Another gauge of performance is the average number of pageviews and average length of a session. This information is useful because it shows the "stickiness" of your site. Having started a session, do your users stick around and look at lots of information, or do they leave after hitting the home page? The average number of pageviews tells you how your site is performing. The average length of stay is related to the pageviews, but indicates how intensely people are looking at your site. For example, you might only have two or three average page views, but a long average session time. This would imply that while people are only looking at a few pages, they are really reading those few pages carefully. Conversely, you might have high page views but low length of time, indicating that people are clicking through your site a lot but aren't really reading it very thoroughly.

Again, comparing these aspects of your site to other sites is problematic. Some kinds of sites are always going to out-perform others simply by their nature. But for the sake of generic benchmarking I went through a sampling of the sites on our server and ran some averages. Here is a breakdown of the sites we've developed.


The average number of pageviews (based on roughly six months of data) was 4.6 pages viewed per session. The highest number of pageviews among the sites we reviewed was 13.5 per session and the lowest was 1.7.

The average duration of site sessions was 4:53 minutes with the longest average being 12:16 minutes and the lowest length of session being only 2 minutes.   next >