Measuring success
How do you know whether your website is actually working?
Page views alone don't tell you much. The right starting point is the commercial job the site is meant to do — generate enquiries, support a sales process, build trust — and then choosing the metrics that show whether it's doing that.
Metric groups
Group your metrics by what they actually tell you.
We're not going to give you benchmark numbers — averages depend enormously on industry, location and business model, and quoting one here would be a guess dressed up as fact. What matters more is picking the right categories.
| Group | What to look at |
|---|---|
| Lead generation | Qualified enquiries, calls, form submissions, booked consultations. |
| Search | Impressions, clicks, ranking visibility, organic landing pages. |
| Conversion | Conversion rate, enquiry completion, CTA interaction where useful. |
| Engagement | Time on page, scroll depth and similar — only where they're genuinely commercially relevant, which is worth saying plainly rather than assuming. |
| Business outcome | Lead quality, quote opportunities, booked work, revenue attribution where it can be tracked reliably. |
Keep it simple
Don't drown in dashboards.
It's easy to end up watching dozens of numbers that don't actually connect to a decision. A small number of metrics, chosen because they're tied to real objectives, is more useful than a dashboard that tracks everything available.
Two different tools
Analytics versus Search Console.
Analytics can tell you what visitors did once they arrived — pages viewed, forms submitted, time spent — but it can't tell you why someone found you in the first place or how visible you are in search results.
Search Console shows the search side: what your site is shown for, how often, and whether people click through. It can't tell you what happens after someone lands on the page. You generally need both to get the full picture.
Redesigns
Record a baseline before you launch.
Before a redesign goes live, record where things currently stand — traffic, enquiries, rankings, conversion rate. Without that baseline, it's impossible to say honestly afterwards whether the new site actually improved anything.
The most important section
Lead quality matters more than vanity traffic.
A website that generates fewer but genuinely useful enquiries is doing its job better than one that generates a lot of traffic and very few real leads. If you only measure one thing properly, measure whether the enquiries coming through are ones you actually want.
If enquiries have dropped or never really got going, see website not generating enquiries. For search visibility, see SEO, for turning visitors into enquiries see conversion optimisation, for lead-focused builds see lead generation websites, and for planning a rebuild see our website redesign checklist.
Before you ask
Measuring website success, answered plainly.
Not sure your current setup even tracks the right things? Get in touch.
Next step
Not sure if your website is actually working?
Let's look past the traffic numbers.
We'll help you work out which metrics actually matter for your business, and set up the tracking to see them properly.