Website Monitoring and Maintenance: Why the Set-Up of Your Site is Only the Beginning

Most of today’s business owners understand that the majority of business is conducted online. Because of this they work hard to develop a cutting-edge website that puts them ahead of the competition. While it is true that the development and creation of a website is crucial to the success of today’s modern businesses, the fact of the matter is that the setup of the site is only the beginning. If you truly want your site to succeed, then website monitoring and maintenance must be a priority in the operation of your business.

Staying Ahead of the Competition

Chances are that every business you compete with has a website. What they do with that website once it is up and running, however, is another story. If you want to stay ahead of the pack, you have to ensure that your website is properly maintained and that you are using a website monitoring service to keep tabs on the performance of your site.

Why is Website Monitoring So Important?

Research has proven that website downtime has a direct impact on the success of your business. Not only does downtime result in lost profits, but it also has a direct impact on the reputation of your company. If a visitor goes to your site and finds that it is unavailable, the experience sends the wrong message about how your business is run and how reputable your company really is. The last thing you want is for a customer to visit your site intending to make a purchase, only to find that your site is unavailable, thereby resulting in that customer turning to your competition to fulfill their needs.

Many website owners do not realize just how much of an impact website downtime can have on the reputation of their business and their business’s profits. Let’s say, for example, that you are currently experiencing a website uptime rate of 98 percent. You may think this rate is acceptable. After all, 2 percent can’t really make that much of a difference to your business – or can it? The fact is that if you are experiencing a website uptime of 98 percent, then your customers cannot access your website for approximately 14 hours out of each month. That’s 14 hours in lost sales and 14 hours of customer frustration. While it’s impossible to ensure 100 percent website uptime, you should try to reach for a goal of 99.9 percent. After all, you do not want your website visitors to become frustrated with your website downtime issues and you definitely don’t want it to affect your search engine rankings due to bounce rates.

How Much Website Downtime Are You Actually Experiencing?

It is nearly impossible to monitor your website downtime manually. That is why a website monitoring service is crucial if you want to keep an eye on the website downtime that your business is experiencing. When you work with a website monitoring service, the service keeps track of your website downtime and immediately notifies you when an outage or slowdown is occurring. This allows you to not only get a grasp of how much website downtime your site is actually experiencing, but also allows you to address website errors and outages the moment they occur.

While no one can completely avoid website downtime since updates and upgrades are necessary in the maintenance of your site, you do need to take measures to ensure that the downtime of your site is not excessive and that it is kept to a minimum. The only way you can be sure that your website has an acceptable downtime rate is to monitor the performance of your site. This is why an investment in website monitoring services is a must if you want to ensure that you aren’t losing profits or reputation due to error messages, bounce rates and customer frustration.