An essential element of your business success lies in establishing trust between you and your users. A big part of this is a reliable website that performs and is there when your users need it. We’ll show you how a website uptime monitoring tool can help you achieve excellence online, with all the wide-ranging benefits that encompasses, not least engendering trust between you and your users.
A professional website uptime monitoring tool like ours at Dotcom-Monitor gives your website a serious edge over your competitors because it provides alerts and root-cause analysis that will spark growth for both your website and business. In 2023, users expect websites to load quickly across devices and locations without unplanned outages. Uptime monitoring helps you maximize uptime and ensure the best experience for your users.
Every business needs to make sure its website provides fast and reliable service to users. Real and lasting trust is developed through practices like serious and professional uptime monitoring. You can never guarantee 100% uptime, but proper uptime monitoring will give you both peace of mind and the tools you need to push toward maximum uptime and minimize unplanned downtime when it occurs. Let’s take a deep dive into uptime monitoring for 2023 and look at some strategies and best practices.
Strategies for Monitoring Uptime
Monitoring Individual Pages
You can monitor the status of individual pages (landing pages, key conversion pages, etc.) using a headless HTTP website monitor. The website monitor can be configured to report and alert systems if it receives anything other than a 200 OK status. All other codes, including 404 or 500 will create an alert. A website monitor can further be complicated by including alerts for each element on those pages. You can access such a monitoring platform, called a full-page website monitor, with a tool like ours at Dotcom-Monitor’s BrowserView platform.
Monitor Your Website’s Uptime Around the World
Ideally you will want to monitor your website’s uptime from a variety of locales. Dotcom-Monitor lets you keep tabs on your website’s uptime and performance from over twenty locations spread across the world. These locales are not just selected at random, but through a process of analysis, have been chosen to reflect usage in areas of strategic importance.
In an ever expanding digital world, it has become quite necessary to reflect usage in areas of dominating importance, such as China. Our software allows you to see exactly what a Chinese user may see on your website, increasing your prospects to make an impact on global markets in a more effective way. If your website loads well in Miami but poorly in Hong Kong, you need to know this and Dotcom-Monitor will give you that information and more.
China is especially important because the Chinese government has sanctioned laws for the strict regulation of what goes around on their servers. You’re better off knowing how your website will perform in this region. Dotcom-Monitor gives you privileged access to usage and uptime reports in both, mainland China and the economic epicenter: Hong Kong.
Monitor Third-Party Content Performance With Dotcom-Monitor
You may have several pieces of content spread across your pages that comes from third party vendors. While these may prove attractive to your website’s layout, it’s crucial to evaluate their effect on your page load times and in specific, your website’s chances of staying online–its uptime.
You may find yourself surprised to know just how much content you borrow from third-party vendors. Fonts, scripts, images, animations, all could come from third-party vendors. Because these third party resources don’t have you pay for them, you can’t hold them accountable for failures in website performance. Many businesses will pay extra money for hosting services such as CDNs for this reason.
When a website goes slow because of simultaneous downloads, it may be time to make use of a Content Distribution Network. CDNs distribute the load to several nodes across the globe and deliver content based on locality. A CDN will see the closest node to the user request and deliver the content from there. Because CDMs are paid for, you can demand accountability.
SLA Performance and CDN
You need a solid method to illustrate and analyze the performance of a CDN once you’ve deployed one for your system. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) will state the minimum performance levels for the CDN, encompassing all including uptime.
When you employ a structure like Dotcom-Monitor, that has multiple nodes across the globe, you will see exactly how CDNs and third party services perform from beyond your own network–you’ll get a glimpse of how real users experience your website’s pages.
Why You Should Monitor Uptime
When it comes to the necessity of professional uptime monitoring, it doesn’t make a difference if your website illustrates the latest concepts in tech, is a simple two page setup, or is a complex network for an employment agency. One thing is crystal clear–if your website is not available to users, it is disruptive to your business. If you settle for an unpredictable website that sometimes loads slowly or not at all, you’ll lose everything that ranges from brand recognition to potential conversions during the time your website’s unavailable.
Additionally, if your website has slowed to become effectively unusable, frustrated consumers will flock to the next best option. According to Acronis, 76% of businesses lose data because they’re websites are down. But the losses are not just data-based. You can incur significant financial losses as well. The Ponemon Institute states that a minute of downtime costs roughly $9,000, which equates to about $500,000 every hour. We suggest you invest in a solid uptime monitoring tool.
Website Uptime Monitoring
The first step toward success in your domain is to check whether your website is operational. Dotcom-Monitor’s flexibility solve this problem. You can set it ping your website every hour, half hour, or every minute to check for availability of all content on your website. If, say, a page won’t respond to the ping, you’ll receive an alert by email or SMS and can build this to escalate to various members of your team to fit your needs. You can also see the results of ongoing monitoring with visualization tools that can graph out your website’s progress given different metrics.
Downtime Alerts
Downtime is practically unavoidable. When it happens, you have the ability to create a chain of command. You’ll set who receives the alert first and with what level of priority. More than one person can be configured to receive the alerts, and you can create validation rules to disempower false positive alerts.
This gives you and your team piece of mind and accountability for when the unexpected happens, as it inevitably will. Digital moves fast, and you and your team need to respond to performance degradation and downtime as quickly as possible. Your business deserves nothing less.
Troubleshooting Downtime
Your journey doesn’t end at the alerts for downtime sent by the monitoring tool. Receiving the alerts just means you have to quickly diagnose the fault and remedy it, so that your website can go online and be available to users again. Dotcom-Monitor can assist you in this process.
Our software comes equipped with troubleshooting capabilities that can help diagnose the problem and provide a root-cause analysis which helps you prevent future recurrences of the same issue. With our world-class support team, you have access to the expertise of the support staff who can help you root out the source of the problems and ultimately serve your users better.
Screen and Code Capture With Dotcom-Monitor
With Dotcom-Monitor, you’ll have access not only to a screenshot of the affected page but also to the code that your website sends when it goes offline. Here’s how the technology works: our monitoring tool captures images of the website during the monitoring process.
In the event of an error, the system sends out the relevant image and stores them in the database for a week before the system discards them. This gives you and your team much-needed insight to help you root out the cause of issues and prevent further downtime.
Dotcom-Monitor Is the Best Uptime Monitoring Tool for 2023 and Beyond
Dotcom-Monitor’s world-class platform and support stands out from the competition, and we back it with industry-leading support dedicated to you and your team’s success online. Access our free trial and learn more about how we streamline and simplify website uptime monitoring for serious DevOps teams around the world.
