The Importance of Monitoring Your Website’s Health and Performance Why You Should Monitor Your Website
Websites are important to modern businesses. People value information and use it to make decisions, including buying decisions. Over 90% of consumers make online searches to find information before making purchases. Google penalizes slow websites with poor user experience, reducing their search rankings.
A website gives businesses an online presence. It lets them access a wider audience in the online arena. Websites with high availability generate customer leads, improve business credibility and perform well. Most web hosting companies that promise up to 99% of uptime often don’t deliver. Businesses with such plans can experience up to seven hours of downtime each month.
With 7 hours of downtime, your business can lose tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. Therefore, website monitoring becomes necessary to ensure that your business website is always up and running. And, in case of a downtime, the issue is resolved quickly and the website gotten back up and running.
Website monitoring can help your business in the following ways:
- Protect the image of your business through better reputation and improved customer satisfaction.
- When existing customers can access your website whenever they need to make purchases, they’re happy buying from your business.
- Website availability and consistent uptimes also ensure that you continue to make sales, eliminating lost revenue due to downtimes.
- Highly available websites with 99% uptime rank well on Google search engine, meaning increased traffic to your business.
- It also helps detect security breaches fast before they happen and affect your business.
Website Monitoring
Website monitoring involves constant testing of a website or web service to check for performance, availability or functionality. Monitoring ensures that websites are up and working, and visitors to the site can use it as expected to accomplish what they want such as making purchases online.
Website monitoring consist of various activities aimed at checking and verifying the performance, availability and functioning of a web service or website. It can either be real user monitoring or automated testing monitoring. Although manual monitoring is often used, it’s unreliable and sporadic.
When an issue is detected during monitoring, the staff responsible for managing or running the website is alerted to take action. Monitoring falls under various categories, but the most important include the following:
- Website Uptime Monitoring
Website uptime monitoring checks the availability of a website. It ensures the website is up and running, thus accessible to site visitors. It also ensures the site is functional as expected. Web availability monitoring involves domains, web services and web pages.
Monitoring of website API involves basic checks to determine response times from websites. It also checks for HTTP protocol-supported APIs to conduct basic authentication. It monitors the size and timing of response time to send alerts in case of slow times of response. HTTP(S) monitors also checks for the presence or absence of certain phrases, words or expressions.
Uptime monitoring also checks for server availability. If the device or serve supports TCP/IT protocols, the monitoring services checks for select port and device availability. Server availability can be checked each minute to ensure the website is always running. It helps increase productivity behind the firewall or over the internet while preventing downtimes that can be costly.
Advanced availability monitoring involves the use of automated monitors with specialized functions. They can check and verify SSL certificates for proper configurations. It also checks DNS records, log into email servers, query databases and download FTP files from FTP servers for availability.
- Domain Name Expiry Monitoring
Domain Name Expiry Monitoring is a specialized monitoring function that auto checks for the domain expiry date. It notifies website owners or administrators if the expiry date is nearing and thus requires renewal. The domain name is renewed before the expiry date to ensure the website doesn’t experience downtime.
- SSL Certificate Monitoring
Specialized automated monitors are also used to check SSL certificates for proper configuration and expiry. They send alerts for corrections to ensure the website does not experience downtimes.
- Website Performance Reports
Website performance reports provide details about the performance of a website. The reports provide real-time data on websites to improve performance. It assesses various metrics such as bounce rates, time to title, time to start render, connection time, DNS lookup time, error rate, top pages, conversion rate, etc.
The reports can also help optimize user experience of websites. A good example of a website performance report is the Google Analytics Report.
Contact us to help you monitor your business website and improve its performance.
