10 numbers worth checking on your website every month

Most small business owners either check their website analytics obsessively or never open them at all. The numbers worth checking on your website every month fit on one screen and take about ten minutes once you know where to look.

All ten below come from two free tools: Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Search Console. If neither is connected yet, that's the actual first step, not the ninth.

1. Sessions and users — is anyone actually showing up

Start with the basic traffic numbers in GA4's overview reports — sessions and users, and how this month compares to last [1]. You're not looking for growth every single month; you're looking for a number that would tell you something is broken, like a sudden drop after a redesign, or a launch that never showed up at all.

2. Engagement rate — whether people who arrive actually stay

Traffic without engagement is a warning sign, not a win. GA4 defines an engaged session as one that lasts over 10 seconds, includes a key event, or has two or more page views, and engagement rate is simply the share of sessions that clear that bar [2]. A rate that's dropped hard from last month usually means something on the page itself changed, broke, or stopped matching what the traffic was expecting.

3. Top landing page — where people actually arrive

The page a visitor lands on sets their first impression of the whole site, and it's very often not your homepage — a blog post, a service page, or an old page still ranking for something you've since changed. Check which page is actually taking the traffic before you spend more time polishing a homepage nobody's landing on.

4. Traffic sources — where the sessions are coming from

GA4's traffic acquisition report breaks visits down by channel, organic search, direct, referral, paid, social, using session source and medium [3]. If one channel disappears month over month, an account got disconnected, a platform algorithm changed, a partner site took down a link, this is where you'd actually notice.

5. Search Console clicks and impressions — how you're doing in Google specifically

GA4 tells you what happens after someone lands on your site; Search Console's performance report tells you what happens before, how many times your site appeared in search results (impressions) and how many of those became a visit (clicks) [4]. A site with impressions but almost no clicks usually has a title or description problem, not a ranking problem.

6. Top search queries — what people actually typed to find you

The same performance report groups results by query, showing the exact phrases people typed before landing on your site [4]. This regularly surfaces a phrase worth writing a whole page around that you'd never have guessed to target.

7. Core Web Vitals — the speed score Google actually measures

Core Web Vitals score loading speed, interaction responsiveness, and visual stability, and Google surfaces them across its own tools specifically because they're meant to reflect real user experience, not a synthetic lab test [5]. A score that's slipped is worth chasing down before it costs you both visitors and ranking — see why a slow page loses the sale for the deeper mechanism.

8. Leads or conversions — the number that actually pays the bills

Traffic and engagement are proxies; leads, bookings, or completed purchases are the real number. Set up a conversion event for whatever counts as a win on your site, a submitted form, a booked call, a completed order, so this shows up as an actual figure instead of a guess.

9. Mobile vs desktop split — which version of your site is actually being judged

If most of your traffic is on mobile and your site was designed and reviewed on a desktop monitor, you're optimising the version fewer people see. Check the split monthly, and open the site yourself on your phone if it's shifted, see our mobile-friendly website guide for what to look for.

10. Indexed pages — whether Google can actually see what you've published

Search Console's page indexing report shows how many of your pages Google has actually crawled and indexed versus excluded, and why [6]. A page you published three months ago that still isn't indexed is a page doing zero work for you, worth checking before you write another one.

None of these require a paid tool, and once GA4 and Search Console are connected, checking all ten takes about ten minutes a month. For the wider picture of what's worth automating around your website and business admin more broadly, see our guide to automating admin tasks first, and if reporting on these numbers monthly isn't something you want to own yourself, it's part of what our business systems work covers.