How to use website performance reporting to improve the user experience

Website performance reporting helps businesses zero in on the good, the bad, and the ugly of their site—showing them what’s running smoothly, what needs improvement, and how to create a better user experience.

Tracking website performance is essential to maintaining an excellent site, loyal and delighted customers, and a smooth stream of conversions.

This chapter of our website performance guide takes you on a step-by-step journey to creating a report, with examples and metrics to better understand how people interact with your site, so you can elevate their experience.

What is website performance reporting and why is it important?

Website performance reporting is the practice of testing and analyzing a website's performance in relation to metrics like traffic, speed, SEO, and user insights. This helps you understand which changes you need to make to improve the user experience (UX) and drive growth.

A comprehensive and actionable website performance report looks at both quantitative and qualitative data to understand what is and isn’t working on your website—and why. 

The benefits of monitoring and reporting your website performance include

• Better website and business performance. Website performance reporting helps you ensure visitors get the seamless experience they expect—ultimately boosting your conversions and revenue.

• Data to draw conclusions for improvement. By reporting on traffic, conversions, and audience interactions, you’ll make more informed decisions about impactful site changes—improving the user experience. 

• An optimization roadmap. With performance data at the ready, you’ll be able to determine your average conversion rate or session duration—so you can set realistic objectives to improve. 

A 5-step framework to make the most of your website performance reporting

Follow this step-by-step framework to create a website performance report that paints the full picture of the metrics most relevant for your business objectives, what’s going wrong (and right!) as users navigate your website, and how you can improve your overall performance. 

1. Get a clear understanding of your business goals

You need to determine specific business goals to get the most out of your web performance reporting efforts.

Before you dive into optimization tests, ask big-picture, broad, and strategic questions to get clear on the key aims of your website:

• What user problems is your website designed to solve? 

• What’s the overall goal of your site?

• What’s your website’s unique selling point?

Defining objectives helps you move beyond assumptions and ensures that every decision you make about your website’s performance will impact your organizational goals.

2. Define website performance KPIs to measure progress

The next step after defining your goals is measuring your progress on each objective. That means defining which website performance metrics you’ll use as your guiding stars to assess whether your site is working for you or not.

Monitoring these metrics over time will also provide you with benchmarks so you can set data-based objectives for your website’s performance. 

Metrics to choose from include

• Page speed: how fast your website loads when someone visits a page. This is a key ranking factor for search engines. To give you a rough idea of industry benchmarks, your site should take less than 5 seconds to load, or less than 3 if you’re in ecommerce. 

• Page views: the number of times visitors land on a specific web page. Measuring this helps you understand which of your pages are attracting visitors, and which ones users skip over. Use page view data to inform decisions on which website UX design changes will have the most impact. 

• Bounce rate: the percentage of visitors who access your website and leave immediately, without viewing other pages. A high bounce rate indicates that users may be confused or uninterested in the content you’re presenting.  

• Scroll depth: measures how far down users scroll on one of your web pages. This metric helps teams make design decisions that foster great UX—like what information to place above the fold, how to optimize your page layout, or what to adjust in your web page copy. 

• Average session duration: how much time people spend on your site during one visit. It’s helpful to investigate industry averages and pair them with your historical data. Even though 2–3 minutes is considered a good ecommerce average session duration, only you know if your website would benefit from shorter or longer sessions based on its design.

• Conversion rate: the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your website—like making a purchase, opting into an email list, or signing up for a free trial. Conversion rates vary between industries, but anything between 2–5% is generally considered good.

Pro tip: if you’re using Contentsquare, use Alerts to automate your KPI monitoring. Simply select the metrics you’re most interested in, and you’ll get notified when there are any big changes. Contentsquare’s AI will automatically find the right threshold for alerts—just choose from a low, medium, or high sensitivity level, and it’ll do the rest.

Contentsquare’s AI calculates when to notify you about changes in a particular metric

3. Run a comprehensive website analysis

Whilst your report will spotlight your key performance indicators, a truly representative website analysis covers a wide range of metrics. Use traditional analytics tools, SEO investigation, usability tests, and user-centric evaluations to take the temperature of every component of your site. 

Here’s how to run a website analysis that evaluates performance based on both traditional analytics and user-centric insights:

Perform a basic website analysis

• Analyze website traffic: this helps you monitor the activities of users on your site and identify the most successful pages and traffic-generation techniques

• Audit your site’s SEO process and results: check your search engine rankings and authority, make sure your site is up to date with on-site SEO best practices, and perform a backlink analysis

• Measure your page speed: run a speed test to investigate your load time on various devices using a tool like WebPageTest or Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis

• Check for website errors: use a tool like Contentsquare’s Error Analysis to identify performance issues and fix bugs—like broken links and error pages—that frustrate users and cause search engines to penalize you

• Analyze mobile responsiveness: use Google’s mobile responsiveness checker to ensure your website looks and functions well on any screen size, and that it loads fast on mobile

Perform a user-centric website analysis

• Find what drives people to your website: use on-site surveys to discover your visitors’ drivers by asking them to describe what they're looking for on your site, and why, in their own words

• Define the barriers that stop or drive users away: use a tool like Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis to identify high-traffic exit pages (where you lose most of your visitors). Then, analyze heatmaps and session replays to understand how individual users interact with them.

• Determine what persuades people to act: use a survey to collect insights from visitors and better understand the hooks, or selling points, that persuade them to stay on the page and eventually convert, and their fears or objections to taking action 

Pro tip: Contentsquare offers everything you need to run a user-centric website analysis, in a single platform.

• View heatmaps that show where customers click, scroll or hover on a page, and even create filtered heatmaps that only show the behavior of one particular user segment 

• Create surveys to ask your site visitors questions—you can even use Contentsquare’s AI for surveys to generate questions for you, based on your goals

• Watch session replays—video-style playbacks of user sessions—that show real user behavior on your site. Filter these by frustration score to view only the most relevant ones. 

With everything in one place, it’s easy to cross-reference your insights. For example, you can view session replays from survey respondents who mentioned experiencing a bug, or create heatmaps that show a page that’s flagged as having a high drop-off in a funnel analysis.

Cross-reference your survey responses with session replays

Use strategic tools to discover the weak aspects of your website 

The right website analysis tools help you identify user pain points and streamline the process of finding solutions to optimize your website’s performance.

Leverage these types of tools to generate a full-picture website performance report that covers all your bases:

• Analytics tools like Google Analytics or Contentsquare, to understand the quantitative performance of your website and spot trends in user behavior

• Web performance monitoring software like GTmetrix, Pingdom, or Contentsquare to see exactly how your site is performing and what to improve

• SEO tools like Clearscope or Ahrefs, to ensure that your content has the right keywords

• A/B testing tools like Google Optimize or Omniconvert, to see which UX design variant resonates with users

• CRM platforms for insights into persona-based purchasing history, past user interactions, and sales figures to draw connections between spikes in website activity and conversion 

• Heatmaps of user activity on your web pages to see where visitors click and how far they scroll to determine if you’re creating an engaging, intuitive user and website experience

• Session replay tools to observe how users experience your site and whether your web design, content layout, and navigation elements make sense throughout their journey

4. Summarize your findings and develop an action plan

As you go through these evaluation steps, your website’s strongest and weakest points will become apparent. Some areas might need more investigation and details, but you should have enough data to make informed recommendations on where you could improve your website’s performance. 

As you develop an action plan with a set of next steps—and suggest priorities—ask yourself specific optimization questions like

• Is your page load time affecting user retention?

• Is your website easy to find and navigate? 

• How targeted is your keyword research? 

• Are you optimized for mobile? 

• How much of an increase in conversion rates did you expect? How much did you get?

• Which website pages do you need to optimize for maximum impact and conversion?

This plan will outline all your user goals—aligned with your business objectives—and list the actions or steps to achieve these goals. 

Ask a mix of big-picture and specific optimization questions to help you understand, implement, and track changes. Develop clear hypotheses on what you need to optimize to meet user and organizational goals—and then validate your idea by testing it out with users.

Pro tip: to help answer your questions and create better hypotheses, turn to the people who matter most—your users. 

User interviews help you test your existing assumptions about your website while giving you direct insight into what you need to prioritize. Ask users to share their opinions about everything from UX design and content relevancy, to page speed and usability across devices.

These interviews don’t have to involve weeks of set-up—with Contentsquare’s Interviews tool, you can get started the same day. There’s a pool of 200k+ participants on call to speed up your recruiting, and your interview will be hosted, recorded, and transcribed in one user-friendly place. 

It’s simple enough that you can easily make a habit of regularly checking in with your users to refine your priorities and process.

Contentsquare allows you to share key insights from your interviews with team members easily

5. Tie it all together in a website performance report

Once you’ve evaluated your website from all possible angles and completed the initial research, you can wrap everything up into a website performance report and present your findings. Focus your report around your KPIs, nesting related metrics beneath them. 

By consolidating and comparing the results from each of these types of analysis, you’ll be able to build a report that:

• Pinpoints the key issues affecting your site’s performance

• Develops a website performance summary of changes and actions

• Offers a broad overview of quantitative and qualitative data

• Starts chalking out a game plan for website performance optimization

Keep your presentation user-focused with a data-informed strategy and roadmap. Engage your future audience with visual aids that use graphic elements to present website performance data and insights in a way that’s easy to follow and interpret.

Next steps to website performance reporting

Your website reporting process should adapt as your website evolves. A big part of website performance reporting is ensuring your platform reflects the key values of your product and brand, and helps users meet their needs. 

With the right planning, website performance reporting doesn’t have to be daunting or overwhelming. Instead, it becomes a dependable process you can repeat each time you need to review web performance and continue your journey toward an optimized website.

FAQs about website performance reporting