How To Conduct an Analysis of a Website: 5 Critical Steps + a New Tool

Your website is the face of your business. Are you making a stellar first impression… or one that falls flat?

Website design and development are expensive. Companies pour thousands of dollars into creating, writing, and hosting their website content, hoping it’s enough to attract the right customers and drive growth.

However, most of those companies never see a proper return on that investment. Why is that?

The difference between a successful website and one that stagnates lies in one thing: The proper analysis of a website.

This guide will walk you through the critical steps needed to perform a thorough analysis of your website. By following these steps, you'll uncover valuable insights about your site's performance, user behavior, and areas for improvement. Then, we'll let you in on a secret: our free tool that measures and tracks all six levers of growth to quickly identify what's working and what is causing friction within the buyer journey.

Analysis of a Website: Why Site Analysis Matters

Your website is often the first point of contact between your business and a potential customer. You know it’s critical to nail that first impression… but how can you tell if your site is performing at its best?

A website analysis can offer you the insights you need to drive your digital strategy and boost your bottom line. Let's explore why site analysis is crucial.

Identifying Performance Bottlenecks: A website analysis allows you to pinpoint exactly where your site might be falling short. Is your page load time causing visitors to bounce? Are certain features not working as intended across different devices or browsers? By identifying these issues, you can prioritize improvements that will have the most significant impact on user experience and, ultimately, conversions.
Understanding User Behavior: Every click, scroll, and interaction on your website tells a story about your users' preferences and behaviors. When you analyze user behavior, you can uncover patterns in how visitors navigate your site, which pages they spend the most time on, and where they tend to drop off.
Optimizing Conversion Rates: Site analysis helps you track conversion rates across different pages and marketing channels, allowing you to fine-tune your strategies for maximum return on investment. By understanding which elements of your site are driving conversions and which are creating friction, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your marketing funnel.
Ensuring Compliance: Ensuring your website is accessible to all users is not just good practice — it's often a legal requirement. Regular site analysis helps you stay on top of web standards and accessibility guidelines, ensuring your site is usable by people with various disabilities and compliant with regulations like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Gaining Competitive Insights: Your website doesn't exist in a vacuum. By analyzing your site in comparison to industry leaders and competitors, you can identify gaps in your own digital presence and uncover opportunities for differentiation.

Conducting regular analysis of your website helps you improve user experience, boost conversions, and stay one step ahead of your competitors. With these advantages in mind, let’s now dive into our step-by-step process for analyzing your site.

1. Establish Baseline Metrics And Set Clear Goals

Before you can optimize any aspect of your website, you need to establish a few things: where your performance is right now, and where you want it to be.

First, establish your baseline metrics. Look at:

Traffic patterns
User behavior
Conversion rates

You can measure your site performance using tools like Google Analytics, HotJar, or SEMRush. If you have an advanced tool like HubSpot with built-in reporting and analytics, you can also view your site analytics directly in your website tool.

Once you understand your site's current performance, you’re ready to set goals. Be careful not to set goals based on vanity metrics — you want your goals to align with your overall business objectives. Don’t just look for a surge in overall traffic; aim to boost traffic that results in highly qualified leads.

Pro tip: Don't just set it and forget it. Regularly review and adjust your goals based on performance data and changing business priorities. This agile approach ensures your website strategy remains aligned with your evolving business needs.

2. Analyze The Buyer Journey On Your Website

Your website should be more than just a brochure about your brand and offerings. If you want your site to succeed, your pages must guide visitors through the stages of the buyer journey.

As a result, the next step of your website analysis is mapping out your ideal buying journey. What path will your buyer personas take through your site, guiding them from awareness to an ultimate conversion? Does your website currently make that path simple and frictionless?

Visualize your site and study the user behavior you gathered in the last step. Look for discrepancies between the current path users take and the ideal journey. Are users dropping off at unexpected points? Are they skipping important pages in the sequence?

Identifying friction points is crucial. High bounce rates, abandoned forms, or low click-through rates on CTAs can all indicate areas where the user experience is breaking down. Pay special attention to crucial conversion pages like pricing tables or sign-up forms.

Pro tip: Remember to make all your content customer-focused! Gear all your content toward the buyer journey on every page at every stage. No page should be a dead end — be sure that every page has a clear call-to-action and next step.

3. Evaluate Your Core Positioning and Messaging

Your website should clearly communicate your unique value proposition within seconds of a visitor landing on your page. This differentiator is especially crucial in the B2B market, where solutions can be complicated, and many companies offer similar products or solutions.

In step three of your website analysis, review your messaging for clarity, consistency, and resonance. Are you speaking your customer's language, or are you relying too heavily on industry jargon? Does your messaging address the specific pain points of your target audience?

When evaluating your value proposition, ensure it's not just stated but demonstrated throughout your site. Use case studies, testimonials, and concrete examples to support your claims and build credibility. Social proof is vital — your happy customers’ words will be more impactful than your most carefully honed marketing copy every time.

Pro tip: Your messaging should evolve as your product and market do. Regularly revisit your core messaging to ensure it still accurately reflects your offering and resonates with your target audience.

4. Assess Your Lead Gen Potential

Often, the primary goal of B2B marketing isn’t to make a sale — we want to book a meeting! As a result, lead generation is the primary goal of your website. Step four of how to conduct an analysis of a website is to assess your current site’s lead gen potential.

Start by auditing your current lead magnets. Are they providing genuine value to your target audience? Do they align with different stages of the buyer journey?

Analyze the performance of your lead magnets not just in terms of download rates but also in terms of lead quality. A high-performing lead magnet should attract many downloads and result in qualified leads that are more likely to convert to customers. When analyzing conversion rates, look beyond the overall site conversion rate. Break it down by traffic source, landing page, and user segment to identify specific areas for improvement.

Pro tip: Don't neglect post-conversion optimization. The experience a lead has immediately after converting has a major impact on the likelihood that the lead becomes a customer. Make sure you optimize your thank you pages, welcome emails, and follow-up sequences for engagement and next steps.

5. Audit for UX

User experience can make or break your website.

The final step of our website analysis process is auditing for UX. Start with technical performance: use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze load times and identify bottlenecks. Modern website visitors expect lightning-fast load times, so any delays in page load speed can hurt your conversion rates and increase bounce rates.

Mobile responsiveness is another non-negotiable. Test your site across various devices and screen sizes to ensure a consistent, user-friendly experience whether a visitor is on mobile or desktop.

You’ll also want to make sure your site is easy to navigate. Take a close look at your site structure. Is it intuitive for new visitors? Does it guide users toward key actions? Do you have an overwhelming number of links on your homepage? Try to focus on driving clicks deeper into your funnel on every page without overwhelming visitors with options.

Pay attention to accessibility as well. Ensuring your site is usable by people with disabilities not only expands your potential user base but is also increasingly important from a legal standpoint.

Pro tip: While conducting your UX audit, don't forget the little details. It’s easy to overlook things like meta descriptions, page titles, header tags, and alt text on images, but these are critical details for SEO potential and user experience.

Analysis of a Website: Get the Most From Your Site Analysis

The five critical steps we've explored provide a solid foundation for analyzing your website's performance. However, let's face it: manually managing all these aspects can quickly become overwhelming. The sheer volume of data and the complexity of modern websites can make this process challenging to manage without the right tools.

To truly harness the power of website analysis and drive meaningful growth, you need the right tools in your arsenal. That's where our free resource, the Growth Grader, comes into play.

The Growth Grader allows you to score your site on the six levers of growth. This comprehensive assessment provides a clear picture of where your website is crushing it and where it's falling short.

Ready to take your website analysis to the next level? Check out the Growth Grader for free today and unlock the full potential of your SaaS website.

Mallory is a Growth Marketer at Lean Labs, working with brands to ignite their growth engine through conceptualizing, implementing, and optimizing growth marketing strategies.

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