You've built your site. It has sat there and except for an initial wave of success after it was first launched it has gradually died a death and now it feels like a dead weight and you don't know what to do. Well this might be one of any number of sequence of events that have led you to read this article on Improving Your Websites Performance, including those who are web savvy and know that the job of improving your website is never ending and who continually trawl t'internet for every better ways of improving your site.

And this is crucial. Nothing is static on t'internet and no sooner do you think you have cracked it than you realise that your competitor has just thrown a curve ball and wham! you're back to square 1.

Let's imagine my first scenario is true of your site. You may have spent a considerable sum with a 'web designer' or put the site together yourself and have had a few hits and sales at the beginning but have nothing now.

First questions; How many visitors are you getting? What is your Bounce Rate? What is you 2nd Page Exit %? How many people are reaching your Goals? How many Goals do you have set up? What is your Average Page Depth per visitor? If you have no idea what this I am talking about and how to find this information then you need to address this first before anything else. I'm talking Google Analytics - but read on!

Google Analytics is free to use and is a service provided by Google (thank you God for Google (despite the undertones of Big Brother in your philosophy - ignore that and life with Google is great!)). Two things you need; access to your FTP server and sign up for a Google Account. Once signed up and Google Analytics enabled you need to place the code that is given to you on your web pages. If you are not particularly web savvy then you may need your web master/designer to do this, or find someone who can.

With this done Google Analytics will start recording all the information you could possibly want and display it in a User friendly and intuitive way - almost anyway. It will certainly get you started and they are continually improving it. Once that data is staring to be collected you are going to learn so much about your site it will amaze you. Without it you are flying blind and any changes you make will be purely guess work.

It is important to remember that with data the more you have of it the more accurate it will be and the only governing factor on the collection of the data once the Google Analytics code is placed correctly is time. You may find that the first few days indicate visitors behave in one way only to find four weeks later that your initial impression was completely inaccurate or that trend happens on Friday and Saturday's only.

Having the Data is one thing you then need to make sense of it. This is yet another pressure on your time. Now you need to learn Google Analytics, well no not really. With some simply advice you might find that only some of the information really needs to be understood at any given time. I would be very wary of generalised rules such as have a Bounce Rate under 40% etc.

More Later...