Website optimization articles on measuring the impact of every change and investigating traffic drops methodically, without relying on guesswork.
Website monitoring is more than knowing whether your site is up. Learn the four areas worth watching (availability, speed, traffic and changes) and how to set up a simple routine.
New homepage, new prices, new content. A practical method to find out whether a change helped, hurt or did nothing, without a data science team.
A step-by-step method to investigate a traffic drop, starting with tracking problems and moving on to sources, pages, search changes and your own recent actions.
Every website changes all the time: a new layout, a rewritten page, a shorter form, a move to a new host. Each change can improve or hurt traffic and conversions, but the effect is rarely obvious the next day. The articles in this category show how to evaluate changes methodically.
We cover two sides of the same problem. The first is measuring the impact of a change you made on purpose. The second is investigating a traffic drop that appeared out of nowhere. In both cases, the path goes through comparing equivalent periods, isolating traffic sources and knowing exactly what changed and when.
For people who make decisions about the website, such as business owners, marketing managers and developers, and want to know whether improvements are really working. The articles don't require A/B tests or advanced tools, although they explain when those make sense.
Most investigations get stuck on the same question: what changed on the site in the last few weeks? When nobody wrote it down, the answer becomes a guess. Keeping a simple record, with the date and a description of each change, solves a big part of the problem.
That's the core of WEBPilot: a strategy history per website, next to its traffic data. Learn about strategy tracking.
