The website of the company should work effectively to attract the visitors and keep them coming. It represents your business online and its work affects the way the brand is perceived. Website owners usually pay attention to structure, functionality, and design, but often forget about such obvious elements as uptime and response time, which are important for traffic and conversion of the site.
Internet users are spoiled rotten by technology. Using such websites as Facebook, Yahoo! and Google, they perceive them as a standard and do not want to put up with slower sites that do not have the same budgets as Internet giants but have to follow their pattern and improve the load time.
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Importance of site monitoring
How do the visitors react to slow response time? Here are some facts concerning this issue:
- 40% of users leave the page after lag time exceeds 3 seconds.
- Visitors are not satisfied with experience after 2 seconds slowdown.
- 2/3 of users feel negative about the poor performance of the site.
- Only 40% of customers return to the page after experiencing the slowdown.
- 40% of respondents noted that site speed is preferred to its functionality.
- More than 40% do not believe in high efficacy of transactions after they encountered slowdown.
Poor website experience leaves visitors with nasty impression while outage brings to more serious losses.
Even search engines prefer fast-loading sites
All businessmen are aware of how time is important. When a website is inaccessible, the company loses sales opportunities and productivity. It also has a negative impact on the reputation of the brand.
In accordance with figures provided by experts, Amazon service outage for 3-4 hours entailed $150-million losses in 2017. As it turned out, the speed of the site also affects the search engines ranking. So not only people prefer fast loading sites, but the search engines too!
Put your business under control with website monitoring tools
As you see, the question of uptime is a critical business issue. A highly functional website improves the subjective experience of the customer and increases the revenue of the company.
It is necessary to avoid the situation when the site suffers from unexpected downtime. The operator of the site should be aware of the uptime problem when it occurs. If the site goes down and you do not even know about it, it can seriously damage your business. It is not surprising that website monitoring service is highly demanded by businesses and organizations.
If your site runs without a hitch, you can feel safe and concentrate on other tasks.
How website monitoring is done
There are a lot of useful monitoring tools to prevent the problem and address the issue as fast as possible. These instruments test and log the status of the site to determine if the site is available online. It is done from different geographic locations. Hundreds of worldwide checkpoints perform this work to make sure that your site is accessible for visitors from different parts of the globe. The performance breakdown is analyzed for different devices, browsers, and OS.
There are simple monitoring tools and the ones with advanced functionality. Almost all free versions are simple. Nevertheless, they are very helpful for customers who take the downtime seriously. The site owner gets a notification when the site is offline for some reason and the second one when it becomes available. The list of services provided by free tools is limited.
Advanced monitoring software is more complicated. If the customer encounters some technical problem (unable to log in, for instance), sophisticated monitoring tools inform about it. In this way, the site operator detects the mistake before the person applies to the customer service. Many people do not apply to the support and just leave the site. Monitoring tools always notify the customers when issues arise, thus helping companies to preserve the customer base. Full suite of monitoring tools is at your disposal if you use the paid service.
There are services with advanced flexibility when the site owners are able to make checks manually. Distill.io belongs to such services. It is free but the functionality is rather complicated. The only tech-savvy person is able to cope with the task.
Standards of website monitoring
High-quality website tools are incredibly useful to all businesses presented online. Both sides take advantage of cutting-edge instruments. Consumers are able to find the best deal without suffering from lags and broken pages, while businesses achieve high efficacy. The primary goal of any online store is to do everything possible to provide minimal downtime.
There are particular standards of website monitoring and the service should be provided in compliance with them. The professionals say that response time should be under 2 seconds for e-commerce sites.
Additional benefits of website monitoring software
Website monitoring software helps to:
1. Resolve technical issues (described above).
2. Improve the security of the site.
The site operator will find out if some changes on the site occur. Website monitoring tools check the code. It runs checks at a certain interval. In case the content on the site is changed, you can take measures without delay. Fix the problems immediately as soon as the website runs into issues.
3. Perform financial monitoring.
Business owners who want to stay competitive should follow the prices in highly volatile markets. Website monitoring software is a helpful tool for the owners of a retail business. For instance, feature-rich service Changetower runs the checks every 12 hours. The prices often change, so it is convenient to monitor such data as well.
You need to find the service that suits your needs best of all. It is very important to learn all the pros and cons of the particular tool before clicking the ‘buy’ button.
Get access to unbiased data
How to choose web hosting when uptime is of primary importance? We have to believe the figures provided on a provider’s website that offers the service. But there also should be some unbiased tools to get such data.
Those who want to get true information can opt for the services provided by such companies as Hrank.com, Pingdom.com, and Gtmetrix.com, to name a few. Their approach to monitoring differs, however, this is the exact reason why you should employ all of them to make sure that your website works round the clock without interruptions.