What would it take for you to become more proactive instead of reactive when it comes to the performance of your website? That’s where a web monitoring tool can help.
Your website is a window into your organization. Often, it’s your brand’s first chance to make a good impression. According to Google, if your site takes over 3 seconds to load, more than half of your visitors will leave.
Like it or not, customers and prospects use your site’s performance to tell them how capable you are of doing business.
That’s even more true if you run mission-critical web applications like an eCommerce platform or customer service portal on your website. Failures in those areas lead directly to lost revenue. For example, every minute of ecommerce downtime costs the Gap $6495.60.
For many, maintaining a website is a reactionary effort. But chances are, by the time you’re aware of a website problem, a website visitor has already experienced it.
What would it take for you to become proactive instead of reactive?
What if you knew how well your website was performing all around the world? What if you could study each individual element of your site to find bottlenecks that affect page load times? What if you were alerted to failures in key transactional processes before a website visitor or customer encountered them?
That’s what web monitoring is all about.
1. Uptime Monitoring
Website outages can be costly. To find out how much a typical website outage costs you, analyze how long on average it takes your website to convert a customer. Then divide that by any downtime that occurs.
If you have any sizable traffic at all, you’ll probably find that every outage costs you money you’d rather not lose over technical issues.
Yet the people who manage a website may not know when it goes down, especially when the outage is location specific. If you’re running an international website and you’re in the US, how do you know if your website suddenly becomes unavailable in Australia?
A good web monitoring solution, such as the new TeamViewer Web Monitoring, uses servers all over the world that ping your website regularly. If that ping takes too long or goes unanswered, you’ll get an alert — no matter where you are.
Some downtime is inevitable. But uptime monitoring can notify you when an outage strikes, so you can take action to minimize lost traffic and missed opportunities.
2. Transaction Monitoring
Most websites involve transactions. They don’t even have to be monetary, like user sign-ups or logins. But if they fail, users quickly lose trust in your site — and your brand.
Transaction monitoring allows you to write scripts for your critical transactions and then set those scripts to run automatically on a schedule. With solutions like TeamViewer Web Monitoring, there’s no writing at all. Instead, a web-based plug-in records a journey through a task on your website and creates the script. If a script fails, you’re alerted.
The best part? You’ll never face logging in on a Monday morning only to see that your eCommerce site wasn’t able to complete any business transactions all weekend because it couldn’t process the data customers provided.
3. Page Load Monitoring
Worried about website visitors leaving if pages don’t load in 3 seconds? How do you prevent that from happening on your website? Page load monitoring.
Today’s graphically heavy websites make a lot of magic happen using a variety of elements. As your site grows, so too does the number of elements, to where you may lose track of those digital assets.
A good page load monitoring tool loads every element of your website individually — from JavaScript to images — to isolate the elements that are slowing things down. Perhaps an image is too big or some loose code is making unnecessary queries. Once you pinpoint those bottlenecks, you can fix them and speed up your site without having to invest in more bandwidth. Ultimately, this helps improve the user experience of your website.
Make Web Monitoring Easier
Web monitoring is just like other forms of preventative maintenance: The easier you can make it, the more likely it is to get done in a timely fashion.
How can you make this a manageable routine? Your web monitoring tool should have:
- A centralized console to control everything
- Automation
- Thorough reporting
Optimizing your website’s performance is an ongoing process that’ll help you provide a much better experience for your visitors and customers. When your brand is on the line, web monitoring helps ensure your website performs its best online.
