Website Monitoring- What, Why and How

What is Website monitoring?

Website monitoring, as the term says is just monitoring your website continuously to ensure it is working as expected and ensures that your website's functionality and performance are always up to standards. It helps you take care of any problems on your website as and when it appears.

Why is website monitoring essential?

We are in an era of digital transformation and it has brought in significant changes in various aspects of human society. In the business world, the shift has brought in remarkable changes to marketing, operations, delivery methods, and customer experience. With More than 80% of consumers depending on Google or any search engine to find information about any products, services or information they want, whatever be the business you wish to run these days, a quality website has turned out to be a must-have. It has a crucial role to play in providing an online space for your business. You need to take care of the design and functionality of your website so that your consumers stay on the page and can increase your conversions.

Not just creating a website, maintaining and monitoring it after the launch is equally important. Once your website is launched, you need to continuously monitor your website to ensure it is online and is performing well. I would say, with ever-increasing customer expectations and low patience levels in people these days, website monitoring has a critical role to play in the current digital era than ever. We all like websites that are always available, loads fast and are easy to use, right? Unavailability or downtimes and any glitches in the functionality of your website can really make your customers angry at times and can lead to them abandoning your website, losing your credibility or losing customer leads and sales. An online store may encounter loss of thousands of dollars in sales in few hours of downtime. Even the page load time of your web pages matters. Surveys show that more than 50% of customers expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds and around 40% of the visitors tend to leave a website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds. And imagine if some functionality on your website has been broken. After all, a pleasant user experience is of utmost importance in maintaining your site’s credibility. Monitoring your website continuously is the best way to ensure that your customers have a smooth user experience 24/7. Here are the top reasons to monitor your website, blog or online store:

1.       Protect your brand’s image and credibility.

2.       Keep your customers happy.

3.       Prevent any potential losses due to impact in sales, customer conversions, etc.

4.       To obtain the best Google search results ranking.

5.       Enable quick response and resolution of issues identified while monitoring.

How can website monitoring tools help you?

Website monitoring involves testing and verifying that end users are able to use a website as expected. It can be monitoring website uptime, performance or functionality. So, how do you go ahead with website monitoring now? Well, you have a number of tools that enable you to monitor various parameters of your website these days. Some tools like Pingdom and Monitis can help you with monitoring your website speed and performance. There are tools available to monitor the functionalities of your website as well like Uptrends. These tools continuously monitor your website and send alerts during downtimes or whenever there is an issue.

Criteria for Selecting Website monitoring tools

Today, if you Google up website monitoring tools, you get a number of tools listed. How do you select the right tool? Each tool has its own features. Some are exclusively for monitoring website performance while some are for monitoring the functionalities of the website. There are tools which do both as well. So, the first thing you have to look out for is what all features the tool can monitor. Ease of using the tool is the next main thing. Some tools might require some technical knowledge and some would be very easy to use. Hence the choice of tool depends completely on your needs and comfort levels. There is a wide variety to choose from.

What all can you monitor?

So what all can you monitor on your website using these tools? Methods to monitor your website are divided into two main categories- External monitoring and Internal monitoring. External monitoring allows you to monitor all the web resource parameters and Internal monitoring allows you to monitor your local network. Here is a quick list of things that website monitoring tools can monitor for you easily.

·         Uptime monitoring which does a regular checkup of availability and response time of your website.

·         Full page load monitoring which gives detailed performance data for every element on the page.

·         Monitoring transactions of a website to test the site’s functionality (Synthetic transaction monitoring)

·         Performance monitoring for checking website’s speed, track connection speeds, and browser load times.

·         Page errors, missing contents, etc.

·         Basic website and API monitoring checks for response times.

These are some of the major things that website monitoring tools can usually do. Some tools cater to monitoring various above parameters while some focus on any of the specific parameters only.

How can Browsee help you to monitor your website?

Browsee is a smart bot that monitors your website’s users and their experiences and alerts you when something is wrong. It monitors your user’s click patterns and can give you alerts based on that. For example, if a user clicks on a button multiple times, browse alerts you that particular button functionality has some issue. Browsee allows you to monitor APIs and identify slow or erroneous Ajax calls. It also can identify and alert you on broken links and JavaScript errors on your pages. Browsee also has an advanced AI-based bug detection which detects bugs in functionalities of your website based on user clicks and experiences.

With just a snippet integration, Browsee keeps an eye on the critical functioning of your website by monitoring your user’s experiences and lets you know of any difficulties or glitches your user’s experience. Thus, you know your customer’s issues even before they log a support request or post feedback. This is one reason why you should be monitoring your website carefully. Not every customer who experiences an issue logs a support request or submits feedback.  They just abandon your website! So with Browsee, you need not manually test your website or write chunks of selenium code to run automated tests for your website. You just have to place our JS snippet on your pages and Browsee will track and monitor your website automatically. Isn’t it a smart tool to have? If you are interested, Sign up now!