Today, there are businesses that rely extensively on their websites to create various touch-points with their stakeholders. Consumers can find everything from clothes, accessories, and electronics to even carton boxes for their packaging needs and nannies for their little ones, online.
Boxbee.com provides boxes and storage space for your material and it guarantees delivery on your specified date. On the other hand, Care.com, a consumer-matching platform, provides a trustworthy medium for families to find care for their needs. Imagine many such companies fulfilling your various needs simply by the click of a button.
In the case of the above and many such businesses, websites are the primary and, in some cases, the only touch points with consumers. Hence, the reliability and availability of websites is extremely crucial and plays an important role for today’s businesses.
With increasing Internet penetration, it truly signals a promising future for the thriving e-commerce market in Australia. For these businesses, while it is easy to create a website, what really matters is how companies monitor their availability and performance from various geographical locations. Even a few seconds of downtime can prove to be disastrous during a peak business period. Various studies demonstrate the direct relationship between website performance and user behaviour. A study by Akamai shows that 47% of users expect an e-commerce page to load in two seconds or less. Slow loading of pages can result in customer abandoning the transaction, which may result in loss of revenue. It further would lead to a reluctance for future purchases, thus affecting the whole purpose of the business. Additional findings indicate that quick page loading is a key factor in a consumer’s loyalty to an e-commerce site, especially for high spenders.
Additionally, there are instances when a website works fine in one particular region but is simultaneously down in other regions. This is very critical in today’s global market. Now not only in e-commerce, think of similar issues with internet banking, booking tickets online, cloud technology providers and education institutions running online test exams.
So what does it take to make your website a roaring success?
The performance and accuracy of certain key elements are directly proportional to a website’s uptime. A good website monitoring tool keeps an eye on all these critical elements, from different geographical locations, to keep you abreast of any issues with your website. Additionally, such tools should alert you in real-time about the discrepancies, before your end-users notice.
Specific website metrics which need to be monitored proactively, include:
- Periodic web page analysis to ensure the availability of a website. This also warrants constant monitoring of some essential website metrics.
- Server monitoring to help look out for server outages and performance issues like a server spike or network traffic overload.
- Remote website monitoring to check the availability of the website from different locations. For any online business catering to global audience, this should be the priority.
- SSL certificate monitoringto alert you before the SSL certificate of your website expires. It ensures you have a valid SSL certificate to maintain customers’ confidence on your website.
- Cloud monitoringanalyses the health and performance of your cloud computing resources.
- Web application monitoringto measure and monitor the performance of the web applications in the website such as feedback forms and shopping carts. These web applications are the user interfaces in the website, giving customers a direct point of contact with your company.
- Mobile access to render apps for your Android and iOS devices to track the status of your websites from anywhere.
About the author:
This article was written by Hemalakshmi Balaraman, Marketing Analyst at ManageEngine which offers IT management and software solutions.
