Important Website Metrics that Need Monitoring

Website outages are not just annoyance, but can have major impact on business bottom-line. Companies that serve customers through their websites clearly understand the repercussions when disruptions happen to their site functionality. They know if their site remains down for a long period of time, the credibility suffers. For this reason online businesses proactively use site monitoring service to keep a closer look on their site performance and uptime. But the challenge is many of them are not able to decide which aspects of website need monitoring. Since websites have many components and metrics, it is less possible to watch into every aspect of the website. 

For instance, for an ecommerce website assessing the load tolerance and speed are important to measure website capability for traffic, whereas these metrics are not essential for low traffic websites. So when deciding to monitor websites, the site owners should come up with the list of metrics to monitor based on their business and site requirements instead of getting baffled with many things at a time. Focusing on minor issues which are not critical for website functionality may distract the attention from the actual problems. 

However, there are certain metrics that need closer attention from every site owner because they are critical for site existence. These metrics are important to monitor regardless of website size and category. 

Accessibility

Checking the site accessibility will let the site owners know the actual status of the website. This is the first step in monitoring that determines whether their site is active or down for users. In case, if the site is experiencing downtime the service would further drill down into each aspect to pinpoint the bottleneck. With website monitoring service in place, the site owners need not worry about unexpected site outages. As soon as the site goes offline, the alert is sent instantly notifying the issue.

Uptime

Uptime tracking includes monitoring websites for hosting disruptions, site response issues, slow page loads and functionality issues. With any one of these issues, the site can go offline or have degraded performance. Tracking the uptime will also let the site owners know the performance of their web host. Hosting companies sometimes do not deliver the uptime that they guarantee to their customers. With website uptime monitoring the site owners can assess whether the hosting provider is delivering the hosting resources as agreed by them. In case if they identify instances of site outages or low uptime numbers then they can consider changing the web host to a better service.

Server Response

Web server responds to the user requests and serves the content in the form of web pages. Any delay in processing the request or server not responding to the requests can slow down page loading or result in site outage. The reasons for server downtime can be anything from normal maintenance process or hardware issues to low server capabilities or power failures. To check the instances of server issues it is important to have a monitoring service with server monitoring feature. This will enable site owners to track server uptime and isolate the issue whenever server goes down.

Website Speed

This is another metric that greatly influences user experience. No matter how much effort is put to optimize the code and design for increasing the site speed, sometimes certain aspects of website such as increased web traffic or inefficient hosting can degrade the response time. The speed of the website also depends on the location from where it is being accessed. Sometimes, the server may take longer to respond to the traffic from the regions other than the hosted location. If that is the case, the website performance will not be the same across all regions. To determine location specific website issues, the site should have monitoring from different locations. Accessing the site for speed from different geographical locations will allow businesses to cater better for global customers.

Site Navigation

Monitoring important workflows will let the site owners understand how users are navigating through their websites. Typically, an ecommerce website will have many integral processes such as login or purchase form and shopping cart which should work without any errors. Also, a website can have database queries or third party plug-ins for different functionality. To go through different processes uninterruptedly, the transactions must be continuous through proper navigation of webpages without any break or discontinuity. Even a small error can disrupt the flow and prevent users from navigating smoothly through the website. By using a step-by-step transaction monitoring, site owners can easily identify the source of transient problems in page navigation or website transaction.