How to review your school website

Back at the start of this year, we suggested some ‘New Years Webolutions’ for your school website. One of these being to review your current school website performance in order to identify strengths and weaknesses as well as areas to improve. Following on from this article we have put together a short guide on some of the most useful metrics and tools to identify your performance.

Google Analytics

For those who don’t use Google Analytics already installing the tracking code on your website is a good place to start. You will then be able to track, measure and analyse user’s activity while on your school website. Answering questions like ‘What are the most popular pages on my school website?’, ‘How many people visit my school website?’ and ‘Where does my website traffic come from?’. Bounce rates, time spent on site and exit pages are just some of the useful metrics which will help identify areas to improve on your website.

Having the ability to set up Google goals are a great way to set targets for your school website performance and understand what you want to achieve from your website.

The goals will tell Google Analytics when something important has happened on your school website, whether this is a prospectus request or school tour booked. From these metrics, you can then set targets and implement a plan on how you are going to increase the number of school tours booked. This may mean making slight changes to the booking process in order to make this easier and avoid people leaving the site when it comes to completing the booking form.

Page speed

We touched upon the importance for website page speed in a previous article, this is something that shouldn’t be ignored. Make use of the great tool Google’s page speed insights to gauge whether updates need to be made in order to optimize your website. In doing so this could have a roll on effect and reduce the number of bounce rates. Users begin to drop off a site when its response time is longer than 2.5 seconds according to the latest usability research. (Source: Forrester Research)

Search Engine Optimisation

Of course, SEO is important when it comes to ranking well in a search engine but following good SEO practices will also improve user experience on your website. There are several free tools out there such as the web page analyzer and Hubspot Website Grader which will analyse your school website to uncovers issues like as missing image alt tags, heading structure errors and meta descriptions. All of which will improve your SEO.

Need further advice?

If you’d like to ask any more questions over a call please feel free to get in touch we’re more than happy to help!