Introduction
Your website is the face of your enterprise in front of hundreds of millions of viewers, every day. No matter what people might have heard or thought about what you have to offer, once they reach your website everything can change in just a matter of seconds. What’s even more dangerous is that you won’t lose a single potential follower or customer, the chances are that the word of mouth will drive away around 10 people that will lose the interest in visiting your page simply because they’ve heard it’s slow, the features are not working properly, or even if the navigation is difficult.
Furthermore, a website could perform brilliantly at the start but the technology could overrun it in a few years and you won’t know where to start fixing and tweaking so you’d face spending a lot of money on building a new website from the scratch. It’s more affordable and purposeful to monitor your website performance regularly because that’s the only way to make sure you can react on time and fix one issue at the time.
You don’t know which performance indicators you should monitor? Don’t be upset, we’ve prepared a list you!
Uptime
The availability of your content to the audience is the pillar of your hopes and dreams for success. It’s is of utmost importance to make sure your entire domain, especially the pages that are bringing in the most visitors and generate the highest conversion rates are online and operational all the time. Keep track of the availability of your website from various points of access throughout the world, and check the monthly downtime. This website performance metrics will help you reduce losing sales or visitors who tried to access your page but nobody was home when they came knocking.
SEO performance – tracking keywords with the help of Sitechecker
Optimizing your website for search engines means always keeping your eye out on the changes in Google algorithm, keyword trending, and changes in the methods of SEO implementation. If you register a drop in page ranking, then you risk losing customers, falling behind the competition, and eventually losing the entire business. Implementing a website keyword tracker tool could help you monitor the performance of your keyword strategy. You could compare your own set of keywords with what the audience is actually searching for and use that data to improve not only your SEO but also your palette of products and services.
Exit pages
When you decide to measure website performance indicators, it’s important to know what drives the people away from your website, as much as it’s important to know what attracts them to your brand. Google Analytics and similar website performance monitor software allow you to keep track of where the audience loses interest in interacting with your content. Once you generate the list, you can analyze the problematic pages and see how you could improve that content in order to keep the people on your website after they reach the “exit page”. After each attempt of fixing the issue, check if the results are showing progress and keep trying until you notice a positive change.
Bounce rate
A lot of people consider bounce rate to be a negative performance indicator, a sort of a red flag for user experience, or the exoticness of your content, however, that’s not entirely true. Bounce rate tells us how many people visit your website and then leaves after seeing only the landing page. But what if you run a brick and mortar store and your landing page advertised a discount at your local store so the visitor read the article and went straight to your shop to make a purchase?
The nature of your business and the visited page can influence your bounce rate, so make sure you closely monitor this performance indicator and analyze it before making a decision.
Page load time
It stands to reason that you want to provide the best user experience to your visitors, you want to give them a chance to have fun and enjoy using your website, but also allow them to seamlessly finish what they came for. In order to establish a balance between aesthetics and functionality, you’ll have to import images, plugins, various forms, and scripts, all of which demand a certain amount of time to load. If it takes too long for your page to load the visitors might lose interest and leave before getting a chance to meet with your brand first-hand. You can track it with Google PageSpeed Insights tool.
Database monitoring
Websites often include dynamic content that gets pulled from the database on demand. Depending on the performance of your database it might take a while for the content to load. Furthermore, it’s not unusual for database queries to contain error messages or return unexpected results. You could manage these issues by incepting alerts for such occasions, but the best cure is regular database performance monitoring.
Third-party resources
Apart from the content stored on your own servers, there’s a great chance that you have some third-party additions to your page like plugins, widgets, and similar pieces of software. Although their performance is beyond your influence, the users will still connect their lack of functionality or slow performance with your website. Keep track of the changes that occur with third-party content on your website to make sure your page works fast and without setbacks.
Conclusion
We hope this article brought you closer to the idea of how to monitor websites under your authority. You owe amazing performance to your visitors and your business, so it’s up to you to do everything in your power to make sure the things run smoothly 24/7. Rest assured that the audience will be thankful and notice your efforts.