If you are an eCommerce website, a second’s downtime can cost you millions in this tough market. Customers loyalties are extremely fickle and they refuse to return to a website that takes a lot of time to load. But the biggest downside when it comes to website outages is the loss of trust from customers. This is why it is pivotal that you use a website monitoring tool to take care of it.
Having a world that is ‘global’ with no boundaries in the business sense, you are bound to have clients from all over the world. This means that there will be visitors from different parts of the world and that your website has to be available around the clock. You would need instantaneous alerts if your site goes offline.
Your website monitoring tool should come with the functionality where it checks for outages at regular intervals so that you are notified immediately. We are talking about tests that should be run each minute and not by the hour.
Someone who might access your website from Seattle might have a different experience when compared to a visitor from Canberra. Ecommerce businesses experience outages sometimes in location A while location B might be running smoothly. When you check your website from only one location, there are chances that you might encounter a false alarm. Ensure that you check the performance of your website from multiple locations to reduce false alarms. Check if the tool has a network that will be able to scout for outages when accessed from major cities in the world.
If providing alerts was the only objective of a website monitoring tool, then everyone would be the no:1 tool as there is no differentiation possible. Thankfully, there is much more than that when it comes to a website monitoring tool.
Apart from solving the immediate problem of taking care of the outage, the website owner should also know how and why it occurred. A good website monitoring tool would come with a dashboard feature which will give the results of all the tests including historical data that will help you take remedial actions.
A detailed reporting dashboard will help you infer any other issues that may be detected. It will also guide you with the initial troubleshooting so that you can get your website up and running in no time. You will be able to easily create an action plan so that your website isn’t troubled with outages in the future.
When your website monitoring tool sends you a notification alert, how nice would it be if you were to get it as a ticket instead? If so, you would be able to ensure that the issue gets solved and it will help in tracking from your website’s dashboard console itself.
When buying anything from an online vendor, it is imperative that you check for the kind of support that is being offered. Is the support offered 24*7? Do they have call support or is it just email support? Which one would you prefer? Are there different tiers for support based on the payment plan. If you are choosing a widely popular tool that has a community of users in a single platform, then it becomes much easier to get support within the group.
Imagine having to use humans to check the downtime of a website, it is a 24*7 job and humans are prone to mistakes. It is difficult to expect 100% accuracy even if you have different personnel working on 3 shifts. Imagine the money spent on overheads too. Why make it complex when there are website monitoring tools that do not require any external assistance?
What are the various features that the website monitoring tool comes with? Someone new to this field might assume that there is little work to do- just website monitoring. That is all right? No.
The way the tool gathers data, puts it into graphs and charts in a dashboard for the website owner to see and take action is important. If all you get is routine monitoring of the website, there is not much to learn nor can you predict trends.
A few other questions that you have to consider when choosing a website monitoring tool:
Enterprises build their own custom uptime monitor since they have large IT teams, but making use of a SaaS tool comes with its own advantages. Here are the reasons why it is advantageous to get an external website monitoring tool:
SaaS tools are easy to deploy while open source tools consume a lot of time and effort to deploy. There should be software engineers who should work on taking care of the bugs, maintenance, and continuously test every process multiple times a day. All of this is not necessary if you are using a SaaS-based website monitoring tool.
Building your own website monitoring tool is feasible but it’s not the best method to take care of your monitoring needs. Why? Because it costs a lot of money and time in developing one. Time that could be better utilized to concentrate on your core business needs. After developing the product, you would also require engineers to maintain the tool so that it is working in full form.
We have already talked about the importance of support in the article, because it’s that pivotal to an online SaaS tool. If you are not using a SaaS tool, you might have to rely on wading through content on forums to see if someone has already faced this problem. Having a highly responsive support team makes your job easier.
The website monitoring service that you choose for your website is relevant as we have shown you some of the factors that you need to consider before opting for one. The website monitoring tool should be able to handle any amount of traffic that your website gets.
Choosing a cheap plan is putting your website at risk since your entire business is online. Go for a website monitoring tool that promises high uptime in the SLA. Give your customers the luxury of being available 24*7 to serve their needs.
If your website generates $100,000 per day, you stand to lose $2.5 million in a year just because of a 1 second delay.
Trust is the bedrock of all relationships. If it is between two people or...
126-year old fashion magazine Vogue’s website was defaced a few years...
There are few things as frustrating as visiting a slow website. How many...
“I don’t think it will happen to me” is a common sentiment that we...
Monitoring a website might look like a boring task to do, you don’t have...
