If you’re a website owner, ensuring it’s available is vital for your business. This way, you will maintain customer happiness and avoid losing revenue.
As such, it’s important you understand the significance of website uptime monitoring – it’s the practice to check website accessibility and performance. If done correctly, it will minimize costly downtime by providing timely alerts.
To get started, you can use website monitoring tools. Alternatively, there are uptime monitoring services for those who’d like to delegate the task to professionals.
This article will explain the reasons why uptime monitoring is important so you can decide whether it’s something you should focus on.
1. Protecting Your Brand Reputation
Building a strong brand reputation takes years. One of the practices to maintain it includes ensuring website uptime, so visitors feel safe visiting it and using your services at any time.
As such, website downtime can be detrimental to your brand reputation – your website being inaccessible will communicate unprofessionalism.
This can damage your online business and frustrate customers. As an example, let’s look at a European online ticket service Trainline.
Its website recently went down, resulting in a complaint from a user on Twitter:
Without proper handling, downtime can damage not only your reputation, but also customers’ trust and confidence in your brand.
2. Maintaining Customer Happiness
In line with the previous point, stable and reliable website performance is vital for a positive visitor experience.
Aside from improving your brand image, your website being accessible every time a customer attempts to visit it will maintain customer happiness and satisfaction.
Thus, uptime monitoring is essential for any type of business, but especially for those that have customers frequently accessing their websites, like online services and eCommerce stores.
These online businesses need high levels of uptime to ensure customers can always access the information they need, such as tickets or transaction data.
In addition to uptime, it’s also vital to ensure a fast-loading site as visitors expect pages to load in two seconds or less. If a page takes longer to load, the bounce rate will increase, leading to a potential loss of half of the total visitors.
3. Avoiding Revenue Loss
Aside from damage to a brand’s perception, failing to monitor website uptime can also lead to lost revenue.
When a website experiences downtime, it loses the chance to make sales, leads, transactions, and ad revenue.
Depending on how big your business is, the revenue loss may differ. Let’s take the most recent Facebook downtime as an example.
In March 2019, Facebook suffered a 14-hour outage. It also hit Facebook-owned brands such as Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, which reported an estimated revenue loss of $89.6 million.
Another example involves Amazon, the online retailer. In July 2018, it held a Prime Day sale which actually ended up costing them up to $99 million in lost sales due to downtime as shoppers were unable to complete their purchases.
4. Preventing Cyber Attacks
Monitoring tools can help prevent harmful attacks. It informs website owners about downtimes caused by malicious activities such as hacking attempts.
Hackers can bring down a website in multiple different ways, such as overloading the servers with DDoS attacks or injecting harmful code into your site.
These activities can lead website owners to shut down their websites to solve the issue. It’s also possible that the website will return error messages such as a 403 forbidden error to your clients, indicating a permission problem.
Without proper handling, not only will these attacks compromise your website, but they may also lead to theft of your customers’ data and damage to their devices.
5. Staying Ahead of Competitors
One way to win over customers is prioritizing a positive user experience. In fact, 79% of marketers place website experience and page load time at the top of their priorities.
When done right, this will earn their trust and confidence in your brand, potentially turning them into loyal customers.
To achieve that, it’s vital to monitor website uptime and ensure site availability at all times. Make sure users can visit, browse through, and make purchases at any time of the day.
Additionally, it’s critical to make sure your website performs just as well on mobile devices. The same source found that bad mobile experiences drive away 52% of users.
6. Maintaining Good Search Engine Rankings
Google indexes your website by crawling into your web pages. It checks the content, page speed, and availability.
During downtime, the crawler will try to reach your website throughout the day to check if it is back up. As that happens, your site will experience a temporary drop in Google search result rankings.
Lengthy or frequent downtimes will lead to long-term search engine optimization issues.
As such, monitoring website uptime is essential to keep an eye out for any outages your site experiences. Understanding problems early on allows website owners to resolve them quickly to protect their ranking.
7. Gaining Insights Into Your Hosting Provider Performance
Some periods of downtime can be caused by your web hosting. Different hosting providers and plans will get you different amounts of resources, affecting your site’s performance.
Budget hosting types like shared hosting are usually best for small sites such as personal blogs and portfolios, since the resources will fit those types of websites.
If you use more resources than you’re allocated, you’ll experience downtime frequently.
By monitoring website uptime, you’ll have insight into the ups and downs of your site. From there, you can analyze whether the provider and hosting plan you’ve chosen are suitable for your needs.
Additionally, you will have access to reports on the downtime percentage to see whether your hosting provider delivers on the guaranteed uptime.
Conclusion
Website uptime monitoring can help minimize the cost of downtime thanks to its timely alerts. Here are some other benefits of using performance monitoring tools or services on your website:
- Protecting your brand’s reputation.
- Maintaining customer happiness.
- Avoiding revenue loss.
- Preventing cyber attacks.
- Staying ahead of competitors.
- Maintaining good search engine rankings.
- Gaining insights into your hosting provider performance.
By being aware of the advantages above, you’ll be able to judge how website uptime monitoring can help your business.
Implement website uptime monitoring to provide a better service than your competitors and start building a positive reputation for your brand.
Jonathon Spire
Latest posts by Jonathon Spire (see all)
- Hypez Review 2024 – Is Hypez a Scam? - April 26, 2024
- Buy Active Instagram Followers Review 2024 – Is it a Scam? - April 26, 2024
- Instajam Review 2024 – Is Instajam a Scam? - April 26, 2024
