How to measure website performance: a practical guide for freelancers and small businesses

You have a website, but is it bringing you clients? To measure website performance, you need to know how many people visit, how they reach you, what they do, how many get in touch and how fast your website loads. This guide covers the metrics to follow in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and other free tools, and how to review them in 10 minutes a week.

What is website performance?

Website performance is how well your site does its job: attracting the right visitors, giving them a good experience and getting some of them to call or write to you. The website performance metrics you follow should cover its two sides.

Commercial results: visitors, engagement and contacts

This side tells you whether you actually get work from it: how many users arrive, through which channels, what content they read and how many call you, send a WhatsApp message or fill in your form.

Technical performance: speed and user experience

This side covers how fast each page loads and reacts to a tap. A slow website can lose potential clients before they read a word, especially on mobile.

Why measure website performance?

Without data, every decision about your website is a guess. Measuring tells you what works, so you make better decisions about your time and your marketing budget. It helps you:

• See whether people searching for your services reach your site.
• Spot problems early, such as a form that no longer sends messages or pages that have become slow.
• Compare the performance of different marketing channels and campaigns.
• Confirm whether a change, such as a clearer contact button, brings more enquiries or sales.

Choose your goals before your metrics

Before looking at any figures, decide what your website is for. A plumber in Alicante wants calls, a shoe shop in Elda wants online sales and a psychologist in Valencia wants appointment requests. Your goals decide which information deserves attention.

Turn each goal into a metric

Write down one or two goals and the metric that measures each one:

• More quote requests: the number of form submissions.
• More calls: taps on your phone number.
• More WhatsApp messages: clicks on your WhatsApp button.
• Being found for electrician in Elda: clicks and impressions for that query.

Which tools do you need?

Four tools cover the essentials for a small company, and a Google account is enough to use them:

• GA4: visits, behaviour and the actions you mark as important.
• Search Console: the queries where you appear and the clicks you get.
• PageSpeed Insights: page speed and Core Web Vitals.
• Google Business Profile: calls and direction requests from your listing.

Microsoft Clarity, also free, adds heatmaps and session recordings that show the experience of real visitors on a specific page.

Which website performance metrics should you track?

A handful of metrics is enough. Reviewed once a week, the website performance metrics in this table help you see whether your site attracts visitors, holds their attention and turns them into clients:

How many users visit your website?

GA4 answers this with three figures: users are the people who visit, sessions are their visits and views are the pages they open.

Users and sessions

In GA4, the user figure is active users: distinct people who interact with your site, recognised by browser or device. One person on a phone and a laptop therefore usually counts twice, and someone who visits on Monday and Thursday adds one user and two sessions.

Landing pages and top pages

In the Engagement section, the Pages and screens report ranks your pages by views, and Landing page lists where visits start. If almost every visit lands on your home page and few reach your services, your menu may need a clearer path.

Compare with your own earlier months

There is no universal good number of visits: performance depends on your trade, your area and the season. It's best to compare each month with the one before and with the same month last year.

GA4's demographic details also show which towns your users are in, so you can see whether visits come from your target area.

Traffic sources: which channels bring visits

GA4's Traffic acquisition section shows the channel behind each session, so you can see which parts of your marketing strategy bring visitors:

• Organic Search: clicks on unpaid results.
• Direct: typed addresses, bookmarks and visits without source information, such as links opened in some messaging apps.
• Organic Social: your social media profiles and posts.
• Referral: other sites that link to yours, such as an online directory.
• Paid Search and Paid Social: your advertising campaigns.
• Email: links in your newsletters, when they are tagged.

Each channel brings visits of different quality, so compare their contacts, not just their size. If your customers live nearby, organic traffic is worth growing over time; our local SEO guide explains how to improve it.

If you'd rather delegate, our Local SEO service costs €15/month: four blog articles a month, local keywords and a monthly report, and you can buy it without the website.

Tag your links to track your marketing

UTM tracking parameters (utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign) label the links you share in newsletters, WhatsApp statuses or a flyer's QR code, so GA4 knows where each visit came from and which campaigns perform better. Our introduction to email marketing also explains how to analyse your campaigns.

Engagement metrics: time spent on your website

GA4 measures engagement with engaged sessions: those that last longer than 10 seconds (the default setting), include a key event or have more than one page view.

Engagement rate and bounce rate

Engagement rate is the share of engaged sessions; bounce rate is the opposite, the share of sessions that were not engaged. Someone who reads your content for a while and leaves without clicking is therefore not a bounce in GA4.

Average engagement time per active user measures how long your site stayed in the foreground of the screen.

What a high bounce rate can mean

When a page has many sessions without engagement, the cause is often one of these issues:

• It is slow to load, especially on mobile.
• The content doesn't match what the visitor searched for.
• The design makes a bad first impression, or the phone number is hard to spot.
• Something is broken, such as a form or a button.

Bounce rates vary between pages, so compare each page with itself over time. And a short visit isn't always bad: if someone sees your number and calls, your website has done its job.

Conversion metrics: calls, forms and WhatsApp messages

This is the metric that matters most: how many visitors actually get in touch. A conversion, which GA4 now calls a ‘key event’, is any important action that turns a visitor into a potential client:

• Taps on your phone number.
• Clicks on your WhatsApp button.
• Contact or quote form submissions.
• Clicks on the link to directions or to the booking tool you already use.

Set up contact tracking

Enhanced measurement records some actions on its own, such as clicks on links that leave your site (the WhatsApp button, for instance). Others, like phone taps or form submissions, may need extra setup. Once an action appears in your list of events, mark it as a key event.

Conversion rate

Your conversion rate is the share of sessions that end in a contact. Conversion rates vary between sectors, so follow yours month by month. If you're getting visits but few contacts, something is holding people back, such as a hidden WhatsApp button, a long form or unclear content; our checklist of the elements every professional website needs can help.

Contacts that bypass your website

Some clients call you directly from your Google listing. If your profile is verified, its Performance section shows those calls, direction requests and website clicks, and our tips to optimise your listing can help you improve them. For word of mouth, the simplest way is to ask each new customer how they found you.

Queries and clicks in Search Console

Search Console is the basic tool for SEO: it tells you which queries display your pages and how many people click. Its Performance section gives four figures:

• Clicks: how many people clicked through to your site.
• Impressions: the number of times you appeared, even without a click.
• Average CTR: the click-through rate, or share of impressions that led to a click.
• Average position: your average ranking, with 1 as the top spot. It can move without anything important changing.

Don't expect these clicks to match the visits in GA4 exactly: the two tools count different things.

Use your queries to plan new content

The Queries tab lists the searches that bring impressions, although some rare queries are hidden to protect privacy. If you are a plumber in Alicante with many impressions but few clicks for emergency plumber Alicante, a dedicated page or a better title can help.

These queries are a source of ideas for your content strategy, and our article on local keyword research explains how to choose the right keywords.

Make sure your pages are indexed

The Pages section lists which URLs are indexed and why others were left out. Open it after publishing anything new, because a page that isn't indexed can't appear in the results.

Speed and user experience: measuring technical performance

To measure the technical performance of a page, start by entering its address in PageSpeed Insights. You get its Core Web Vitals, a performance score and suggestions for improvement.

Core Web Vitals in plain words

These three metrics describe the user experience of a page:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long the biggest block of content, often an image or a headline, takes to appear.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page reacts to a tap, click or keystroke. It replaced First Input Delay (FID).
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): whether text and buttons jump around during loading.

Each one is rated good, needs improvement or poor; aim for good on all three.

What is the difference between lab and field data?

Lab figures are produced by a simulated visit on a set phone and network; field figures are collected from real visits in Chrome. The first helps you find the cause of a problem, the second tells you what your visitors see.

In the lab: repeatable, but simulated

A lab analysis repeats the visit with the same device and network settings on every run, so you can compare the result before and after a change, such as compressing your photos. This is helpful for spotting issues, but it can't reproduce every phone and connection, nor Interaction to Next Paint, since nobody taps the screen.

In the field: timings from actual visits

Field figures group the timings of many visits, on all kinds of phones, computers and connections. They are collected from Chrome browsers that share usage statistics and published in a public report known as CrUX.

When a URL gets too few visits, no field figures are available for it; you may see the whole domain's instead, or only the lab result. In that case, rely on it and on your own phone.

What each section tells you

In PageSpeed, everything is displayed in the following order:

1. Field figures: the CrUX figures for the three indicators described above, with an overall assessment, passed or failed, when available.
2. Performance score: a score calculated by Lighthouse from the simulated visit, shown in green, orange or red. Green is the target, but the score is a general indication, not an end in itself.
3. Lab measurements: First Contentful Paint (when the first text or image appears) and Total Blocking Time (how long scripts block taps and clicks), among others.
4. Diagnostics: detailed suggestions, many related to a specific resource, such as an image that could be smaller or a JavaScript file that delays loading.

Results differ between mobile and desktop, and the smartphone figures are the important ones, since many clients will look you up on their phone.

What can Chrome DevTools show you?

Chrome DevTools offers three ways to follow loading on your own computer and network: a Lighthouse analysis, the list of every file downloaded and a step-by-step recording. To open it in Chrome, right-click anywhere in the window and choose Inspect.

Lighthouse: a lab test on your computer

The Lighthouse panel runs a similar lab analysis and provides a score and suggestions. It's useful before publishing a change, such as a new photo gallery, but its scores depend on your computer, so only compare runs made in the same conditions.

Network panel: every file, one by one

With the Network panel open, press reload: it lists each resource requested, such as photos, fonts, style sheets and JavaScript, with its size, how long it takes and the order it arrives in, so one heavy photo stands out at once; click a resource to see its details. Tick Disable cache to see what a new visitor downloads, and pick a slower network in the throttling menu to imitate a phone away from wifi.

A step-by-step recording of loading

The Performance panel records what happens during the page load or while you scroll and click: when each element is painted, which scripts are running and when the layout shifts. The timeline is technical, but it lets you understand where loading stalls, and the panel also displays the three indicators live for your own visit.

Timings recorded behind the scenes

During loading, the browser notes the timing of each step, from the first request to the server to the last image. Developers read these timings through the Performance API, with Navigation Timing for the document itself and Resource Timing for each file; some monitoring services use them to build their own field figures.

You don't need these panels every week: open them when something seems slow, or leave them to whoever manages your website. To learn more, the MDN and web.dev documentation explain each of these indicators.

Common causes of slow pages

• Heavy images that take long to load because they haven't been resized or compressed.
• Too many plugins, scripts or embedded widgets, each adding network requests.
• A slow server: the Time to First Byte (TTFB) reflects the server response time.
• Fonts, videos or pop-ups that load before your content.

After testing, start with your most visited pages: that is where improvements pay off. Our article on why website speed affects your ranking goes into more detail.

How to install GA4 and connect your tools

You don't need to be technical. These steps summarise the official help centre:

1. Open GA4 with your Google account, then create an account and a property with your time zone and currency.
2. Add a web data stream with your website address.
3. Paste the measurement ID (it starts with G-) or the tag snippet into your site; many website builders have a field for it.
4. Visit your site and open the Realtime overview: your visit appears within moments, while standard reports take a little longer.
5. Define your own connection as internal traffic and activate the filter, so your own visits don't inflate the figures.
6. Mark the contacts you want to follow as key events (GA4's name for conversions).
7. Add your site to Search Console, verify it (with the GA4 tag, an HTML file or a DNS record) and link the two tools.

If you'd rather not do it yourself, ask whoever manages your website to add the tag: it only needs doing once.

Cookies and consent in Spain

GA4 uses cookies. In Spain, your website must ask visitors for consent before setting analytics cookies, usually through a banner where they can accept or reject them, and your cookie policy has to mention them.

Visitors who reject cookies may be missing from GA4, which can then display fewer users than really visit; Search Console clicks don't depend on your cookies.

If WebAutonomos builds your website, the legal texts (legal notice, privacy policy and cookie policy) are included; when you add a tool such as GA4, make sure the cookie policy mentions it.

How often should you analyse your website performance?

Once a week works best for a quick glance at your metrics, with a longer analysis once a month. Small daily changes don't matter: one day's figures move with a bank holiday, the weather or a single social media post.

A 10-minute weekly check

• Users and sessions compared with last week.
• Contacts: calls, WhatsApp messages and forms.
• Traffic sources, to spot any sudden change.

A monthly review

• The queries that gained or lost clicks in Search Console.
• Calls and direction requests from your profile.
• A PageSpeed test of your most visited pages.
• A comparison with the same month last year.

Realistic goals for a freelancer

Measure each goal in contacts, not visits: a plumber or a neighbourhood shop gains more from an extra call each month than from visitors in other provinces who will never hire them.

For example, aim for more contacts than in the same month last year, or more clicks from searches such as physiotherapist in Elche. Note the date of every change you make, including marketing campaigns, so you can see its effect later.

Measuring website performance isn't complicated if you stick to a few performance metrics, spend 10 minutes a week on them and keep one question in mind: are more people contacting you than before? The answer tells you what to improve next.