How to tell whether your website is actually working

Ask an owner whether the website works and the answer is usually a feeling. It looks old. We do not get much from it. Somebody said it is slow.

None of that is measurement, and measurement here is cheap.

The five worth watching

• Enquiries, and where they came from. Ask every new enquiry how they found you and write it down. Unglamorous, and it beats every analytics dashboard.
• Indexed pages. Search Console tells you how many of your pages Google has actually stored. If you have two hundred products and six indexed pages, that is the whole problem in one number.
• Impressions and queries. Also free in Search Console. Shows the actual words people searched before seeing you.
• Load time on mobile. PageSpeed Insights, mobile tab. Check it monthly. It drifts upward as people add things.
• Does the form still deliver. Submit your own enquiry form once a month from a phone on mobile data. This catches the failure that costs the most and shows up nowhere.

Three that waste your attention

Total visitor count on its own. A thousand visitors who all leave is worse than forty who enquire. Look at what they did.

Bounce rate as a headline. It means different things on different pages. A high bounce on a page that answered the question and gave a phone number is fine.

Ranking reports from a vendor. Especially for terms you have never heard anybody use. Ask which of those terms produced an enquiry.

Set a baseline before changing anything

Before a rebuild, write down today’s figures. Page weight, load time, indexed pages, monthly enquiries. Five minutes of work.

Without a baseline you will never know what the money bought, and you will be arguing about impressions instead of facts. Every audit we run starts by recording these, for exactly this reason.

The honest caveat

Attribution is getting harder. If an AI assistant recommends you and the buyer phones directly, nothing is recorded anywhere. That is why the first item on the list is asking people how they found you. It is the oldest method and it is becoming the most reliable one again.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.