How to Properly Maintain Your Home Business’s Website

by Julie Hickey September 3, 2022

Guest post by Carla Lopez

If you’re running your first home business, you’ve likely put a website on the internet to promote your products and services. This is a great first step, but your job as your own webmaster isn’t quite done yet. Today at Home Office Wellness, we will discuss a few ways to keep an eye on your website and why you can’t just hit publish and turn the other cheek.

What to Watch

There are dozens of different metrics to pay attention to when it comes to your website. These include visitor statistics, conversion rate, traffic source, and popular pages.

Visitor statistics show you how many people are visiting your website and from where. Your conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors that have made a purchase, downloaded a paper, or interacted with your site based on your preferred parameters. Traffic source points you to where people are coming from, whether that’s an organic Google search, your website, or from ad-based sources. Your website dashboard can also show you which pages are the most popular and have gotten the most attention, which can help you create content that appeals to your potential customers.

How to Get Data

Your website dashboard is an obvious first spot. However, there may be other places, such as databases and social media, that have valuable insight you can use to build a better home business. You can also utilize business process management (BPM) strategies. While there is no specific BPM that works for all businesses, these are essentially processes that allow you to analyze your systems and workflows, which then lets you automate for greater efficiency. If you want to know more about BPM, a quick Google search is all it takes to do your research. One quick tip here: whenever you do come up with the BPM framework/strategy, keep an eye on it to ensure it maintains its effectiveness.

Benefits of Monitoring Your Website

In addition to reading data, you should also check your website periodically to:

Make sure it’s online. Your website has to be up and running to be of any use to anyone, including you and your customers. Check your website daily to ensure there are no unusual errors that might render your site ineffective. Pingdom shares information on common HTTP errors.

Monitor your website’s speed. There are few things more frustrating than logging into a website that takes forever to show content. While slow internet and needed system upgrades might be reasons that individuals experience slow load time, if your website itself is the problem, you’re going to lose customers.

Confirm its growth. Your visitor statistics can show you how many people are coming to your website over time. Ideally, you have more visitors today than you did this time last year.

Work more closely with your hosting company. Keeping a close watch on and documenting statistics coming from your website arms you with more information if you ever need to contact your hosting company with a problem.

Build a better marketing strategy. As you watch your website grow (or not), you can tap into insight that helps you create a better online experience and more relevant marketing materials for your customers. By knowing what your site visitors are and are not utilizing, you can get a better idea of what they do and do not want. Site statistics might lead you toward more email marketing, SEO, or video marketing.

You do not have to hold a degree in information technology to understand and utilize website statistics. Monitoring your site by utilizing business process management techniques and then working to better your online presence based on the information you find is one of the best possible ways to keep your home business steps ahead of the competition.

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