A site with no transactions is hard to measure, so most businesses do not measure it and fall back on impressions of whether it looks good. There are four things worth tracking, and they can all be in place within a week.
1. Enquiries, split by channel
The base metric is enquiries per month. The useful version splits form submissions, phone calls, WhatsApp and email — because they behave differently and the split tells you what to fix.
The attribution problem is real: someone reads the site and then phones. That call looks like it came from nowhere.
Two practical fixes. Use a distinct phone number on the website, different from the one on printed material and listings — then calls to it are attributable. And ask "how did you hear about us" at the point of enquiry, recording the answer somewhere durable. Neither is perfect. Both are far better than guessing.
2. Enquiry quality, not just volume
Volume alone is misleading. Ten enquiries where two are relevant is worse than four where three are.
Tag each enquiry as qualified or not, and track the ratio. A falling ratio usually means the site is attracting the wrong visitors — often because pages target broad terms rather than the specific thing you sell. That is a content problem, not a design problem, and it is fixable.
3. Cost per enquiry
Total annual site cost — build amortised, hosting, domain, content updates — divided by annual enquiries.
Compare it against your other channels. For most small businesses a brochure site produces enquiries far more cheaply than paid advertising, and this is the calculation that demonstrates it. It also makes the case for content investment concrete: if a page costs a certain amount to write and produces enquiries for years, the per-enquiry cost falls continuously.
4. Speed, and its effect on the rest
Page load time correlates strongly with whether people stay. Measure your busiest pages on a mobile connection rather than an office one.
What to watch: how long the main content takes to appear, and whether the layout shifts while loading. Layout shift is why people tap the wrong thing and leave annoyed.
On a static site these are usually easy wins — images are almost always the cause, and fixing them is an afternoon.
Set up before you need it
- Analytics installed and actually checked, monthly
- Form submissions recorded somewhere durable, not only emailed — emailed enquiries get lost and cannot be counted retrospectively
- A separate phone number for the site
- Search Console connected, so you can see what people searched before arriving
That last one is the most underused. It tells you the words customers use for what you sell, which is usually not the words you use — and that gap is the cheapest content improvement available.
What a realistic review looks like
Monthly, fifteen minutes: enquiries and their split, qualified ratio, top pages, top search terms. Quarterly: cost per enquiry, and one page rewritten based on what the search terms revealed.
This is a small enough commitment that it actually happens, which matters more than a comprehensive dashboard nobody opens.
About the author. Kislay Chandan has worked with schools since 2014. Rather than gathering requirements from the outside, he worked inside a school to see what actually goes wrong day to day, and built what he found into the software. He still works with Shemrock Glitters in Patna — most changes to the product start with something that came up there.
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