Website analysis is the regular practice of checking whether your site is doing its job: bringing in the right visitors, helping them find what they need, and turning enough of them into leads or customers. Done well, it tells you what to fix next. Done badly, it produces a monthly report of traffic numbers nobody acts on.

We first wrote about this in 2023, the year Google retired Universal Analytics. The tools and some of the metrics have changed since, so here is the current version.

Start with the questions

Before opening any tool, write down what the site is for and how you would know it is working. For most B2B sites, that means a small set of actions such as contact form submissions, demo or quote requests, calls, newsletter sign-ups, and key downloads. Those are your conversions, and every other number is context for them.

Traffic and engagement: GA4

Google Analytics 4 is the default web analytics tool. Universal Analytics stopped processing data in July 2023, so if your reporting still talks about “sessions and bounce rate” the old way, it is worth relearning a few terms.

  • Key events: GA4’s name, since 2024, for the actions you mark as important, previously called conversions. Set these up first; without them, analytics can only describe traffic.
  • Engagement rate: the share of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, included a key event, or viewed at least two pages. Bounce rate in GA4 is simply the opposite of it.
  • Traffic acquisition: where sessions come from, by channel and source. Use UTM parameters on campaign links so email, social, and paid traffic are labeled correctly.
  • Landing pages: which pages people arrive on, and which of them lead to key events.

Check two settings while you are there. New GA4 properties keep detailed event data for only two months unless you raise it to 14, and GA4 hides rows with very few users in some reports to protect privacy, so small segments can look empty. If you need longer history or raw data, GA4 can export to BigQuery for free within daily limits.

Search: Google Search Console

Search Console shows how your site performs in Google search: the queries you appear for, impressions, clicks, average position, and which pages are indexed or have problems. It is free and covers data GA4 cannot see, such as searches where someone saw your listing and did not click.

  • Look for pages with many impressions and few clicks; better titles and descriptions often help.
  • Look for queries where you rank on page two; these are often the fastest wins.
  • Check the indexing reports for pages Google cannot or will not index.

Bing Webmaster Tools offers the same for Bing, which also feeds Microsoft’s AI products.

A growing share of research starts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google’s AI Overviews. Visits from AI assistants usually appear in GA4 as referrals from domains such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai; group them into their own channel so the trend is visible. Then ask those assistants the questions your buyers ask and note whether your site is cited. Our guide to answer engine optimization covers how to improve that.

Behavior: heatmaps and session recordings

Analytics tell you what happened; behavior tools help explain why. Microsoft Clarity is free and provides heatmaps, anonymized session recordings, and flags for rage clicks and dead clicks. Paid tools such as Hotjar and Crazy Egg add surveys and A/B testing. Watching a dozen sessions on a key page often explains a drop-off faster than any report. Mask form fields and anything sensitive, and mention these tools in your privacy policy.

Speed and technical health

  • Core Web Vitals: PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console show how fast your pages load and respond for real visitors. The UX guide explains the three measures and their targets.
  • Crawl: a crawler such as Screaming Frog finds broken links, redirect chains, missing titles, and duplicate pages.
  • Security: check that certificates, updates, and security headers are in order; our website security checklist lists what to look for.

Accessibility

Run an automated scanner such as WAVE or Lighthouse, then test your key pages with a keyboard alone. Automated tools catch only part of the problems, but they are a quick start, and accessibility issues are also usability issues.

Competitors

Tools such as Similarweb, Semrush, and Ahrefs estimate competitors’ traffic and the searches they rank for. Treat the numbers as estimates, especially for smaller sites, and use them for direction rather than precision. Our guide to website competitive analysis walks through a fuller comparison.

Turn findings into a plan

  1. List what you found, with the evidence for each item.
  2. Estimate impact and effort. A broken form on your contact page beats a slightly slow blog page.
  3. Fix the top few items, and note the date of each change.
  4. Compare before and after on the metric each fix was meant to move.
  5. Repeat monthly for the core numbers and quarterly for the full review.

Where we come in

We set up analytics that answer business questions, including key events, campaign tracking, CRM connections, and dashboards, and run regular reviews as part of our digital marketing work. If you are not sure your numbers can be trusted, ask us to take a look. Weighing a privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics? See Matomo vs. Google Analytics 4.