Your website is one of the most important parts of your business. From getting your products in front of potential customers to increasing your brand’s trustworthiness, your website is often the first part of your business a potential customer sees. But do you know how it’s really performing?
There is a lot of valuable data about your website that you might not even be aware of. Things like the amount of time it is offline or loading speed seriously affect how customers interact with your site, or why they might choose not to use it at all.
To get at this data, you need monitoring solutions. When you register for monitoring solutions, you will have all the data you need, right at your fingertips.
So why do you need to monitor your website? We’ve got the top seven reasons that you need monitoring solutions.
1. Get Alerted When Your Site Goes Offline
Notice that we said, when your site goes down, not if. No matter how good your website is, it is going to go down at some point. Even Google, with its top of the line Site Reliability Engineering, isn’t up 100% of the time.
There are lots of reasons your site may go down. A poor hosting service, a sudden spike in traffic, malware, or a faulty plugin could all become the culprit. What matters is how you react.
When your website goes down unexpectedly, there are a number of serious costs to your business.
On top of financial costs, there are costs to your reputation as well. If a customer tries to go to your website and it is offline, they may go to a competitor. But the frustration of your site being down may mean that they may keep going to that competitor in the future as well.
For example, a website like Personalfinance-online.com has online tools to help people run their businesses. If someone wants to use one of their tools and you go to their website, only to find that their site is down, they aren’t going to stick around trying to refresh for very long. They are going to Google a new solution and go to a competitor.
That is why web monitoring solutions are so critical. These services constantly monitor your website 24/7, checking it more than a thousand times each day.
That way, when you get an alert that your website has gone offline, you can respond immediately. With a quick response, you can get your site back online as quickly as possible, reducing any possible damage.
2. Know Your Site’s Stability Over Time
Is your website suddenly going down all the time? Or is its performance actually improving? Without using monitoring solutions, there is no way for you to know.
It’s important to be able to compare your website’s current performance to the past if you are trying to troubleshoot issues. If you notice that your website is suddenly going down significantly more often in the past two months, you can consider what might have changed to cause this.
Did you change your hosting service, or did you install a new plugin? You can narrow down the possible causes in order to solve the problem.
Once you know what is going wrong and why you can build a solution and make sure your site spends as much time online as possible.
3. Save Time and Gain Peace of Mind
Without using monitoring solutions, the only way to know the status of your website is to check it yourself.
There is no way that you can check your website as many times as a monitoring service can. Website monitoring is needed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You wouldn’t be able to take time to sleep, let alone get anything else done!
But even if you are just checking your website’s status periodically throughout the day, that takes time and attention from running the other aspects of your business. Plus, due to peering issues, even if your website appears online to you, it might be inaccessible to users in other locations.
With web monitoring solutions, you get more effective and more frequent monitoring than you could ever do yourself. Plus the only time you will need to react is if an outage occurs.
It also gives you peace of mind. If you aren’t getting alerts, you can rest assured that everything is running as it should.
It is one less thing to worry about in your workday. Even more importantly, you don’t have to stress about it in your time off.
If you have ever been the person checking their website from a holiday or at a family outing, you will appreciate having one less thing to worry about. Since you know everything online is business as usual, you can go back to living in the moment.
4. Be In Control During Downtime
When you have your website monitored, you will know immediately when it goes down. We already talked about the benefit of being able to start solving the problem as soon as possible, but what if it is something that will take a bit of time to fix?
Getting a downtime alert lets you take control of the situation, even if you can’t get your website back online right away. You can show your customers that you are aware of the problem and are working to solve it.
You can release statements on your social media accounts that you are working to solve the outage problem. Tell customers that you are there to answer any questions they may have, and give updates as to when the site will be back online.
This helps keep customers from getting frustrated. Plus, the professionalism of your response can help mitigate any reputational damage from the outage. This way, you can turn a potential disaster into an opportunity to interact with your customers.
5. Be Sure of Your Website’s Speed
Do you know how quickly the pages on your website load? The loading speed of your website is a big Google ranking signal, meaning that pages that load faster will show up higher in Google’s search results.
To be counted as “fast” by Google, your pages need to load in two seconds. Ideally, though, your site should consistently load faster than that. For most users, even two seconds is too long to wait.
When you use web monitoring services, you will always know how fast your website loads. If you are clocking in at over two seconds, you will know that it is time to start working on a solution.
You can check this data over time to look for any changes in the speed, and backtrack to figure out where you have made a change. This will let you know which solutions are working, and which ones aren’t.
6. Get Honesty From Your Hosting Company
Using a monitoring solution to keep an eye on your website produces a ton of valuable data. You will have accurate statistics about your site’s uptime and loading speed.
This data is very useful to have on hand if you ever need to make a complaint to your hosting company. If you want to talk to them because your site is down for an unacceptable amount of time, you’re more like to get help if you can prove this claim with data.
Since a hosting company’s poor infrastructure is one of the major reasons that your website might go down, this data can also let you know if it is time to look for a new web host.
7. Monitoring Solutions are Easy and Effective
Website monitoring is a no-brainer. After a quick set-up process, it will run entirely on its own. The only time that you will need to do anything is to respond to an issue when your site goes offline.
It is a solution that can improve your website and help it run more efficiently. You can respond to problems as they arise, rather than getting an embarrassing notification from your own customers that your site is offline.
Plus, the longer you stick with the same monitoring service, the more data you will have access to. This will lead to more effective troubleshooting and analysis in the future, as your database grows.
When you use monitoring solutions, it is an easy and effective way to protect your website and your reputation online.
Wrapping Up
Web monitoring solutions are an absolutely essential part of your website. Knowing that your website is running smoothly and getting alerts when it isn’t helps make sure an outage doesn’t cost you or your reputation. You can respond to issues proactively, searching for solutions and keeping your customers up to date in the meantime.
It will save you time and give you peace of mind, knowing that you don’t need to constantly check your website. Plus, you will get valuable data to troubleshoot any issues and plan solutions to downtime problems.
It is easy to get started, and an effective way to constantly monitor performance. If you want to find out more about monitoring solutions or set up your solution today, contact us for more information.
