6 Free Tools To Monitor Website Traffic And Website Performance

If you are an Internet Marketer, you need to understand how to monitor your website traffic and website performance in order as part of your Search Engine Optimisation evaluation. Here are the 6 free tools that can help you monitor your website traffic or website performance. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a fantastic free tool to help you get an in-depth analysis of your website’s performance. It is a free tool provides by Google to let you analyze data for all your websites in one place. You can set up multiple properties in one single google account. You just need to verify the ownership of your website and Google will start tracking the performance of your websites. Google Analytics is a powerful tool. It helps you to build a complete picture by understanding your website and apps users so that you can have a better evaluation of the performance of your website contents. You will be able to see how users are interacting with your sites or apps and what channels drive the traffic to your website. 

More than that, as Google Analytics is built to work with its advertising tools, so you can connect Google Analytics with tools such as Google Ads, AdSense, Display & Video 360, Ad Manager, AdMob to monitor the results. 

The reporting function in Google Analytics is great. For example, you can use the audience reports to learn about your active users, lifetime value, audiences, and individual user behavior. It also provides other reports including advertising reports, acquisition reports, behavior reports, real-time reporting, conversion reports, and user flow reporting. If you are using Google Analytics 360, you will also have access to Data Freshness, Unsampled Reports, and Roll-Up Reporting.

If you want to learn more about Google Analytics, Google Academy provides free online courses to help you learn about the Google Analytics measurement tools. You will learn how to do the data collection, track business performance and campaign. 

Hubspot’s Website Grader

Website Grader provides you a quick and easy insight into your website performance. It is easy to use and understand. After you enter your website URL, you will first know your scores from 1 to 100 of your overall website performance and also an individual score for the following categories.

1. Performance
2. Mobile
3. SEO
4. Security

I use Website Grader to get an insight into my website performance and here are what each category analyze for you:

Performance 

The performance category will provide you an insight into your page size, page requests and page speed. It also lets you know whether you have browser caching, page redirects, compression and render-blocking on your website.

Mobile 

From this mobile score, you will know whether your website is optimized for mobile users, including the responsiveness and viewport. 

SEO 

From this SEO Category, you will know whether your website is easy for the search bot to understand, including the quality of page titles, meta description, headings and whether you have sitemaps that help users navigate your site quickly and easily. 

Security

The score of security lets you know whether your website is authentic and trustworthy and whether your website has an SSL Certificate that protects your websites from attacks.

SEOBOOK Spider Test Tool

The SEOBOOK Spider Test Tool is one of the free tools that let you get an overview of your website results, including which search engine your page is indexed, your site title, description, keywords, number of distinct words, the density of keywords and links. You can also use this tool to check how other websites do on their SEO strategy. For example, when I search BBC News on this spider test tool, it shows the following results.

GTmetrix

If you want to know your website performance, page speed is one of the important elements that you shouldn’t ignore. Indeed page speed is one of the factors that will influence your website ranking on the search engine. GTmetrix is one of the best free tools to let you understand your page speed. You will get performance scores that include PageSpeed Score and YSlow Score, and also Page Detail information that let you know your website ‘Fully Load Time’, ‘Total Page Size’ and ‘Request’ number. It also provides recommendations on which areas you should improve your page speed, then you can rectify your website performance based on the grade and recommendation. 

WebPageTest

WebPageTest is my another favorite free website performance tool because the quick test provides me a detailed insight into the page speed of each of my links from the waterfall charts. The compression and caching testing are helpful too! You can use WebPageTest to monitor your website performance and you will know what problems need to be solved to speed up your website. 

Google Page Speed Insights

Google Page Speed Insights is another free tool from Google. It provides the result of your mobile and desktop performance. The page speed results may be different from GTmetrix as they base on different sets of criteria to analyze your website. 

Final Thoughts

If you want to succeed in internet marketing, it is important to monitor your website performance at least two times a week with an appropriate tools. There are other free and paid tools in the market that you can use to analyze your website performance, but I would say the 6 tools mentioned above are the fundamental tools marketers need for their success. Do you have any recommended free tools? Feel free to leave a comment to let me know your thoughts.