07/18/2013

Five Reasons Why You Absolutely Need a Website Monitoring Service

An increasing number of businesses are beginning to realize the importance of website monitoring. As a result, they are also beginning to realize the importance of a website monitoring service. After all, you can't sit at your desk clicking refresh 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even if you could, you may not know if your site was actually up and running or if your computer was just pulling up a cached version of your site. If you still aren't too sure about why a website monitor is so crucial to the success of your site, these five reasons may help you better understand the importance.

1. Keep Customers

In a recent survey, it was shown that 80 percent of customers will leave a website if the pages don't load fast enough. If your site is having performance issues, you're losing sales. You need a website monitoring service in place to let you know if these issues are occurring so you can address them and fix them fast. Letting the performance issues continue is akin to pushing customers out the door.

2. Prevent Revenue Loss

Each and every minute of downtime equates to lost revenue. Depending on when your site outage occurs, you may not become aware of it for hours. Just because you're in bed asleep doesn't mean that people aren't trying to access your site and make a purchase. If you don't want to lose those sales, you need to be notified when your site goes down. A single phone call from a website monitoring service can literally save you thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

3. Keep Your Search Engine Rankings

Remember Murphy's Law? If something bad can happen it likely will. Your site may go down the moment the search engines are trying to crawl it. If this happens, the search engines may penalize your site, dropping you in their rankings. You likely worked hard on your SEO techniques. The last thing you want is for unexpected website downtime to cause your site to take a hit. A website monitoring service will immediately notify you when your site goes down, which means you can work to bring it back up and keep the search engines happy.

4. Minimize Loss Due to a DDoS Attack

Just because your site may not be political in nature doesn't mean it's not at risk of a DDoS attack. Sometimes a site is attacked by hackers just because the hackers want to show you they can do it. Hackers can lead to serious website downtime. Fortunately, a quality website monitoring service can make you aware of any issues the moment they occur, allowing you to protect your site from the attack. While your site may go down for a few minutes, you can minimize the damage if you're made aware of the attack the moment it happens.

5. Protect Your Company's Reputation

When doing business on the Internet, reputation is everything. You don't want to risk losing customer confidence due to issues with the performance of your website. Your site doesn't even have to go down completely for customers to become frustrated. A slowdown in the performance of your site can be enough to make customers leave and not want to come back. Website monitoring services can tell you if your site is experiencing performance issues, allowing you to address them and keep your customers happy.

A Small Price to Pay

When you consider all of the benefits that website monitoring provides, it becomes clear that website monitoring service isn't just an expense – it's an investment. Make sure that you invest in a quality website monitor to maximize your website uptime and prevent the type of damage that performance issues and website downtime can cause.