Key Takeaways
- Monitoring website and application performance is vital to any robust digital strategy. Achieving perfect uptime is challenging, but with effective web monitoring tools, unexpected downtime can be minimized.
- Platforms like Dotcom-Monitor empower IT teams to enhance website uptime and performance, driving user engagement and reducing bounce rates.
Online business operations are ubiquitous now. Despite the big advantages of web-based business, it still comes with risks that could be detrimental if there’s no troubleshooting strategy already in place.
While online operations offer major advantages, they also present risks, especially without a proactive troubleshooting strategy. One of the biggest risks is availability. Today’s businesses are expected to deliver seamless, 24/7 online experiences across all devices and regions, which can be a tall order for engineering and development teams. Even with advancements in digital infrastructure, unforeseen issues are inevitable.
What Is Web Monitoring?
Web monitoring is the process of consistently checking your website’s performance, availability, and functionality. This involves automated tools that run at regular intervals to evaluate if your site is online, how fast it loads, and if it’s performing as expected across different devices and browsers. When web monitoring detects any issues, it can alert your team immediately which allows you to quickly address problems before they impact your users.
Key elements monitored typically include:
- Uptime – Checks if your website is accessible and online.
- Page Load Speed – Measures how long it takes for your site to load for users.
- Functionality – Tests whether critical website features, like forms or checkout processes, are working properly.
- Content Accuracy – Verifies that specified content, such as product descriptions or prices, hasn’t changed unintentionally.
- Security – Monitors for potential vulnerabilities or breaches.
By using a comprehensive web monitoring solution, you can gain real-time insights into your site’s performance and quickly resolve any issues that could affect your visitors.
Why Web Monitoring Matters
The bottom line is that users want to know that your site is responsive and reliable. There’s nothing more frustrating than visiting a site that’s unresponsive or down for extended amounts of time.
When your site is consistently slow or experiencing downtime, users will have no problem looking elsewhere for the same product or service. Studies have shown that nearly 50% of Internet users expect web response times of less than two seconds. Understanding this data allows you to take a proactive approach to your site, in order to ensure that your users are getting what they expect.
This is where web monitoring comes in. Conducting regular checks on important metrics of your site will ensure that your site is performing well and meeting user expectations.
Let’s consider all the ways that web monitoring can help your site and by extension your business. Professional web monitoring tools like ours at Dotcom-Monitor can lead to insights that in turn move you to:
- Install security features that ensure the safety of user data, at scale and performatively.
- Optimize your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings so that new users will be able to easily find your site.
- Notify you of potential bugs and other functional issues and solve them as fast as possible.
- Provide you with user data in order to optimize your site’s performance.
- Boost revenue and conversion rates and improve your organization’s bottom line.
- Help you understand how users actually experience your site, globally and across different devices. This information will allow you to make necessary changes.
- Confirm whether your web hosting provider is delivering on essential elements of your site, and if there might be improvements to the hosting arrangement.
- Ensure that your site’s design and content directly reflect what users expect.
- Compare your site’s performance with your competitors, ensuring that you have the competitive edge where possible.
These are all important features of monitoring your site, but the most crucial element to monitor is unexpected downtime. Downtime is the time that your site is unavailable to users due to power outages, busted code, or some other technological error.
Downtime can lead to loss of loyal users and revenue, which can prove detrimental to the reputation of your business and hurt your bottom line. Let’s look further at downtime and how web monitoring tools like Dotcom-Monitor can minimize and prevent it.
Some Causes of Downtime
There are several possible reasons why your site may experience downtime, which could damage your reputation and cause a significant loss of revenue. Let’s take a look at the most common reasons for site downtime.
Hardware Failure
If your business takes care of its own servers, it’s possible to experience downtime when your hardware fails. However, many businesses have moved to a cloud-based computing system, which avoids these types of failures.
Network Errors
Network downtime has to do with the inability to access a network due to application error or some particular system. These errors are sometimes caused by issues outside your control, such as maintenance or power shortages. The Internet is a complex and often unpredictable place, which means that having a troubleshooting strategy in place sets you and your business up for success.
While you cannot effectively predict everything that may go wrong with your site, the goal is to get as close as you can. Users expect sites to have an infrastructure in place that will prevent extended instances of downtime.
Software Errors
Software deficiencies are often the consequence of human error, such as poor communication, poor management, and simple errors in code or issues during a planned update. These issues can be remedied by having a troubleshooting strategy in place before any of these issues actually occur.
Software errors can be caused by simple changes to your site, such as removing or adding a plugin. It’s important to remember that your site and software is a complex system, and the fallout of a small change may have downstream effects that were not foreseen.
Downtime Is Unavoidable but Can Be Minimized With Web Monitoring Tools
The simple fact is that unplanned downtime is sometimes unavoidable. The best you can do is be as prepared as possible, ready to resolve the issues that can be fixed. Downtime can be caused by a viral blog post or video, or even network issues that are outside your control. However, it’s important to have a monitoring tool that can be used to locate exactly where and why your site went down. This is where Dotcom-Monitor can help you.
Should your site experience deficiencies or downtime, our monitoring tools will instantly send you a text, email, or both, to alert you to the issue. The frequency with which you receive messages can be tailored specifically to your needs and preferences. Dotcom-Monitor also has the capacity to capture real-time screenshots of the pages affected, which allows you and your team to respond quickly and effectively.
You want your site’s downtime to be discovered by your team instead of users. If you are alerted to your site’s downtime by your users, it communicates that you don’t take pride in your web applications, which can damage your user’s perception of your business. Businesses that choose to invest in a monitoring tool that keeps a close eye on uptime signals they truly care about their user’s experience.
Use Dotcom-Monitor for Web Monitoring
Dotcom-Monitor’s website monitoring tools aim to help you maximize your site’s performance by alerting you to any potential issues in real time. We have monitoring locations all over the world, which allows us to identify any and all performance issues that may happen in those locations.
By using Dotcom-Monitor, you will have access to dashboards that provide you with important metrics about your site and its performance. You’ll be notified immediately about performance that may arise, making collaboration and problem-solving a streamlined task. Consider scheduling a free one-on-one demo today, or you can sign up for a free trial. We will be happy to help you with all of your web monitoring needs, and work closely with you to maximize your site’s uptime.
