Is the relevant information above the fold or does the viewer have to scroll and scroll to find what they need?

This is a good list for basic usability and effective visual communications, and many of the questions will contribute to your clients KPI’s, but these questions are not an indication or means to evaluate real business performance. The analysis of key metrics is the only way to evaluate the amount of improvement or ROI that a website is delivering for your business – these are numbers that can be used to make informed decisions about future changes you will need to make to create a better performing website.

The top 10 list you have here should be titled – Top 10 things your web designer should be doing to improve your website business performance.

When evaluating the performance of a website you need to measure the contributing factors that every business should be measureing to determine ROI of their marketing materials – leads, conversions, average dollar sale, number of transactions per customer, & margins.

When measuring the success of a website or online campaign it is critical to measure the metrics that support key performance indicators (KPI’s) of your clients business i.e. lead metrics such as absolute unique visitors, search engine traffic, referring sites, organic & paid search engine traffic. It’s also important to establish a benchmark prior to any campaign and to compare the before/after differential to come up with true performance measurements whereby you can evaluate the success of website in real numbers that contribute to profitability.

A good website from a business stand point will improve the number of leads they get, increase their conversions percentage, improve their average dollar sale, increase the lifetime value of their customers, and improve business processes improving their margins. If you have a serious business owner and they want to know how much revenue is being generated from your website very few if any of your questions will be able to answer this.

Thanks for the inputs Chris. The advice in my blog post is designed to constitute a list of quick hits with direct impact on the ROI, based on experience. The various KPIs you describe do not improve business performance, they just measure it. Certainly it is ideal to have indicators of success, but it is very different from actually knowing what actions will generally bear fruits.
The problem with your recommendations is that
(1) they sound very much “corporate consulting”-like: looking into all those measures will take lots of time, costs lots of money, and 90% of the time bring you right back to the quick list in my post… They might be interesting for large clients, but not for my clients and readership which are small businesses and start-ups.
(2) if a startup is web-only, they’ll generally already focus on those indicators. If they are not, the website is one part of their sale process, and “how much revenue” it generates, while not a dumb question, will generally not be possible to answer directly as it works in conjunction with a complete marketing mix.
Where I think we can agree to agree thus, is that it is preferable to have some measure of business success when implementing web design initiatives.

This is an area I’m quite passionate about and I enjoy discussing the topic at length I have some firm beliefs about what a business should know about their website as it relates making decisions that impact the health, success, and running of their business. A great deal of what I believe goes beyond just measuring website performance, and involves more general business knowledge and insights than the great many design technicians who start up design companies with no real knowledge of business. You are right when you say my comments have nothing to do with impacting ROI but with actually measuring it and using that information to make better business decisions.

Your post is titled “10 Questions to Evaluate Your Website’s Business Performance”. and I read the title as a business owner who wanted to know what questions I should ask myself to see what business results my website is contributing to and how I can qualitatively show them – an often cloudy and hard to pin down question for any design firm.

How do we as a web design firm answer commonly asked questions from clients like: What will your product/service do for my business? What kind of results can I expect in a given time frame? What makes you different from web company A,B,C….Z except price – you can all build a website? These are questions customers should be asking and often don’t and they wonder why their website isn’t generating the results they want.

The difficulty is that too many design firms say they know how to improve a business with a website and then leave their clients in the dust with no provable measure of the success of their work. This leaves a client unsatisfied, in the dark, and debating what the heck they spent their money on.

Your list is great and I have something similar in my companies training manual & production checklists for designers & developers. It’s one thing to put these in place in the hopes for achieving better business results and it’s another thing entirely to actually know the business result and make better business decisions from knowing them.

With regard to the problems in my comment:
1) Consulting is exactly what a web design company should do for their clients. Small business & startups are a demographic where these services are often neglected, but are just as critical if not more necessary. Just look at how many startups & small business make it to year 5. The need to hire an experienced and knowledgable web design company that will help ensure the success of their business should be on the top of their mind.

95% of my clients are small business and without knowing the website business results they really don’t have a way of making informed decisions when it comes to running their business e.g. Should I drop my Yellow Pages advertising and invest in website maintenance? Business results generated & tracked by both your website and yellow page ads will allow a business owner to make such important decisions to save them money and improve the results generated by their advertising efforts. Customers have saved thousands of dollars year over year and at the same time increased their business by making informed decisions based on the evaluation and measurement of their websites performance compared with their other marketing initiatives.

Tracking performance need not take a huge amount of time or money. It just needs to be thought out and implemented correctly, it doesn’t need to be big, it can be small, have a specific focus that addresses a business need. Yes there’s a cost of doing this, but the advantages of making strategic business decisions will always out weight a minimal monthly maintenance cost of a couple hours to a day to track, evaluate, and let your clients know what their online marketing is doing for their business.

2) I completely agree when you say it’s generally not possible get the total number of leads or conversions that come directly from a website. Most of our customers are not tracking the business results they need to be tracking for web design firms to really measure their bottom line results. Which makes our job that much harder to provide them with a website that they can make informed business decisions about. Often we have to put on our consulting hat and help them implement strategies so that we & they can get the best quality of information on how their website, as it relates to the rest of their marketing mix, is performing.

Often this means setting up tracking of their entire marketing mix, so they can know what ROI they are getting from each type of advertising. It’s about knowing what goes into a recipe and measuring what comes out of it. Our customers are amazed when they can actually see what their spending their money on and what it’s doing. They are often so happy to know that they can reduce their advertising costs where they aren’t getting an ROI and shift that budget to an area that produces far greater business results.

It’s not just preferable, it is a MUST, to have some measure of business success when implementing web design initiatives. Anyone who’s not doing this is playing Russian Roulette with their clients money. The big companies know this and it has helped them to become & remain successful, and why not do that for the small business owner as well? They will get the exact same benefits and thank you for it.