A business website is your connection to the online world. It is your online ID that connects your business with customers all around the globe. As such, it is crucial that your website is always fully functional and operational. If it stops working as intended, you will start losing customers and jeopardize the future of your company. That is why it is so important to always know what is happening on your website. With that in mind, we would like to discuss the importance of monitoring your website. There is a whole array of meaningful metrics to keep track of and make sure that all systems run perfectly.
What is considered website monitoring?
When we say website monitoring, we actually think about a couple of different testing processes that do a health check on your website. This usually includes factors such as:
- Security
- Functionality
- Performance
- Availability
You want to make sure that your website is always online, that it operates without any issues, and that it is always secure.
Why is website monitoring so essential for your business?
As we mentioned at the beginning, if your website is not fully operational, it will negatively affect your business. There could be dire consequences. For example, if your website is running slow, the customers will go elsewhere, and your company will lose money. This will also reflect on your business reputation, and it will be more difficult to find new customers and also hire talented employees.
When we talk about security breaches, regular website monitoring safeguards customer data and protects your website from cyber-attacks. Another reason to monitor your website would be to identify any issues in the back end of your website or potential problems with the hosting services. Furthermore, this way, you can discover potential SEO issues and also understand how visitors interact with your website. As you can see, there is a plethora of reasons to monitor your website. Let’s see what types of monitoring you should regularly do.
Monitoring the security of your website
The most common issue with a website is online safety. Hackers may attempt to hack your website, steal valuable and sensitive information, and resort to all sorts of dirty tricks that harm your business and your customers. To prevent this from happening, you need to do two things.
First, you need to monitor all of the software on your website and make sure that it is always updated to the most current version. And second, do various malware and security checks to identify the potential presence of a cyber-attack. If you are unsure about how to approach this process, pros can handle this for you. It is always best to work with a professional company and hire website security and monitoring experts.
Monitoring the performance of your website
As a business, you want to make sure that your website delivers whatever your customers need. You need to know if they are taking specific actions and staying on your website for some time.
Furthermore, specific metrics, such as traffic, bounce, and conversion rates, also affect your website’s SEO and search rankings. There are three main performance indicators you should look at.
The first one is LCP, or the Largest Contentful Paint. This basically tells you how much time it takes your website to load the largest elements. The second is TBT or Total Blocking Time. That indicator measures how much time it takes for your website to load fully so that the users can interact with it.
The third indicator is CLS or Cumulative Layout Shift. When elements on the page start to load, they may shift to other elements on the page. If that happens too often, it will feel like everything is jumping around, and that can create a poor customer experience.
Monitor website downtime
When you sign up for a hosting provider, you will always see almost a 100% guarantee that your website will constantly be up and running. However, you usually do not monitor your website’s uptime 24/7. Sometimes it may happen that the website goes down. Hosting providers often fix the issue quickly. Nevertheless, it is crucial that you are always informed when this happens. If the issue occurs constantly, it would be a smart choice to change the hosting provider.
Experts at wpfullcare highly suggest that you start to monitor downtime. You will be alerted 24/7 if your website goes down. You can act quickly and prevent major issues for your business.
For this type of monitoring, you can use network monitoring software. It helps you to keep track of the server uptime, server response time, and bandwidth utilization. The response time tells you how much time it takes for the server to respond when someone makes a request in the browser. Bandwidth utilization tells you how much bandwidth your website uses. Hosting providers usually limit this, and if the website is going over the limit, there will be some performance issues.
Monitoring the analytics data
This type of monitoring will help you to quickly determine if something is wrong with your website. It also shows you how users interact with the website. You can monitor the below details:
- The number of visitors
- Where they come from
- How they navigate to pages
- How much sales and revenue your website generates
- Collect information about customer demographics
- Know exactly what pages your customers visit
Data monitoring will provide enough information to improve your content, tweak website performance and make successful marketing strategies to support your business in the future.
A huge benefit of analytics tools for data monitoring is that they allow you to correctly interpret the data and also present it through various dashboards and reports for easier analysis. You can then compare how data changes across different time periods. Furthermore, always make sure to protect your data by creating backups.
Focus on monitoring your website and protecting your business
As you can see, it is very important that your website operates without any issues. If you understand the importance of monitoring your website, you will know exactly what to do and how to protect your website and your business. This is an essential process, so make sure to do it correctly.
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