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February 13, 2019

The Importance of Website Monitoring for Your Business

Employing an internet service that provides a systematic and thorough process to monitor your website is one of the most important means to ensure that it is performing at an optimum level. Generally referred to as website monitoring, this type of service should be able to test and confirm that end users can interact with the various features on the website and that its web applications are responding just as they are meant to. Such service becomes even more vital for ecommerce websites that are offering goods and services to guarantee that the transactions are proceeding smoothly. Website monitoring provides companies with essential data that can help them enhance the overall end-user experience on their website.



While companies can easily hire their own webmasters and developers to create and manage their website, monitoring its performance is altogether a different endeavor. It is true that webmasters and developers can do some performance diagnostics from their end. However, it wouldn’t come as close to the consistency and thoroughness that a web monitoring service can offer. For starters, website monitoring services conduct their monitoring and tests from several locations around the globe 24/7. This type of consistent monitoring seeks out problems or potential problems that may cause network delay, hop issues, website sluggishness and downtime.

Website monitoring companies also conduct tests on websites to prevent false positives that may arise from local or interconnect issues. The monitoring service provider collates all the data from the tests and relays this information to their clients via regular reports in the form of charts and graphs. If an issue or a potential problem is detected, the website monitoring company sends out an alert through various means such as emails, phone calls or short message service (SMS). Apart from reporting the problem, the alert will usually include a screenshot of the problem or even a video, code capture of a network trace route and diagnostic information. All these data will help webmasters and network administrators resolve the issue in a timely manner.

The Need for Website Monitoring

As websites become increasingly essential for businesses and end-users relying heavily on the internet for work or pleasure, the need for website monitoring has become even more crucial. With proper monitoring, companies can be assured that their website is not only up and running but is also performing in the best way possible. A website needs to be reliable and always available for a better end-user experience. Such reliability is also critical for websites that offer goods and services for smoother transactions such as ordering, electronic payments and checkouts.

Website monitoring encompasses a wide range of variables that can affect the performance of a website. These variables may include network, database and server connectivity; bandwidth and domain name system records. Monitoring may also log the performance metrics of a computing platform as it interacts with an application. The metrics can clue in developers on how the application influences infrastructure resources like random access memory (RAM (News - Alert)), central processing unit (CPU) and disk space. The usual metrics that website monitoring commonly keeps track of include website response time, uptime, consistency, reliability and internet latency. Because performance metrics vary depending on website traffic, website monitoring services also conduct regular load testing.

Other Benefits of Website Monitoring

e-Commerce businesses can also benefit from website monitoring by comparing the performance metrics of their website against their competition. By determining how their end-user experience measure up against the others, they can either take steps to make their website more competitive or maintain the edge that they have over their competition.

Website performance, particularly its response time and reliability also help in search engine optimization. Since website speed is one of the metrics in search engine rankings, web developers and designers can coordinate their efforts with search engine optimization (SEO) specialists to give their website ranking a boost.

Apart from performance metrics that are influenced by website architecture, businesses can use website monitoring to ensure that their web hosting providers are holding true to their end of the service agreement. Web hosts guarantee a near 100 percent uptime quality of service. The monitoring can confirm whether or not the quality of service maintained. If the website suffers recurring downtimes, businesses can hold their hosting service provider accountable and thus can ask for some form of reparation.

To date, more than 100 different website monitoring services are active. With such a high level of competition, most website monitoring services offer free but basic monitoring and this form of service may be enough for smaller, two-tier websites. Larger businesses, however, especially those that feature on-site transactions are better off with professional level monitoring to remain competitive.



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