An introduction on how to analyze websites so you can optimize your site's performance in relation to user behavior, SEO, speed, competition, and traffic.
Start analyzing your website with Hotjar today so you can learn more about what people do on your website—and why.
Almost every guide to website analysis will tell you that you can evaluate a site’s performance by doing any or all of these actions:
They aren’t wrong, and we cover the same practices later on in this guide. But we think website speed, SEO, and competitor and traffic analysis only ever tell part of the story behind your website’s performance.
The missing piece in your website analysis is understanding your visitors, users, and customers, and giving them what they came for so they don't just land on your perfectly optimized site—they stay on it, use it, and keep coming back. And that’s where our guide begins.
Website analysis is the practice of analyzing, then testing and optimizing, a website's performance.
Any site can benefit from some form of website analysis if the results are then used to improve it—for example, by reducing page size to increase overall loading speed or optimizing a landing page with lots of traffic for more conversions.
→ Eager to start improving your website already? Explore our curated list of website optimization tools!
We can all agree it's important to have a site that’s fast, ranks well on Google, and doesn’t have major usability issues. We can also agree that it's equally important for your business to understand your competitive landscape and maximize the web traffic that gets to your site.
Standard website analysis helps you achieve all of the above—with a caveat; it won't give you a clear competitive advantage because your competitors are doing it, too. They all have access to the same SEO, performance, and traffic tools you use as well.
But here’s another insight you can leverage that’s 100% unique to your website: your users’ perspective.
Finding out how they got to your site, what they want from it, how they’re experience it, what’s working or not working for them—this will give you the holistic insight you need to build a great experience for the people who visit your website day in and day out.
A user-centric list of website analysis methodsYour users are the extra source of insights you need to grow your website and business—through interaction, they know what’s working, and what’s not on your website. Behavior analytics tools (like Hotjar 👋) help you analyze this user behavior and answer valuable business questions, such as:
Let’s look at some of the noteworthy ways your overall website analysis strategy can benefit from including behavior analytics.
Knowing the number of views a particular landing page receives will only get you so far—far more important knowledge lies in understanding your users’ behavior. What’s working for them on the page? Where are they struggling? Naturally, you’ll want to examine the functionality of your page(s) to uncover (and start fixing) potential website issues.
Heatmaps are a great way to understand what users do on your website: they aggregate behavior on a page by highlighting the buttons, CTAs, and other elements your visitors interact with, scroll past, or ignore. They’re an effective data visualization tool that can make an impression on even the most numbers-averse among us.
💡Pro tip: analyze how customers interact with your site or product with click, scroll, and move maps in Hotjar Heatmaps. Use Engagement zones to combine data from all three heatmaps into a single view.
Visualize user engagement on your site with Heatmaps tools like Engagement zones