Step 1:
Benchmark Your Current Metrics
Written by Rebecca Churt at Hubspot.com
November 5, 2016 (a repost)

Before you begin planning your redesign, document your current performance metrics. Start by analyzing your existing site over its history in areas such as:

  • Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors (monthly average)
  • Bounce rate (monthly average)
  • Time on site (monthly average) 
  • Top-performing keywords (in terms of rank, traffic, and lead generation)
  • Number of inbound linking domains 
  • Total number of new leads/form submissions (per month)
  • Total amount of sales generated (per month)
  • Total number of pages indexed Total number of pages that receive traffic

If you don’t have access to this information, then I absolutely recommend adding tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics for better tracking and visibility into your website’s performance. Furthermore, make note of which tools you used to identify each of these particular benchmarks. Ideally, you’ll want to use those same exact tools when collecting post-design metrics.  Otherwise, you’ll be comparing apples to oranges!