Why monitoring website is important for an online business?

One of the secrets behind any successful online business is a healthy and effective website. To remain competitive in the market, it is important to make sure the site is continuously available to the customers without any breakdowns. For instance, if a brick-and-mortar store is closed for one hour, the business may likely lose customers from a localized geographical areas. However, for online businesses the impact will be entirely different. The one hour website disruption will have different implication as it will be affecting customers across the entire country or world.

The damages due to downtime will be substantial because website is the primary means of communication between any online business and its customers. It could be possible that someone might be making a purchase in the online retail store or comparing product list with other competitors. When website suddenly breaks down or suffers with performance issues, customers will simply move on to other sites. It will be a cumulative loss in terms of sales, customers, revenues and brand reputation. To stay ahead in the competition, online businesses need to give better user experience to their website visitors. They need to monitor websites to have clarity on the true end user experience, otherwise it becomes difficult for them to sustain in the online business. Using human resources to watch the websites manually is a tedious process and covers only certain aspects of monitoring. Due to this reason most of the business owners are finding third party external monitoring services as very convenient sources to keep a check on their websites. Monitoring websites is very beneficial for online businesses and some of the reasons are explained below.

Monitoring Reduces the Impact of Downtime Issues

There could be many problems which you may not identify by just looking at the website. Sometimes, the website could be working for you and it may be down for others. So basically you will not be knowing anything about website outage until you get calls from customers. Sometimes there could be a glitch in a particular part of the website while other sections working perfectly fine. For instance if there is a problem with the final payment procedure on the website, you will come to know about the issue only if you manually test the process or somebody complaints about it.

Needless to say, you will not be in this embarrassing situation if you have a dedicated service that exclusively cares and works for your website full time. The service not only adds value to the user experience but also reduces your anxiety on website functioning. Whether you are away from the desk or in the middle of a good nights sleep, you will be alerted immediately about any possible downtime issues. So before the problem turns gigantic and impacts negatively on sales and brand reputation, you can resolve the issue using monitoring service.

Is Your Website Performing Consistently Over the Last Six Months?

Unless you know the facts about your website and keep an eye on its performance, you cannot estimate the actual end user experience. No one can estimate future uptime and downtime percentages of their websites based on the past analysis. But knowing the past numbers will help to analyze the reasons for downtime and performance issues. Analyzing the past website performance manually is a difficult process. Your hosting service may provide you with limited analysis but it will not be the comprehensive one that can be useful. Another viable option is the uptime statistics reports provided by the monitoring services. These reports will not only help to calculate website performance of present and the past, but also aid in identifying any upcoming downtime issues.

Know Visitors Experience on Your Website

If you are in online business, providing good user experience should be on the top of your list. Apart from planned downtimes, the site may go down at any instant for any reason. That means there is less guarantee for continuous availability of the website. The users might be working on the shopping cart or login form and they may suddenly come across an error page on your website. These issues may cause businesses to lose their customers, revenues and ultimately search engine rankings. While it is hard for the online businesses to totally prevent downtime issues, they can minimize these outages by tracking their websites using monitoring services.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. We monitoring service uptime and check availability and performance of Internet-connected devices.