s a crucial aspect of the user experience.

Uptime

Uptime is important no matter what type of business or organization you have a website dedicated to. The uptime metric, which refers to the time the website is online, is dependent on your server.

If you experience irregularities in the uptime of your website, this would be the first thing to deal with, since all other metrics are then of secondary importance. Your hosting provider and the server you chose for your website are responsible for any downtime events. So, if a provider or a server cannot offer you reliable website performance, consider other options.

The 99% guarantee of uptime is what you should aim for when choosing a hosting plan for your website.

Time to First Byte

This metric refers to the amount of time it takes for the first byte of data to reach the user’s browser.

TTFB is calculated by adding up the time spent on sending a request to the server, the time spent on processing the response, and the time of a response getting back.

Increasing the time to the first byte, which will enhance the user experience, can be done by configuring the server’s software and/or hardware, optimizing the code, or using caching.

The ideal TTFB metric is below 600 milliseconds.

Page Size

The web page size is an important metric to take into account. It includes the overall size of a web page with its content, stylesheets, and other parameters.

Understanding the page size will help determine how quickly it’s supposed to load, and how quickly it loads in actuality. It helps identify the loading speed norm for a particular page.

The ideal total page size is around 100 KB. However, depending on your website design and content, it is not always possible to fit it into such a volume. Page size below 400 KB is usually fine.

Interaction to Next Paint

Interaction to Next Paint or INP measures the responsiveness of pages to user interactions on the website.

INP is especially relevant for sites with dynamic content, which requires users to engage with it. This metric takes into account only 75% of all page views to give out a reliable number, independent from random delays.

For example, an INP score below 200 milliseconds is considered good, while it being below 500 milliseconds – poor.

Number of requests

When we talk about the number of requests, we mean requests that are generated from user’s interactions with a specific page. The higher the number of requests, the more time the pages take to load.

The average number of requests is in the range of 68 — 75 requests per page; however, it can vary depending on the website.

Average session duration

The duration of the average session correlates with the average amount of time visitors spend on the website. The longer this metric is, the more engaging users find your content. Average session duration directly refers to the quality of the content you have on your website.

The solid metric for average session duration starts at 2 — 3 minutes.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate implies the number of unique visitors, who complete the buying action. Various factors can contribute to what helps visitors go through with buying the products or services, including good loading speed, a great call to action, etc.

Conversion rate is the ultimate parameter for a website’s performance since it directly reflects the success of the strategy behind creating and managing your website.

The conversion rate parameter is highly dependent on the industry and a specific business.

How to Measure Your Website’s Performance?

There are several methods and tools that can help you measure the performance of your website. They depend on the area you want to focus on, for example, website speed or load testing.

Website performance metrics can focus on technical performance, content analysis, or user behavior characteristics.

The most popular tools used to measure such parameters are: