Top 4 Reasons You Need to Employ Website Monitoring Services

As consumers become increasingly demanding in regards to what they expect from a website's performance, more and more website owners are beginning to realize the importance of quality website monitoring services. Back in the days when most shopping was done in brick-and-mortar stores, a friendly staff providing excellent customer service was the key to a business's success. Nowadays, with a good percentage of transactions being conducted online, the role of the friendly salesperson has transitioned into the role of a website that offers performance and reliability. If your website is your business's "voice" to your customers, you want to make sure it's saying the right things. If your site goes down or experiences performance issues, you need to be the first to know so you can take measures to insure the wrong message isn't being sent to the public. If you have yet to invest in a quality website monitoring service, here are the top four reasons you should consider doing so sooner rather than later.

1. All Websites Experience Downtime

If you think website downtime can't happen to you, you're sorely mistaken. Website downtime happens to even the biggest and best of sites. It's impossible to guarantee 100 percent uptime and when downtime does occur, you need to be the first one to know about it. Don't count on emails from customers to reach you to notify you of a site outage, especially since the same outage affecting your website can take your email down with it. You need a quality website monitor to notify you via phone or SMS text message in addition to email to ensure that you know about any website downtime the minute it occurs.

2. Looks Can Be Deceiving

Your site may seem to be up and running, but is it working properly? It is virtually impossible to monitor all aspects of your site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Sure you can constantly visit your site to make sure it's up, but that doesn’t mean it's performing up to your customer's expectations or that certain applications associated with your site are functioning properly. You need the services of a website monitor to ensure that all features of your site are performing as they should be.

3. Slow Response Times Equate to Lost Profits

A quality website monitoring service doesn't just check the uptime of your site, but also monitors your site's performance. Nearly 50 percent of all online consumers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less. If your site isn't performing up to expectations, your customers will go elsewhere. That means lost profits. A quality website monitor will alert you when your site isn't performing the way it should be, ensuring you can take measures to correct the situation and keep your customers and sales.

4. Reputation is Everything

Performance issues and website downtime can wreak havoc on a website's online reputation. Not only will customers who visited the site during the outage or performance issue become frustrated, but chances are that they will also vent about their frustrations in online forums. The last thing you want is negative reviews circulating about your business due to an outage or performance issue that you weren't aware of. With website monitoring in place, you can take care of any problems before they get out of hand and can do any damage to your business's reputation.