Monitoring Your Website’s Performance – Check This out or Miss Out

The Internet is an alternate universe where people’s attention spans are shorter than in the physical realm.  It is a world populated by citizens who are used to instant gratification.  And why not, considering that the next possible greatest experience is a click away?  And for an online business, that back click means loss of opportunity and possible sales.

Why does this happen? 

For the most part, viewers click the back button when they do not find what they are looking for, or the website does not contain what is promised. But the most unfortunate instance for a webmaster is to lose sales because the site is experiencing system failures or communication failures that result in major downtime.  Even a well-built site experiences these glitches and the more elements you have on your site, the more difficult it is to monitor your website’s performance and its availability 24 hours a day.  It is a time consuming yet extremely necessary part of maintaining and owning a website.

Monitoring website performance

There are several reasons why websites fail to function properly from simple bugs to script errors or network connectivity issues.  The bottom line is to know what happens so that necessary adjustments are made in real time, minimizing your site’s downtime and maximizing viewer traffic.  Monitoring website performance involves quite a number of things that an application needs for it to function properly and there are metrics that are most commonly measured as performance indicators such as response time and availability or uptime.  Here a list of the essentials.

1.       Website availability or Uptime – Monitoring your website’s uptime should be the first and foremost concern.  You are online because you want to be visible and visible you must be at all times.  It is essential for websites that are intended to reach global audience, uptime of key pages should be checked from different locations.

2.       Full Page Loading – Monitoring the functionality of each element should also be monitored, from images to videos to flash files, etc.  For viewers, the visuals matter.

3.       Page Loading Speed – As mentioned, the internet is fast paced and the loading speed determines whether your viewer would decide to explore your site further and stay longer.

4.       Sign Ups and Log ins - Let your viewers feel that they are important, welcome them and answer their queries promptly. 

5.       Query Forms and Shopping Carts – These applications should always be working well.  One keeps clients interested and the other one is of course income generating.

6.       Broken Links – It is frustrating for viewers to find that certain links do not take them further.

7.       Your site has been hacked and is flagged by search engines and anti-virus softwares.

There are other more technical aspects of monitoring website performance and the list above is just a small portion. If you think you need help in monitoring your website, visit Site-Monitor, you may be missing out because of issues that may be easily fixed if you know where to start.