Why You Need to Monitor Uptime of Your E-Commerce Website

Being part of an online business is exciting. It makes good business sense especially when consumers tend to purchase almost everything online. Clothes, accessories, books, electronics, groceries, sports goods among others are extensively purchased online. It is important to constantly remind yourself that for an online storefront, the website is the essence of your business. Many times, it is the primary means for e-commerce sites to stay in touch with the customers. Therefore, make sure your website is available all the time and that it is working in good condition. 

You may have invested much effort and money to create your website with great UI and user appeal. Online competition is fierce, it is important to start uptime monitoring of your site as soon as it launches. Users don’t have good user experience when your website is down, takes time to load or fails to meet the expectations of the customers.  Users not having good user experience will not wait, they will most likely find an alternative site to satisfy their needs. Not only does this affect your revenue and profits, it will also affect your brand reputation.

Here are the reasons why you need to monitor your e-commerce website:

Continuous Uptime Monitoring

Visitors access the site from their mobiles or desktop and also from various geographic locations. Any monitoring service first monitors the website uptime; whether your online store is live and fully functional around the clock. Good monitoring solutions check the availability of the website from multiple geographic locations. The benefit of continuous monitoring is that downtime can de discovered early and corrective action can be taken faster.

Checking Site Features are Functioning

The main purpose of any e-commerce site is to see that the customers are able to purchase online without any glitches. They can choose a product, add it to a cart and pay for it. A minor error can affect this process and irritate the customer during the purchasing process. Monitoring services apart from making sure that your site is live, also constantly monitor some of the other essential website functions.  They can detect the problems at an early stage and alert you. This enables you to resolve the matter before more end users experience the same problem. The website monitoring tool may even offer some clues that may help to easily find the right solution to fix the issue. An early detection and prevention helps your business prevent lost sales due to site malfunctions.

Performance and Speed

Studies have shown that a typical customer decides in 250 milliseconds whether to stay or abandon an e-commerce site. Every site is tested by the customers’ expectations on having a responsive and fast performing site.  The landing pages are the ones that make good first impression on the visitors. These pages are most sensitive to poor load times. It is seen that bounce rates are higher in sites that take more time to load. Some of the landing pages that you need to monitor are the home page, category pages, and promotional pages of the best-selling products.

Track the Server Performance

With monitoring it is possible to actually predict some failures and use this information to prevent it. One of them is when traffic volume increases beyond the server capabilities. A growing server response time signals of traffic load increase. A reliable monitoring system will alert you when its limits are being exceeded. 

Monitoring an E-commerce Website is Essential Not Optional

You can prevent website downtime or any inappropriate functioning of website with constant monitoring. There is no doubt that a good performing website helps avoid shopping cart abandonment,  results in better customer retention and repeat visitors. Without doubt one essential duty of operating an e-commerce website is to invest in a good website monitoring solution and use it regularly to ensure better success.