So I’ve had a personal website for a while now that I honestly just… haven’t touched. Like at all. But I finally decided to actually work on it, add some portfolio stuff, make it look like I know what I’m doing. Before I go in and start changing things though, I wanted to get a baseline of where the site is at right now so I can actually see if my work made a difference after a month or two.
Turns out benchmarking your website isn’t that complicated. Heres what I found out.
You don’t need to go out and buy SEMrush or any of those expensive tools. Genuinely, Google gives you everything you need for free. The main things you wanna track are page speed, your SEO basics, and if you have any traffic coming in, where its coming from.
Page Speed is probably the most important one. Google has this free tool called PageSpeed Insights and it just tells you how fast your site loads and what’s slowing it down. You’ll get a score from 0-100 and a list of things to fix. Run it on your homepage before you start working and screenshot the results. Thats your baseline.
On-page SEO stuff is the other big one. This is like, do you have proper headings (H1, H2, etc.), are your images optimized, do you have good title tags and meta descriptions. Most of this is just following best practices but if you’ve never really thought about it, theres a good chance your missing some basics. Do a quick manual audit of your pages and write down what’s broken or missing.
Search Console is also worth setting up if you haven’t already. It shows you what search terms are bringing people to your site, how many impressions your getting, click through rate, all that. Even if the numbers are tiny right now it’s good to have a snapshot so you can compare later.
The Tools
- PageSpeed Insights — pagespeed.web.dev, free, run your pages through it
- Google Search Console — free, shows your organic search data
- Google Analytics — set it up even if your not analyzing it yet, just so the data starts collecting
- Lighthouse — built into Chrome, open devtools and go to the Lighthouse tab, gives you scores for performance, SEO, and accessibility all at once
Thats really it. You don’t need anything fancy.
Before you touch anything on your site, run PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse on your main pages and save the results somewhere. Pull your Search Console data and screenshot it. Write down anything that looks obviously broken with your SEO.
Then go do your work, wait like a month or two, and run everything again. Compare the numbers. That’s it.
Honestly the biggest thing I learned doing this research is that most of it just comes down to the basics: fast load times, good markup, optimized images, clean headings. You don’t need a crazy strategy. Just don’t ignore the fundamentals and you’ll be suprised how much things improve.
You got this.
