Key Takeaways
- Website and web application performance and uptime monitoring is an essential component of any serious digital strategy. Perfect uptime is impossible, but unexpected downtime can be kept to a minimum with proper web monitoring tools.
- Platforms like ours at Dotcom-Monitor help IT professionals maximize website uptime and improve performance, which is key to engagement and lower bounce rates.
Online business operations are ubiquitous now. Despite the big advantages of web-based business, it still comes with risks that could be detrimental if there’s no troubleshooting strategy already in place.
One of the largest risks to doing business online is availability. Businesses are expected to perform online at the highest level every minute of every day, globally and across devices, which can be difficult for engineers and development teams to maintain. Though digital infrastructure has progressed to meet these heavy demands, it’s still not perfect. Unforeseen issues inevitably arise.
What Is Web Monitoring?
The importance of your website cannot be understated. Much of the time, businesses rely on their websites for commerce, information display, and user experience. In order to maximize a user’s experience on your site, you must understand the best way to optimize the functionality of your site in order to develop a seamless experience for users.
Web monitoring requires knowledge of exactly how users will engage with your site or application. Though there are many components to this process, one of the most important elements to your site is uptime. If your site goes down for any amount of time, do you have protocols in place that will quickly get it back up?
Why Web Monitoring Matters
The bottom line is that users want to know that your site is responsive and reliable. There’s nothing more frustrating than visiting a site that’s unresponsive or down for extended amounts of time.
When your site is consistently slow or experiencing downtime, users will have no problem looking elsewhere for the same product or service. Studies have shown that nearly 50% of Internet users expect web response times of less than two seconds. Understanding this data allows you to take a proactive approach to your site, in order to ensure that your users are getting what they expect.
This is where web monitoring comes in. Conducting regular checks on important metrics of your site will ensure that your site is performing well and meeting user expectations.
Let’s consider all the ways that web monitoring can help your site and by extension your business. Professional web monitoring tools like ours at Dotcom-Monitor can lead to insights that in turn move you to:
- Install security features that ensure the safety of user data, at scale and performatively.
- Optimize your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings so that new users will be able to easily find your site.
- Notify you of potential bugs and other functional issues and solve them as fast as possible.
- Provide you with user data in order to optimize your site’s performance.
- Boost revenue and conversion rates and improve your organization’s bottom line.
- Help you understand how users actually experience your site, globally and across different devices. This information will allow you to make necessary changes.
- Confirm whether your web hosting provider is delivering on essential elements of your site, and if there might be improvements to the hosting arrangement.
- Ensure that your site’s design and content directly reflect what users expect.
- Compare your site’s performance with your competitors, ensuring that you have the competitive edge where possible.
These are all important features of monitoring your site, but the most crucial element to monitor is unexpected downtime. Downtime is the time that your site is unavailable to users due to power outages, busted code, or some other technological error.
Downtime can lead to loss of loyal users and revenue, which can prove detrimental to the reputation of your business and hurt your bottom line. Let’s look further at downtime and how web monitoring tools like Dotcom-Monitor can minimize and prevent it.
Some Causes of Downtime
There are several possible reasons why your site may experience downtime, which could damage your reputation and cause a significant loss of revenue. Let’s take a look at the most common reasons for site downtime.
Hardware Failure
If your business takes care of its own servers, it’s possible to experience downtime when your hardware fails. However, many businesses have moved to a cloud-based computing system, which avoids these types of failures.
Network Errors
Network downtime has to do with the inability to access a network due to application error or some particular system. These errors are sometimes caused by issues outside your control, such as maintenance or power shortages. The Internet is a complex and often unpredictable place, which means that having a troubleshooting strategy in place sets you and your business up for success.
While you cannot effectively predict everything that may go wrong with your site, the goal is to get as close as you can. Users expect sites to have an infrastructure in place that will prevent extended instances of downtime.
Software Errors
Software deficiencies are often the consequence of human error, such as poor communication, poor management, and simple errors in code or issues during a planned update. These issues can be remedied by having a troubleshooting strategy in place before any of these issues actually occur.
Software errors can be caused by simple changes to your site, such as removing or adding a plugin. It’s important to remember that your site and software is a complex system, and the fallout of a small change may have downstream effects that were not foreseen.
Downtime Is Unavoidable but Can Be Minimized With Web Monitoring Tools
The simple fact is that unplanned downtime is sometimes unavoidable. The best you can do is be as prepared as possible, ready to resolve the issues that can be fixed. Downtime can be caused by a viral blog post or video, or even network issues that are outside your control. However, it’s important to have a monitoring tool that can be used to locate exactly where and why your site went down. This is where Dotcom-Monitor can help you.
Should your site experience deficiencies or downtime, our monitoring tools will instantly send you a text, email, or both, to alert you to the issue. The frequency with which you receive messages can be tailored specifically to your needs and preferences. Dotcom-Monitor also has the capacity to capture real-time screenshots of the pages affected, which allows you and your team to respond quickly and effectively.
You want your site’s downtime to be discovered by your team instead of users. If you are alerted to your site’s downtime by your users, it communicates that you don’t take pride in your web applications, which can damage your user’s perception of your business. Businesses that choose to invest in a monitoring tool that keeps a close eye on uptime signals they truly care about their user’s experience.
Use Dotcom-Monitor for Web Monitoring
Dotcom-Monitor’s website monitoring tools aim to help you maximize your site’s performance by alerting you to any potential issues in real time. We have monitoring locations all over the world, which allows us to identify any and all performance issues that may happen in those locations.
By using Dotcom-Monitor, you will have access to dashboards that provide you with important metrics about your site and its performance. You’ll be notified immediately about performance that may arise, making collaboration and problem-solving a streamlined task. Consider scheduling a free one-on-one demo today, or you can sign up for a free trial. We will be happy to help you with all of your web monitoring needs, and work closely with you to maximize your site’s uptime.