Categories: Website Monitoring

What Does a Web Performance Monitor Do?

No matter how many visitors your website gets every month, and what type of industry you’re working within?

We know that you’re always looking for ways to improve the user experience.

But if you don’t take the time to constantly analyze and test your website?

Then chances are your website just isn’t functioning as seamlessly as it should be.

Over time, this will cause you to lose visitors. Eventually, you’ll fall way down in the search engine rankings.

Plus, if your website is often offline, you won’t be making any sales or building your brand recognition.

Having a web performance monitor can help.

But what is website performance monitoring, and why does it matter?

Read on to find out.

What Is Website Performance Monitoring?

Before we speak more about the benefits of working with a professional web performance monitor?

Let’s make sure you actually understand the concept.

In the simplest possible terms, a website performance monitor continually tests your website to make sure it is optimized for the best possible user experience.

This includes making sure that it loads quickly and completely, and that you get the maximum amount of site uptime possible (AKA, that your site stays online.) It should also work well on mobile devices.

In general, there are two main kinds of performance monitoring that websites for any kind and size of business can benefit from.

The first is what’s known as synthetic performance monitoring.

Essentially, this means that a computer constantly and routinely (we’re talking about once a minute here) does a quick scan of your website.

You may also have heard this referred to as active site monitoring.

It looks for potential problems, and it tests to see how long it takes for a site to respond to a request.

It even figures out what may be making your site slow down.

Remember that humans aren’t involved in this testing process. So, reports will be created by software and other testing programs/tools.

On the other hand, there’s what’s called real user site monitoring.

It’s a passive approach, and it requires that an actual user gets on a page and runs a real user monitoring test of some kind. This will help companies to figure out more detailed information about the overall site functionality.

It looks at loading time, the network connection and duration, and the send/receive aspects. It even takes a look at the average download speeds on your site.

But it also tells you about the user on your website.

It can help you to understand the browser/type of operating system users have, as well as their location and the pages they’re looking at.

The Benefits of Using a Website Performance Monitoring Tool

Now that we’ve talked about web performance monitor basics, let’s move onto the benefits.

As you can imagine, there are quite a few — whether you choose to go with real user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, or a combination of both.

First of all, doing so will help you to lower the overall bounce rate on your site.

This is crucial because websites with high bounce rates — AKA, when users click away from your site within just a few seconds — don’t do well in the search engine rankings.

It will also help you to increase your conversion rate.

After all, users can’t exactly buy a product or book a service when your website keeps on crashing.

Above all, using any form of site monitoring will improve your brand’s reputation. It will also give you a serious advantage over your competitors. That’s something that every website can benefit from.

Which Web Performance Management Works for You?

We understand that it can be tough to figure out which of these two main types of performance management you should focus on.

While again, a combination of the two is valuable, you’ll likely concentrate your efforts primarily in one area.

If you’re trying to gain insight into your customers’ behavior, web habits, and the most successful pages of your website?

Then real user monitoring will likely be the best bet for you.

In other words, you’ll be able to have a pretty complete picture of the overall user experience that visitors will have on your site.

This will help you with things like your level of customer service, save your development/IT team time, and will (as they’re not spending half their time looking for errors) help you to generate leads online at a lower cost.

If you’d like to get notifications when there’s a problem with your website, or if you’re more interested in learning about how to improve the more technical side of your site, then it’s likely that synthetic monitoring is the better choice for you.

You’ll even be able to try out new website features and tools before they go live on your site. You can also run tests on how your website will respond in several possible scenarios, like a traffic overload or a customer transaction issue.