04/20/2015

How Website Monitoring Services Protect Your Site from Embedded Web Script Errors

If you talk to the average person who has a bit of knowledge about website monitoring services and ask them what website monitoring entails, they will tell you that these services check to see if your website is down and let you know when an outage of your website occurs. While on the surface that is an accurate description, quality website monitoring service goes beyond that simple explanation. The Internet is ever-evolving, as are the technologies used by the websites that inhabit it. If your site uses third-party embedded scripts, for example, there are some things you need to be aware of before choosing a website monitoring service for your online business. After all, the more advanced a website is, the more advanced the technology used to monitor that site needs to be.

Understanding Modern Web Applications

Many of today’s websites utilize modern web applications which use third-party scripts that are loaded from external servers. These scripts are often allowed to make changes to the embedding page and access resources on the server of the site using it. If something goes wrong with such a script on your website and you do not have the right website monitoring service in place, your site may, on the surface, appear to be working properly. However, when a user tries to actually access and navigate your site, the script may cause a less-than-ideal experience.

How Website Monitoring Service Helps

When you select a website monitoring service, you want more than a service that simply pings your site to see if it responds. While these website monitoring services can indeed tell you whether or not your site is online, that is pretty much all they can do. The abilities of such services are limited and they can’t really dig deeper into your site to ensure that all of the pages and third-party scripts used by your site are working properly. A quality website monitoring service, on the other hand, will check all aspects of your site to ensure that everything is running perfectly, including these third-party scripts that you may be using. Even though the script is hosted elsewhere, the website monitoring service will be able to tell if it is causing problems within your site itself.

Your Site Is More than the Server It’s Hosted On

If you use any third-party scripts or other third-party tools on your site, embedded in your site’s pages but hosted on another server, you need to remember that your site’s uptime is affected by more than just the uptime of your hosting provider. The uptime of your site is also affected by the uptime of the technology that you use within your site’s pages. As such, you need to make sure you utilize a website monitoring service that can monitor all aspects of your site and not just the uptime of your site’s hosting server.