You’ve heard us discuss best practices for websites before. But, it’s been some time since we’ve done so. And these standards change over time.

Aberdeen Group recently released its research and findings on website management. And we’d like to share some of those with you here.

So let’s dive right in.

Why Care About Your Website’s Performance Anyway?

You know it’s important to offer the best presentation you can for your visitors. What difference does that actually make?

Aberdeen found companies who make a consistent effort at improving their websites for their uses are:

• 4x more likely to have more online sales and revenue
• 2x more likely to have lesser website downtime
• 45% more likely to have a greater insight into performance problems

By the way, if you want to read the whole report, you can find it here.

The Average Patience of the Typical Website Visitor

You’ve heard the stat that most visitors leave your website in just seconds. What’s the reality on that?

According to Aberdeen, 20% of mobile websites report users start leaving their site after just 2 seconds. After 3 seconds, this jumps to 40%.

What Smart Companies Do

When you’re first building your website, your priority is ranking and attracting traffic. That traffic gives you data, so you can understand how people use your website, and what they like and don’t like.

At the beginning, you of course create the best experience possible at that point. But, you realize your website will need changes on an ongoing basis to adapt to preferences in your market.

What do sharp companies do to continue to meet their market’s needs?

Here are some things:

1. Analyze Visitor Conversion Paths

Google Analytics gives you a report called “Users Flow.” You can find it under “Reporting à Audience à Users Flow.”

You’ll see an image like this:

This report shows where users enter your website, and then the path of pages they follow. It’s huge for understanding how people use your website, and where they leave. Then you can figure out what to do at points where they leave to increase their on-site time.

1. Heat Maps

Heat maps show similar data to the Google “Users Flow” you just learned about. However, they help you understand exactly how a visitor uses a certain page in greater depth. They show you exactly what the user clicks on in a certain page.

Check out this one:

Image Credit: Conversion XL

The red indicates the areas of most frequent clicking. This data helps you understand how to build your pages for the best user experience, and possible elements to eliminate.

Those are a couple things forward-thinking companies do to make their websites most useful for their users. You can get as scientific as you want, and it does make a big difference in your sales once you have consistent traffic.