Your website is a living breathing extension of your business. It is a constantly evolving project. There is no such thing as a date of completion. Projects might be completed, but not websites. Unfortunately, many businesses largely ignore their websites. Managers and business owners fail to dedicate an ongoing effort to make improvement. If you ask a business owner some very simple questions about the website they own, you might get some strange answers. It is mind boggling that a company will invest thousands of dollars into building a website only to ignore it completely. Once your site is up and running you work has just begun. As they say, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. You have to monitor your website to understand what is happening. If you have made a change to the site, you need to study the effects of the change. Did the change improve or hurt the site’s performance? Don’t expect results unless you believe that your website can change your business. Take a proactive approach to perfecting your web presence. Don’t react to problems, instead circumvent them. By the time your customers start complaining about problems they experience on your site, it may be a too little a too late. Website performance problems can be elusive. Successful online businesses must be able to quickly identify the source of performance related issues. Does the problem originate from the network, the server or the application? Performance problems may originate from sources other than your own website. Based on the intelligence built through analysis management can identify, isolate, and diagnose performance problems. By identifying performance bottlenecks, you may improve the shopping experience. As you successfully isolate intermittent problems, you will be armed with intelligence to take you one step closer to online business success. Tools To Analyze Your Website Performance Google Analytics It is true that some of the greatest things in life are free, and so is GA (Google Analytics). It is an especially, helpful tool for online businesses advertising through the Google Adwords system. GA is an excellent tool to track site conversion. Key metrics such as page visits, page views, visits, traffic sources, etc. are presented in an easy to understand format. You don’t have to be an expert to understand the information. GA provides you with so much data that is almost overwhelming. Once you become familiar with the system, you can quickly zoom in on the areas that interest you the most.