Commissioning a New WordPress Website: What Does Success Look Like?

In the web design world, we define success by a series of key performance indicators (KPIs). These are quantifiable measurements, agreed to beforehand, that reflect the critical success factors of the new website.

By asking a few simple questions, you will greatly enhance the success of your new website.

Here at Moove Agency, we’ve built a good number of websites since we started back in 2010. This experience has given us a great insight into what works and what doesn’t. We thought we’d make life easier for you and compile a list of metrics that we believe are the best way to measure your website’s success. Here they are.

Lead generation

For many websites, the most important goal will be lead generation: capturing details of incoming users or having them call your sales team directly. If that’s the case, metrics you would track are:

  1. Number of enquiries (via email or web form)
  2. Number of white paper downloads
  3. Number of phone calls from website visitors

User engagement

A lot of websites aim to provide more information and enhance their company’s credibility. You can track and judge your user engagement success with these metrics:

  1. Number of visitors
  2. Average visit duration
  3. Average pages visited
  4. Bounce rate
  5. Number of social media shares

Acquisition metrics

If you’re looking to create or increase awareness about your organisation or product, the following metrics will be a good indicator of how successful your marketing is. The ‘New vs Returning Visitors’ metric will be especially interesting, as it shows the performance of your marketing over time.

  1. Number of total visits
  2. Number of unique visits
  3. New visitors vs returning visitors
  4. Number of inbound links

Conclusion

Your most important metrics will probably be the lead-generation numbers. But we recommend keeping a close eye on acquisition metrics too. Why? Because the more traffic your website receives, the more sales or leads it will generate.

Finally, we advise measuring all the above metrics on a month-by-month basis. Track them every month for at least a year. That way, you’ll see how effective your new website really is. Our experience shows that the numbers tend to rise over a period of 6 to 12 months.

One final tip: to track many of these metrics, you can simply use Google Analytics. For more advanced tracking (such as phone calls generated from your website), you’ll need third-party services such as ResponseTap, or SproutSocial for social media engagement metrics.

Talk to a web specialist today

Drop us an email or call us on 020 3372 5696.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Stay up-to-date on the latest WordPress, design and marketing trends with our quarterly email newsletter.
Subscribe now >>

Let's connect