01/21/2018

Why is Website Monitoring Important for Your Business?

The current websites today have increased substantially in their functionality compared to the first versions of the websites when the Internet first got started. In the initial days of the Internet, websites were meant only for information sharing.  The usage of the websites now has changed as most of the sites are dynamic, today's websites allow info searches, comparison shopping, some sites even allow calculations like EMI calculators, websites enable purchases and many web-sites allow making payments online. 

Currently, web applications have replaced the desktop software and many newer software apps are available only through browsers like Google Docs while the traditionally apps were available as a desktop software.

All these advancements on the website have to lead to increased adoption of Internet and usage of websites for doing many regular activities of daily living.  This additional functionality available on the current generation of sites puts a high computing load on the web server and the load becomes huge when we factor in a large number of users on a website.

What Exactly is Website Downtime and User Experience?

Website uptime refers to the span of time when your website is available and fully functional. By the same measure, website downtime is when the site is either not available or not fully functional. User experience includes the visitors’ subjective experiences while navigating or using your site. This includes their opinion and comfort level while using your site, specifically with the smoothness or effortlessness of doing their work on your site

From the definition, it is quite obvious how important website uptime and user experience are in today’s competitive business environment. Your organization’s business goal depends largely on the smooth operation of your web-site. If your website is unavailable or performs slowly, it irritates the customer

Customers may not hesitate to visit a competitor’s site to take care of their needs.  Therefore, your site not only has to be up and running but also perform well every time a visitor is on your site.

Need for Website Monitoring for Your Business Success

This load on the website could degrade the performance and when the performance gets degraded, it leads to poor user experiences.  Visitors’ having a poor user experience on your site is not good, as it could affect business financials negatively.

The impact of website monitoring on your business is many folds. A slow site or a website that routinely does not function properly irritates the current customer and weakens their relationship with your site. Such a situation developing with your client is not good for the future of the business.

Consider the situation where your potential customers are eager to buy on your site but experience a non-working site or website malfunction.  In frustration, they take their business elsewhere. If this information reaches you late by several days or weeks, it deprives you of a chance of correcting the issue in a timely manner. Such a situation can be easily prevented by having a website monitoring app that will promptly send you an alert as soon as your site experiences downtime. Thereby, allowing you to start the correcting mechanism at the earliest. This helps you to prevent further loss of sales from your customers by quickly correcting site downtime issues.

Manual Website Monitoring is Not Practical

Tracking uptime does not mean that you have to open your browser to check if your site is working every five minutes. It is not a feasible solution, as such an approach prevents you from doing any other activity. Not only is it impractical to do this continuously, it is also expensive as one person on the payroll has to be on this job. While not monitoring your site is not a good idea, as you may risk not being aware when your site visitors are moving away as the web site is not functioning. For a small monthly investment, this web uptime status tracking activity can be performed by a quality website monitoring service.

Today, there are various third party services that not only simplify this task for you but also can more vigorously and comprehensively test your website to check which aspect of the website or service component is not functioning.

Good Website Monitoring Service Does Comprehensive Monitoring

Even if your site’s home page works properly on the browser it does not ensure the entire site is performing well. While monitoring your site’s uptime it is essential to take a holistic approach. The third party website monitoring services continuously check throughout the year, whether your entire website's pages are working correctly. If your website uses an API, the good site monitoring tools also check if these API’s are working correctly and with good speeds.

Website Monitoring Service is Essential Tool for Your Site

The third party website monitoring services check on whether your site is working correctly in real time and immediately alert you when there is an issue.  While this sounds simple enough the impact of site monitoring in protecting your business revenues and branding is immense.