What is a Site Report?

A site report is a detailed analysis of a website's statistics and technical workings. The goal of a site report is to improve a website's performance both in itself and within the Internet. Business owners who own websites can benefit the most from investing in a site report. A site report can help businesses get an edge over competition by giving insight into low traffic trends, poor conversion rates and shopping cart abandonment.

Site reports can analyze any number of website elements. These elements may range from the simple, like reporting broken links and misspellings, to the more complex, like validating a website's source code and evaluating its overall structure. Regardless of what a report returns, improving usability and navigation is the priority of a website owner.

Marketing campaigns can be fine-tuned as website owners will at least find out from where on the Internet visitors are referred, which advertisements are clicked on and where visitors physically reside. Other bits of demographic information may be made available and will inform website owners if they are reaching their target market. If website owners find that they have successfully reached their target market, they may go on to analyze elements like link popularity, the effectiveness of copy and web element placement. They may also choose to increase visibility with better search engine rankings through the use of proper meta tags and keywords.

A site report may also return information about technical website performance for visitors. For example, a report may indicate that a website has too many complex elements in it that compromise its loading time. Loading time can be important to a website owner who needs information displayed quickly, owns a website devoted to technology or simply knows that the attention spans of Internet users are low. In a typical case, a report may indicate that images on the website need to be optimized so loading times are reduced as much as possible.

Despite the variables in site reports, all reports are meant to help website owners optimize website functionality, usability and performance. However, optimization can only occur if changes are made to the website. Appropriate modifications can result in more visitors, higher traffic and more revenue if websites are supported through advertisements or if products are sold on it.

Reports may be available for free on the Internet. However, to truly get the best results and interpretative analysis available, website owners can choose to hire a professional who optimizes websites. The relationship between a website owner and the contractor may only be as long as the length of one analysis or it can last for as long as the website remains active. Website owners who use the same contractor may benefit from the professional's working knowledge of the website's functional history.