Monitor Your Website for Superior Site Performance

Whether your site is in an established industry in a dominant position or a new startup that is trying to create a space for itself, it is important to ensure your site is being monitored if your website wants to be an online success story. In order to be an online success story, you need to monitor the website to have any realistic chance of achieving this goal.

Today, there are millions of organizations or business that have their own website that helps them in achieving their organizations goals. In a competitive online environment, there is a need to set objectives in order to improve or even maintain your website’s good reputation. Those who manage these websites have informal or formal objectives that are essentially goals and expectations from their website.

In order to perform on these site objectives there is a need to need to monitor the website. Monitoring the website is the first step in ensuring a high performance website.

But how do you go about monitoring your website and what exactly to monitor? Don’t worry if you have this question. This is a very common question that comes across the mind of website administrators. This article has been written to help you to get clarity and provide direction to you on this important topic.

Monitor Your Website for DowntimeOf all the issues that your website could have, the worst situation would be to have an extended downtime. Even worse it would be if you are unaware of the downtime. From a branding point of view, this could be harmful and create an extremely negative impression with first time users of your website. This is something that you should avoid, and if such a situation does arise you should try to resolve it quickly. During that downtime, your first goal should be to communicate to your website visitors that you are aware of downtime issue and your goal is to resolve it quickly.

Monitor Your Website for Slow PerformanceThe tricky thing with a slow performing site is that on first impression, everything looks fine. Typically, if your website is being monitored from within the company or by users who come frequently to your website it may give an impression that everything is fine with your website. This could be because some of the pages may load from their computer’s cache memory and give an impression of performance despite the site being slow.

A slow performing site is something that causes sustained nuisance to your website’s visitors. In such situation your website is not completely offline and as the visitor tries to engage with your website they experience a series of issues. At the end, they remember the extended aggravation. Unlike with a website that is completely down, a typical visitor will try again, wait and hope the site starts responding promptly. The fact that it is somewhat in a working situation encourages them to keep trying. At the end, something that should take 5 minutes make take the visitor 15 minutes to get done or worse even after spending 15 minutes they do not complete the desired activity. This causes much ill-will with your website. For this reason, there is a need to check your website for slow performance.

Monitor Your Website for 3rd Party API PerformanceYour websites may be providing additional functionality by integrating with 3rd party applications via their API. This enhances the functionality of your website for visitors. However, this adds a new dimension to monitor for your website’s performance.

Monitor Your Website for High Bounce RatesIf your website landing pages are showing high bounce rates, this maybe a cause for concern. Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who leave your website immediately after visiting it. There could be some pages that have transactional data, which attracts visitors to your website and thereafter once they see the data, they are satisfied and leave your website. In such case, it may be OK. However, you need to examine and figure out what is causing the high bounce rate. Typical issues with high bounce rates are slow loading times, badly written content, page usability issues among others.

Monitor Your Website for Lack of Flow through the SiteYour website may be delivering a service online like providing a quote for insurance or displaying the products that meet the visitor’s criteria. In such situations, the superior performance is the ability to complete the process on your site. This is vastly different from just checking if your website pages are loading quickly or not. You need to ensure that regular checks are being done to monitor the user process flow on your website.

Monitor Website for User EngagementIf your website visitors indicate a strong user engagement that is good news. Similarly, if visitors on your website have weak user engagement that is a cause for concern. Your website will be successful only if the target audiences have a good user experience. For your website to be successful you need to monitor your website for user engagement.

Use a Comprehensive Website Monitoring Service for Your WebsiteHow is the site working right now? This should be a thought that should occur regularly for any good site owner or administrator. Now just having that concern is not helpful, it may actually be counterproductive. But if that question is acted upon in meaningful manner and a website monitoring solution is designed for a systematic site monitoring program, then it could help boost the user experience of visitors to your website and help your website to be successful.

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