The five website numbers a business owner should check every month

A business owner needs only five website numbers each month: visits, where they came from, which pages they landed on, how many became enquiries, and whether the site is fast and healthy. Together they take about ten minutes to read and tell you whether the website is doing its job. Everything else in an analytics dashboard is detail.

Key takeaways

• Count enquiries first. Visits mean little if nobody gets in touch.
• Compare each month with the previous one and with the same month last year, because many businesses have seasons.
• Real-user speed data from Google is more reliable than a one-off test.
• Search Console shows the searches that bring people to you, which analytics cannot.
• Write the numbers in one small table, so trends show up.

1. Enquiries

This is the number that matters most: contact form submissions, booked calls, quote requests and, if you track them, phone taps. Set each of them up as a goal in your analytics tool, and add the form submissions that arrive in your inbox as a cross-check. The two counts should be close.

If they differ a lot, something is broken in either the form or the tracking, and that is worth finding out immediately.

2. Visits and the share that become enquiries

Divide enquiries by visits to get your conversion rate. Treat it as a trend line for your own site, not as a target taken from someone else's industry average. If visits grow and enquiries stay flat, the traffic is the wrong kind or the page is not persuading. If visits fall and enquiries hold, you may be seeing fewer casual visitors, which is not necessarily bad.

Our seven-check review lists the usual reasons a page fails to convert.

3. Where visits come from

Your analytics tool groups visits by source: search engines, direct, social media, other websites and email or campaign links. Look at which source produced the enquiries, not only the visits. A small channel that produces most of the enquiries deserves protection.

Use UTM tags on links you control, such as newsletters and profiles, so they appear under their own names instead of as "direct".

4. Top landing pages

List the five pages where visits start. They are your real front doors, and it is often not the homepage. Check each one for a clear heading, a visible next step and a working link to your contact page.

If a service page attracts visits but no enquiries, improve that page before spending on more traffic.

5. Speed and health

Check your Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console, or the real-user section in PageSpeed Insights. Google's thresholds for good are a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less. Also confirm the site is up, the certificate is valid and the form still works. The website speed guide explains the metrics, and the maintenance guide covers what a regular check should include.

One extra look: the searches that find you

Search Console also lists the queries people typed before they clicked your site. A few minutes here shows whether you appear for your services and your region, and which pages deserve more attention. Read it alongside our guide on being found in AI answers if you also want to understand how assistants pick sources.

Making it a habit

Put a recurring reminder in your calendar for the first working day of the month, open the same three tools in the same order, and write the five numbers into a table. After three months you will see what is normal for your business.

If you would like help setting up the goals or reading the results, the free website audit is a good starting point, and a free 30-minute discovery call is the place to talk through what to improve. See our services for how we build and maintain sites that report these numbers clearly.