How to measure website success: metrics, benchmarks and influences

When you’re investing time and money in a website project, you want to ensure it delivers real business impact.

Identifying, measuring and monitoring key website metrics not only helps you put some kind of quantitative value on the success of your website project and ensure you get return on investment, but also give you direction in terms of future development.

In this post, we’ll explore:

• The key types of website metrics you should measure to monitor the success of your project
• Benchmarking around some key website metrics
• The factors that influence your website metrics

Types of website metrics

The key metrics you can use to measure the success of your website can be grouped into three categories:

• Performance metrics: how well your website loads, operates, and whether it’s accessible
• Engagement metrics: how visitors interact with your site and your content.
• Conversion metrics: how effectively your website turns visitors into leads and customers

Next we’ll dig into each type of website metric, what kind of things they measure and what impacts them.

Website performance metrics

Before a visitor ever engages with your content or considers taking action, your website’s performance sets the tone. Website performance metrics focus on how quickly your site loads, how smoothly it functions across devices, and whether it’s accessible to all users. These technical elements might seem like they mainly impact user experience, but they can also influence things like search visibility, as search engines consider site performance as an important ranking factor.
Performance metrics include:

• Speed and load efficiency: how fast pages on your website load, and how the content and elements within them load to ensure users can interact as quickly as possible.
• Uptime and downtime: put simply, how much your website is “up” (live and functioning as expected).
• Core Web Vitals: Google’s Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that dig a little deeper into load speed to determine how quickly your site becomes partially or fully interactive:
  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long it takes for the largest element on the page to load in the user’s browser window, usually a header image or main text element.
  • Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly your site responds when a user interacts with it; i.e. clicking/tapping a button, link or using a form.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures how much the elements on your page move around as it loads.

Google Core Web Vitals report showing LCP and CLS

Other factors like mobile responsiveness and accessibility are also important to site performance, but these are harder to quantify with specific metrics. Tools like Google Lighthouse can help you get a “score” for these aspects of your website and provide actionable suggestions for improvements.

Performance benchmarking

To state the obvious, you want your website to be as quick, high-performing and stable as possible. If it feels too slow or inefficient, then it probably is. But there are a few benchmarks you can aim for as a minimum (or maximum) standard.

• LCP: less than 2.4 seconds
• INP: less than 200ms
• CLS: less than 0.1
• Uptime: 99.9% or higher

Factors influencing performance metrics

The main factors that will influence the performance of your website are initial setup and how it’s designed and developed.

• Clean, efficient code, thoughtful design and a streamlined backend.
• Utilising modern infrastructure and architecture, including headless for additional performance improvements.
• Stable server and infrastructure that’s suited to your requirements and able to scale – i.e. it won’t fall over if you have an uplift in traffic.
• Ongoing support and maintenance to stay on top of any technical issues and continue to improve performance with the latest technologies and techniques available.

Website engagement metrics

Fast loading and high performance mean visitors are more likely to land on your website and stick around. From there, it’s a question of how long they stay and how deeply they engage with your content; and more engagement means an increased likelihood they’ll turn from a visitor into a customer (which we’ll cover in the next section).

Engagement metrics include:

• Visits/sessions and users: a top-level metric for measuring volume of traffic. Sessions are different from users, as a single user can have multiple sessions.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of users that navigate away from your site after viewing only one page. Note that the latest version of Google Analytics (GA4) now reports this by default as “engagement rate” – which is essentially the other way around; the percentage of users that stay on the page.
• In-session metrics: including average session length, pages per session, and scroll depth; these indicate how engaged users are and how useful they find your content.
• Returning vs new users: returning users signal ongoing interest; new users indicate audience growth. A healthy ratio helps grow reach and improve conversions.
• Click-through rate (CTR): usually a precursor to conversion (which we’ll discuss shortly), this indicates the percentage of users that click to take a further action (.e.g visit a contact page or download resource).

Engagement benchmarking

A lot of website engagement metrics depend on what success looks like for your business as well as average rates for the industry you’re in.

• Traffic metrics are difficult to benchmark as they depend on a lot of factors like the size of your business and the effectiveness of your overall marketing.
• Generally, a good bounce rate is 40% or lower – though it’s important to interpret this in context. If for example you have a landing page that gets a lot of traffic and conversions, this might contribute to a higher bounce rate, as users will land on that page, perform the conversion action and then navigate away.
• A good returning vs new user ratio depends on your industry and content, but ideally it should fall between 30-50%.

Factors influencing engagement metrics

As we start to look at more in-depth metrics around engagement with your website, the factors influencing them become a bit more complex and we have to look at the wider picture; your business and its goals, your industry, your marketing strategy, etc.

• Traffic is influenced by your total addressable market (i.e., the number of people interested in your offering), and the overall effectiveness of your marketing – whether through SEO, PPC, email, or traditional advertising.
• In-session metrics are broadly influenced by effective UX design and your content; how useful and relevant your website is to the user.
• Returning vs new users again will depend on the user experience; if a user has a positive experience on your website they’ll be more likely to return.
• CTR is largely influenced by design – for example, whether calls-to-action are clear and easy to navigate, and whether your copy is persuasive.

Website conversion metrics

Once a user is on your site and engaged, the next step is prompting them to take action. Having traffic, a good balance of new and returning users, and a low bounce rate is great, but you want your website to bring in actual value and deliver a return on investment. Which is where conversion comes in.

Conversion metrics include:

• Conversion rate: the percentage of users who “convert” by completing a call-to-action (e.g. enquiry, download, sign-up, or purchase).
• Goal completions: the total number of conversions completed. It’s best used in conjunction with conversion rate as total completions will scale with traffic and other factors like CTR.
• Exit rate: different to bounce rate, the percentage of users who drop off before completing a conversion (e.g. abandoning a checkout process).

Conversion benchmarking

Conversion is probably the trickiest metric to benchmark, as it depends on a greater number of factors. You can refer to typical conversion rates for websites in your industry for guidance, but it’s generally a better idea to set this internally. You can do this by working backwards from your wider business goals; number of sales you need, how many leads you need to achieve this, and therefore how many conversions your website must deliver to meet those goals – helping you determine an ideal conversion rate.

Factors influencing conversion metrics

Factors that influence how well your website converts are similar to those that influence engagement.

• Effective UX design focused on conversion, along with persuasive copy, will help guide users towards completing key actions.
• The commercial context will also influence conversion; your industry, your product/service, what the conversion is, your position within the market, pricing (if provided).

Key takeaways

• Website success is best measured through three key categories of metric: performance, engagement, and conversion.
• Performance metrics are vital for user experience and search visibility.
• Engagement metrics reveal how users interact with your content and can signal their intent and interest.
• Conversion metrics focus on the actual business value of your site and return on investment – tracking how well your site turns visitors into leads or customers.
• Many metrics are context-dependent, so benchmarks should be interpreted based on your industry, audience, and business goals rather than as universal targets.
• Good design, fast performance, and relevant content all contribute to strong website metrics, making ongoing review, optimisation and maintenance essential for success.

Ready to launch a successful website project? Get in touch to talk about your goals and how we could help.