How to Diagnose Causes Of Poor Website Performance

When you're pouring your heart and soul into your business and not seeing results it can be very frustrating. You start to doubt your abilities, you may even start to doubt whether you should be in business at all.

Where most coaches focus the majority of their marketing time is in their website. Creating sales pages, writing blog posts, implementing opt in offers and the list goes on. Your website is the backbone of your marketing and speaks to your audience on your behalf on a 24/7 basis. So if it's not working for you, your business is in trouble.

And you may think you need to be an expert to figure out what's wrong, and while an expert will certainly be able to help get down to the core problem quickly and help you find solutions, there are steps you can take yourself to identify the issue.

Here are 3 areas to check when trying to diagnose the cause of your poor performing website:

1. Check your systems.

Have you ever heard those tech support stories (or perhaps even been part of one) where someone calls complaining that their device won't work only to find that it wasn't turned on? It's always an embarrassing situation and while it seems silly, it's a common occurrence.

Make sure you test everything on your website to ensure it is in working order. Test your opt in boxes and make sure you're getting the confirmation and delivery emails. Are you getting the follow up sequences?

Test your buy now buttons and shopping cart. Make sure that if someone is trying to purchase from you, that the process actually works. Visitors won't always tell you if something isn't working and you may go weeks or months before discovering a problem unless you're testing.

And don't assume that just because you tested everything when you launched that it's all still working. Things change and a simple update to your theme or a plugin could break pieces of your site that you won't even realize unless you're checking.

Bonus tip: As you're checking your systems make sure that you aren't logged into your website. What you see as an administrator may be different than a visitor so when you're not logged in your site could be a completely different experience.

2. Check your analytics.

Analytics are free to install on your site if you use Google and they will give you a wealth of information about your website performance. All the way from, is anyone even coming to the site? To understanding visitors' behavior on the site and how you can improve your content.

The first question to answer when looking at your analytics is if you are getting traffic. If you're only getting 100 people a month, then you can't expect to be getting a lot of action. So if this is the case, then you'll want to take a look at your marketing strategies and make improvements.

But what if you are getting traffic and still no results? Then you can dig a little deeper into your analytics and look at things like your bounce rate, keywords people are finding you with, and where they are going when they land on your site.

This insight will tell you where you can make improvements to keep visitors engaged and where your content may be weakest.

3. Test your content.

If all of your systems are working and you're getting traffic then something is usually amiss in the content of your website. Unfortunately the issue usually isn't as easy to pinpoint. In this case you'll want to pick one goal at a time for your site and optimize the pages that relate to that goal.

For example, if your goal is to get more people on your list then you can start by looking at your opt in offer and the call to action around your opt in box. Does it clearly speak to your target audience? Is the result promised something they desperately want? You can start by tweaking the call to action text, and if that doesn't improve your results then you could also try testing a different offer all together.

These tests take a bit longer to run because you need to have enough visitors seeing the new changes to be able to measure the results of your changes. The good news is that by doing this kind of research and testing you'll become more attuned to your audience and the language they respond to. This will help you in the long run so you don't have these problems in the future.

If you're really not sure where to start then talk with a former client or at least someone in your target audience and have them go through your site and tell you what they are taking away from it. Make sure this is in alignment with the message you intend.

You may also interview someone in your target audience to get the right language that they use to describe their problems and ideal solutions. This kind of information can be gold when writing your pages and calls to action.

This is just a brief 3 step testing process that you can use to diagnose problem areas on your website and it is in no way an exhaustive list! We work on all three of these areas with our clients and could literally lead courses about each area. With this information though you should be able to get a head start on diagnosing what might be missing on your site and why you aren't getting the results you desire.