Saturday, April 15, 2023
Best tools for website analysis and monitoring
You've created your website, what's next?
Building a website is just the first step of the website lifecycle. Keeping an eye on how your website is performing is important if you want to succeed.
Monitoring your website and analyzing results can help you to:
- Discover security issues
- Avoid errors
- Improve performance
- Improve SEO ranking
- Optimize your website for conversions
- Keep information up to date
- Improve user experience
These are essential things if you want to grow your business and online presence. In this article, we will look into different website analysis and monitoring tools.
Some of the tools listed below focus on quantitative analysis while others are all about qualitative analysis. To be successful, you need to have both. It is also important to develop a habit of monitoring your website's health on a regular basis since this is not a one-time task.
We will start with some essential tools and move on to some hidden gems, not every website owner knows about. Move through the list as some of the tools can give you a competitive advantage over your rivals.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is probably the best-known website analysis tool on the market. It allows you to monitor and analyze the website's traffic and visitor behavior.
Google Analytics is an essential tool, although the latest version may require additional customization to create meaningful reports.
Hotjar
Another widely used tool is more focused on qualitative rather than quantitative analysis. With Hotjar, you can get information about what your customers are doing on your website and how they feel about you. It offers heat maps, session recordings, and surveys.
It is also important to mention that you can quickly grow out of the free version.
HubSpot
While it is more CRM rather than an analytical tool, it can still be very useful since you receive data about your customers and their interaction with your website. HubSpot can give you qualitative data to be used to improve your sales and marketing funnels.
HubSpot is a very powerful multidisciplinary tool that is appreciated by marketing and sales experts. The downside is that going premium will cost you thousands and thousands of dollars.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is event-based analytics for websites that allow you to monitor what happens to your customers. Mixpanel is focused on moving initiatives to improve your website forward and analyzing the results by receiving customer feedback and reactions to your changes.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is another popular analytics tool to monitor your visitors' flow and behavior. The benefit of Kissmetrics is that it can be easily tied to a specific visitor and help to discover the drop-off point.
Kissmetrics is well-accepted among marketing professionals since it allows tracking core metrics for Saas products and e-commerce solutions.
Adobe Analytics
https://business.adobe.com/products/analytics/
Adobe is another analytics platform as an alternative to Google Analytics to analyze your website traffic. It allows you to segment your customers based on different characteristics and understand how they are different from each other.
In addition, Adobe Analytics is offering AI tools to help you predict and model customer behavior.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a powerful tool to help you with SEO rankings. It allows you to audit and optimize your website in terms of SEO, discover new content opportunities, track ranking progress, and find the right keywords.
Ahrefs also allows you to keep an eye on your competitors to see how they are doing with their SEO.
Semrush
Another powerful SEO tool for your website and business is Semrush. It allows you to perform keyword research, track the keyword strategies of your competitors, perform SEO audits, and more.
Semrush can also help you with discovering backlink opportunities which is essential for high SEO rankings.
Google PageSpeed Insights
A widely discussed tool, Google PageSpeed Insights allows you to audit your website for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. The benefit of PageSpeed Insights is that it provides you with exact pain points when it comes to your website on desktop and mobile.
It is important to mention that many web development professionals have mixed feelings about PageSpeed Insights and recommend not blindly following all of the suggestions.
GTMetrix
GTMetrix is the most popular website performance testing and monitoring tool for web professionals. It allows you to audit your website for performance and structure along with giving insights from the web vitals.
Not like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix is much more accepted by web developers and is considered to be more accurate.
A11Y Color
A11Y Color validation tool allows you to understand how good is your website in terms of color contrast. Color contrast is important when it comes to accessibility as it allows more people to access and use your website.
New Relic
New Relic is a powerful all-in-one tool to monitor your website's health and performance. New Relic allows you to monitor security, connections, availability, integrations, and other core performance and availability indicators.
Intruder
Intruder is a powerful cloud-based vulnerability scanner to help you discover the security weaknesses of your website and infrastructure. It will also prioritize results based on the importance of vulnerability.
Uptrends
Uptrends is a health monitoring tool for your website that allows you to discover problems with your site performance. It allows you to follow not only your site but also API performance if this is a part of your business. It can also help you to monitor 3rd party services you are relying on in terms of infrastructure or delivery.
MailChimp
Even though MailChimp is considered an email marketing tool, it provides you with analytics and reporting to follow your website performance. Marketing experts use MailChimp to discover opportunities for their marketing campaigns related to websites and build strategies.
Freshping
https://www.freshworks.com/website-monitoring/
Freshping is a free uptime monitoring tool from Freshworks. It allows you to easily keep an eye on your uptime to see if your website is down. Freshping will also provide you with data about average response times to see the workload.
Pingdom
Pingdom is a premium uptime monitoring tool that can help you keep an eye on your uptime and send detailed alerts whenever your website goes down. Pingdom will also provide you with helpful insights about your website performance.
Atarim
Atarim is a visual collaboration tool made for agencies and businesses to become more efficient when it comes to change management. While it is more related to the web development stage, you can still benefit from Atarim when working on website improvements.
Omnisome
Omnisome is a customer satisfaction and feedback survey that allows you to receive feedback directly from your clients while they are browsing your website. It also provides you with the satisfaction score calculated from responses.
The unique feature of Omnisome is milestone annotations that allow you to annotate your changes or events to see how they impact your customer satisfaction.
Omnisome has a powerful free version with high limits to get you started easily.
Are you ready to build better products?
Conclusions
There are many tools out there to monitor and analyze your website. Different tools serve different purposes and different team members may require different metrics.
The most important part of choosing website monitoring tools is not the choice itself but consistency and habit of using them. If you decide to go with a specific tool, make sure to use it on a regular basis since website monitoring, just like customer experience, is not a one-time thing.
In many cases, businesses choose to outsource website analysis and monitoring to web agencies as a part of the maintenance service. It can help them to focus on their. business while having a team of professionals to take care of their website.
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