Most people have a general idea when it comes to the importance of website monitoring, but few people have a deeper insight into what key criteria to watch.
Unfortunately this can have a negative effect and render the process useless. After all, if you’re not paying attention to the right data, all the monitoring efforts will go to waste.
In short, you need to consider how people use and experience your website, as this highlights the right information. Traffic can track success and failures, while more accurate findings, such as performance and load times, can indicate what causes this. Similarly, don’t forget to compare these results to your competitors.
Server performance
All website traffic and data goes through your server, so it’s highly important to know how well the server is doing. Regular monitoring and testing can show any changes – for instance, increased traffic might be causing additional stress on the server. Consequently this can cause slower load times and other difficulties for anyone trying to access your website, so regular monitoring should help highlight this issue early.
As a result, you can deliver a quick response to any problems before any real damage can take place. Similarly, any changes you make, such as improving server capacity, can be watched through this method to see how successful they are.
Load times
However, while the server is important, the end result is all that matters. For instance, none of the technical work matters if users still encounter slow loading times.
Because of this, taking time to monitor loading times individually is a very important aspect. Load times can be a big deterrent for potential customers and audiences. Since you have a close connection to the server, cached databases and other aspects not available to remote users, your own experience does not always reflect what others see.
Competitors
Finally, while this information is always useful, it all depends on how you sit within your respective market. As good as your service could be it might not matter if your rivals have an even better alternative.
To this end, NCC Group monitoring services offer competitor benchmarking, to compare your site to chosen rival companies, to help provide this data. This will instantly tell you how good your website is, if more can be done, or if you’re already leading the field.
At the moment there are website monitoring solutions that allow to see any transaction made on the site – what every client does on the site, the time a person sees the site and so on. So, if you wish you can have the entire picture of the site with modern tools like Anturis, Nagios or Pingdom.