06/12/2013

A Closer Look at the Numbers Involving Downtime, Performance Issues, and Profitability

Last week we discussed the fact that, according to the National Retail Federation, 67 percent of shoppers will abandon a website if that site is too slow. It was a telling tale of how serious the performance of your website can be to your bottom line. This week we are going to look a little bit closer at the numbers regarding a website’s performance and how that performance can affect your profits and your site’s reputation.

When Money Matters

If your site isn’t profit driven and is just for fun, you probably don’t care if you lose a few visitors here and there. If, on the other hand, your site is indeed profit driven, then you know that every single customer counts. If every single customer counts, then it’s very alarming that approximately 80 percent of web shoppers say that they won’t return to a website if they have experienced performance issues with the site. If your site isn’t performing up to expectations (and consumers expect a site’s pages to load in two seconds or less) then you’re potentially losing 80 percent of your customers. Your traffic may look great this month, but how’s it going to look next month. Or the month after that? Worse yet, how is it going to affect the profits of your website? If you don’t do something to address your performance issues now, you won’t be in business for long.

Another Reason Why Website Monitoring is Crucial to Your Success

When many website operators look into website monitoring, they have one thing in mind – notification of website downtime. They want to be notified immediately when a website outage occurs so they can get the site up and running again as soon as possible. After all, every minute of downtime does equate to profits lost. Website downtime, however, isn’t the only thing you have to be concerned about. You need to worry just as much about your site’s performance, as the numbers above have shown. Fortunately here at Alertra we don’t just notify our clients when their sites go down. We also notify you when your site is experiencing a slowdown. It is increasingly evident that performance issues can affect your site’s profits just as much as downtime can, so being alerted of performance issues is just as critical.

When you look at maximizing your site’s profit potential, you need to look at the big picture. You can’t solely focus on website downtime or you’ll be missing an important piece of the puzzle. The performance of your site is just as important. If you’re alerted that your site is experiencing issues with performance, make sure you address the issue just as quickly as you would if you were notified that the site was down altogether.