Running a WordPress site without tracking key website metrics is like flying a plane without instruments. You‘re just guessing which direction to go.
Making data-driven decisions is crucial for WordPress success today.
Website metrics provide the insights you need to confidently grow your traffic, leads and revenue. They enable continuous optimization of your website for better results over time.
In this comprehensive guide as a webmaster with over 15 years of experience, I will share how to track the 10 most important website metrics for WordPress.
I‘ll explain what each metric means, why it matters, and most importantly – how to analyze and apply the data to maximize your success.
Let‘s get started!
Contents
Why Website Metrics Matter
Here are 5 key reasons why you should be measuring website analytics metrics:
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Identify What‘s Working
Analytics reveals which content, campaigns and traffic sources resonate best with your audience. You can double down on what‘s working.
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Pinpoint Underperforming Areas
Metrics expose pain points like high bounce rates, slow pages and leaked funnel conversions. You can diagnose issues and improve.
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Track Progress Over Time
Website metrics allow you to benchmark performance and track changes over weeks, months and years. You can quantify growth.
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Optimize Pages for Conversions
By analyzing visitor behavior, you can continuously test and refine pages to boost optins, sales and other conversions.
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Uncover New Opportunities
Detailed metrics may reveal hidden insights that inspire new content ideas, products, traffic channels and revenue streams.
In short, analytics metrics enable data-informed decisions instead of guesses. They provide the feedback you need to confidently grow your WordPress website traffic, leads and sales.
How to Track Website Metrics
When it comes to website analytics, Google Analytics is the gold standard. It‘s free and provides detailed tracking of all key website metrics.
The easiest way to set up Google Analytics on WordPress is using MonsterInsights.
MonsterInsights seamlessly integrates with WordPress and Google Analytics. Over 3 million websites use it to access analytics directly within their WordPress dashboard.
The plugin also comes with advanced tracking features like:
- Enhanced eCommerce Tracking
- Custom Dimensions
- Google Analytics Dashboard Widget
- Site Speed Tracking
- Form Conversion Tracking
- Scroll Depth Tracking
- Outbound Link Tracking
And more…
To get started, install and activate MonsterInsights, then follow the setup wizard to connect your Google Analytics account.
You‘ll then be able to access all your metrics and insights directly within your WordPress admin area for analysis.
Now let‘s dive into the 10 most important website metrics to track for WordPress success:
1. Sessions
Sessions represent the number of visits to your website over a given time frame. It indicates your overall traffic volume.
For example, if you received 500 sessions per day last month, it means 500 visits landed on your site daily.
Monitoring sessions helps answer critical questions like:
- Is my traffic increasing or decreasing?
- How much website traffic do I receive daily, weekly, monthly and yearly?
- How does my traffic volume compare before and after launching a campaign?
- What is the impact of seasonality on my website traffic?
Experts recommend analyzing sessions data:
- Week-over-week to measure growth
- Month-over-month to identify trends
- Year-over-year to track long-term progress
Sudden drops in website sessions could indicate technical issues like site downtime. Spikes may reveal viral content that attracted unusual levels of traffic.
Actionable Insights:
- Compare sessions before/after launching initiatives to quantify impact
- Set goals for monthly or yearly traffic growth
- Expand efforts that increase sessions, pause ones that don‘t
- Address technical issues reducing traffic
Sessions provide a 30,000 foot view of your overall website traffic. It serves as the foundation for digging deeper into engagement and conversions.
2. Pageviews
While sessions represent total visits, Pageviews measure the number of pages viewed across all those visits.
Pageviews indicate how many times your pages were viewed or loaded by visitors. More pageviews mean visitors are clicking and browsing deeper into your site.
For example, if your blog received 100 sessions (visits) yesterday, and a total of 250 pageviews, then each session viewed 2.5 pages on average.
A single visit can have multiple pageviews. Pageviews help identify your most popular content.
You can track pageviews for:
- The entire website
- Specific blog posts or pages
- Content categories or sections
- Authors, campaigns, and other filters
Experts recommend analyzing pageviews to:
- Compare traffic before/after launching a new piece of content
- Identify your most popular content for further promotion
- Relate pageviews to business outcomes like email subscribers
- Set goals for pageviews and page depth as a measure of engagement
Actionable Insights:
- Create more content around popular topics, subjects and formats
- Further promote and optimize high traffic pages
- Improve low traffic pages by enhancing content, on-page SEO and promotion
Pageviews help quantify user engagement and indicate your most valuable website content.
3. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of visits that land on just one page before exiting your site.
For example, if you received 100 sessions yesterday, and 50 of them bounced after viewing only one page, your bounce rate would be 50%.
A high bounce rate suggests your content doesn‘t provide enough value to keep visitors engaged. They quickly leave because your pages miss the mark.
Ideally, you want to minimize bounce rates across your website. Pages with high bounce rates need optimization.
Experts recommend analyzing bounce rate to:
- Identify which pages and content fail to engage visitors
- Set benchmarks for acceptable bounce rates by page type
- Measure changes after optimizing page speed, layout, content etc.
- Relate bounce rate to business metrics like converting subscribers
Actionable Insights:
- Improve page load speed and navigation for high bounce rate pages
- Strengthen content quality, visuals and calls to action
- Remove friction points causing visitors to leave
- Test new variations of high bounce rate pages
Reducing bounce rates results in more engaged visitors who convert better.
4. Traffic Sources
Your website traffic comes from different sources. Understanding your traffic sources is crucial.
Some key sources include:
- Organic – Visitors from search engines like Google
- Referral – Traffic from other websites linking to you
- Direct – Visitors typing your URL directly
- Social – Traffic from social media sites
- Email – Clicks from email marketing campaigns
- Paid – Visitors from paid ads and campaigns
Analyzing your traffic sources helps answer:
- Which sources deliver the most valuable visitors?
- Which channels offer the biggest opportunities for more traffic?
- Which initiatives and partnerships drive significant traffic?
This enables you to double down on high-performing channels and stop wasting efforts on ineffective ones.
Experts recommend analyzing traffic source data to:
- Identify the best sources of quality traffic
- Set benchmarks for performance by source
- Reduce dependence on overly dominant sources
- Optimize pages and content for top channels
Actionable Insights:
- Improve SEO to increase higher converting organic traffic
- Strengthen partnerships and outreach for better referrals
- Promote top content on social media and via email
- Calculate ROI of paid traffic sources
Diversifying and optimizing your traffic sources results in more website visitors.
5. Landing Pages
Your website‘s landing pages play a crucial role in engaging visitors and driving conversions.
Analyzing your top landing pages provides insight into:
- The most popular entry pages into your site
- How well those pages convert visitors
- Which pages need further optimization
For example, you may find blog posts generate high traffic but poor conversions compared to targeted landing pages.
Key landing page metrics to analyze:
- Pageviews
- Bounce rates
- Time on page
- Calls to action
Experts recommend tracking top landing pages to:
- Identify the pages visitors use to enter your site
- Set benchmarks for an ‘excellent‘ landing page
- Make changes to improve poor performing pages
- Promote already high-performing landing pages
Actionable Insights:
- Strengthen weak landing pages by improving content, speed and design
- Add conversion elements like optins and demos to popular landing pages
- Promote high-traffic landing pages in marketing campaigns
- Replace poor landing pages in navigation menus and site architecture
Optimizing your landing pages results in lower bounce rates and higher conversions.
6. Exit Pages
Your website‘s exit pages are the last pages visitors view before leaving your site.
A high exit rate indicates your page missed the mark somehow. Visitors decided to abandon your site instead of browsing further.
Analyzing top exit pages helps uncover:
- Usability issues frustrating visitors
- Confusing site navigation and menus
- Poor page load speeds
- Lack of engagement and value
Experts recommend minimizing exit rates by:
- Identifying your top exit pages for further optimization
- Setting benchmark exit rates by page type
- Relating exit rate to key metrics like conversion rates
- Improving page speed, clarity and engagement
Actionable Insights:
- Shorten lengthy pages with too much content
- Simplify confusing navigation and menus
- Improve technical performance for slow pages
- Add more value through visuals, examples and stats
- Include links to related content across your site
Reducing your exit rate results in visitors browsing more pages and converting better.
7. Time on Site
Time on site indicates how long visitors stay and engage with your website.
Longer time on site shows you deliver compelling content. Short time periods reveal engaged visitors.
Benchmarks for time on site vary based on your:
- Website type
- Content format
- Page objective
For example, blogs can average 2-3 minutes while landing pages may aim for 3-4 minutes.
Experts recommend analyzing time on site to:
- Set realistic engagement goals by page type
- Identify pages that fail to engage visitors
- Relate to conversion rates and sales revenue
- Benchmark before/after making page optimizations
Actionable Insights:
- Improve readability through clearer content structure
- Add more engaging elements like visuals and examples
- Reduce friction points like excess popups
- Promote in-depth content like guides and tutorials
More time on site shows your content quality drives engagement.
8. Bounces by Page Depth
Along with overall bounce rate, you should track bounces by page depth. This reveals how far visitors scroll before leaving.
For example, you may see:
- 40% of bounces leave after scrolling 25% down
- 30% of bounces leave after scrolling 50% down
- 10% of bounces leave after scrolling 90% down
This metric is a proxy for engagement. Visitors who scroll further are more engaged in your content before exiting.
Experts recommend using scroll depth data to:
- Gauge engagement at different parts of each page
- Identify weak page sections that cause exits
- Test improvements to see if people scroll further
Actionable Insights:
- Shorten overly long pages that people abandon reading
- Add more headers and visuals to lengthy content sections
- Improve readability by breaking up dense paragraphs
- Feature value propositions and engagement elements above the fold
Increasing page scroll depth results in more engaged visitors.
9. Site Speed
Your website‘s speed significantly impacts visitor experience, engagement and conversions.
Faster sites provide a smoother experience. Slower speeds increase abandonment.
Important site speed metrics to track include:
- Page load time – How long for pages to fully load
- TTFB – Time to first byte or initial server response
- Page size – Total KB resources comprising pages
- Requests – Number of files requested
Site speed benchmarks for WordPress:
| Metric | Good | Average | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Page load time | < 2s | 2s – 4s | > 4s |
| TTFB | < 200ms | 200ms – 600ms | > 600ms |
| Page size | < 1MB | 1MB – 3MB | > 3MB |
| Requests | < 30 | 30 – 60 | > 60 |
Experts recommend analyzing site speed to:
- Set speed benchmarks for your site to maintain
- Identify technical problems slowing your site
- Continuously monitor site speed month-over-month
- Relate speed metrics to visitor behavior and conversions
Actionable Insights:
- Reduce page size through image optimization
- Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML
- Enable browser caching
- Upgrade web hosting plan
Improving site speed results in lower bounce rates and higher conversions.
10. Conversions
Ultimately, the success of your WordPress site depends on conversions.
Conversions could be:
- Email subscribers
- Free trial signups
- Ebook downloads
- Online course enrollments
- Product purchases
- Quote requests
Tracking your key conversions reveals:
- Your website‘s ROIs
- Top converting pages
- Highest value visitor acquisition channels
- Leaks within your conversion funnel
Experts recommend tracking conversions to:
- Calculate ROI for business insights
- Set conversion benchmark goals
- Identify top converting traffic sources
- Optimize each step of your funnel
- Run A/B tests to lift conversions
Actionable Insights:
- Promote top converting pages and content
- Improve low conversions pages by changing calls to action
- Double down on the most valuable visitor traffic sources
- Fix signup form, shopping cart and other funnel leaks
Higher conversions result in growing your email list, sales and revenues over time.
How to Analyze Metrics to Optimize WordPress
Once you‘re tracking website metrics, the real value comes from analysis and optimization.
Here are proven ways to apply analytics insights to improve your WordPress site:
1. Set Benchmarks
Determine realistic goals for each metric to maintain or achieve monthly. For example, target site speed under 2s page load and 5% max bounce rate.
2. Monitor Trends
Analyze weekly, monthly and annual trends to quantify growth and track seasonality impacts.
3. Compare Before/After Changes
Measure how new content, campaigns and optimizations impact metrics week-over-week and month-over-month.
4. Identify Quick Wins
Find low hanging fruit opportunities to quickly boost metrics, like promoting an already popular post.
5. Diagnose Underperforming Pages
Pinpoint low traffic, high bounce and exit rate pages that need further optimization.
6. Improve Low Converting Funnel Steps
Tighten up leaks within your conversion funnel, like shopping cart abandonment.
7. Double Down on High Performing Areas
Do more of what already resonates, such as promoting your top converting landing pages.
8. Brainstorm Optimization Ideas
Let data gaps inspire testing new content formats, landing pages, offers and more.
Regularly analyzing your metrics enables data-informed optimization of your WordPress website for continuous improvement over time.
Key Takeaways
Here are the most important points for successfully tracking metrics for WordPress:
- Leverage MonsterInsights to easily connect Google Analytics
- Analyze sessions, bounce rate, sources, speed and conversions
- Set benchmarks to identify optimization opportunities
- Compare before/after changes to quantify impact
- Diagnose underperforming pages and funnel leaks
- Double down on high-traffic sources and landing pages
- Improve low conversions by testing page variations
- Regularly monitor metrics month-over-month to track growth
Website metrics empower you to make smart decisions that lift traffic, engagement and conversions for your WordPress site.
What key website metrics will you start tracking? Let me know in the comments section below!
