What Happens to Businesses that Don't Have Website Monitoring Service in Place?

Website monitoring has become a must-have in the world of online commerce. Some people, however, may not see why website monitoring and server monitoring are so crucial in today's online day and age. In the era of ecommerce, what exactly happens to websites that do not have monitoring service in place? Here are some cautionary tales to help you understand why downtime is so dreaded among those in the know.

You Get a Call From Your Customer

You're having a "slow" day and decide to take advantage of the lull in website traffic and orders and kick back with a cup of coffee. After about an hour, the phone rings. It's a valued customer asking why your website isn't online. You're a bit chagrined because you had no idea. It looked like it was fine on your end, but you didn't realize you were looking at a cached version of your site and your site wasn't actually functioning. You assure your customer that you'll take care of the problem immediately only to find out your site has been offline for a few hours and you had no idea. How many sales did you lose? Even worse, how many potential customers did you just push away? If website monitoring had been in place, you would have known about the downtime the minute it occurred and you wouldn't have had to have to endure the embarrassment of a customer alerting you.

You Start Seeing a Drop in Sales

It's been proven that many consumers will simply leave a website and go to another if page load times last more than 3 seconds. You see a drop in sales, but attribute it to the economy or it simply being a "slow" time of year. The truth is, your page load times are becoming increasingly unacceptable as your site's performance is declining and you have no idea until you receive a scathing email from a would-be customer about the horrible performance of your website. Who is to say how long your site was experiencing performance issues and how many customers and sales were lost due to those issues? With website monitoring service in place, you never have to ask yourself such questions.

Your Website Exceeds Its Allocated Bandwidth or Is Affected by Other Sites on a Shared Server

Your site suddenly goes down because you exceeded your allocated bandwidth and you could have seen it coming had you seen the decrease in site performance that usually precedes such situations or you could have been notified of the rapidly-increasing traffic if you had only had website monitoring service in place. Worse yet, you may be on an unlimited plan on a shared server and one of the other sites is hogging all of the server's bandwidth, affecting the performance of your site. In either situation, you would have been notified of the issue by your website monitoring service rather than finding out the hard way with decreased sales and lost profits.

It's No Laughing Matter

When it comes to your website, lost customers and lost profits are no laughing matter. You want to be sure you stay on top of any issues that can affect your business's bottom line – especially when it comes to the uptime and performance of your website. This is exactly why website monitoring service is not an optional feature for serious ecommerce professionals. It's an absolute must.