Monitoring Website Performance: Why it’s As Important As Monitoring Website Downtime

We all hear about it when a website goes down. We all know that website downtime equates to lost profits and even headlines that hurt a company’s reputation. That’s why the majority of serious online ecommerce players put website monitoring service into place. Profitable companies know that website downtime equates to lost profits and website monitoring can help reduce the amount of profits that are lost each year due to downtime. But what about website performance? Is it as important as website uptime? Before you assume knowing about website downtime is enough, there are some things you should consider.

Website Downtime vs. Website Performance

When website goes down, your site can’t bring in sales. That’s just common sense. But what about when your website isn’t performing up to par? Your site may still be able to make sales, but the question is, are your customers going to actually hang around long enough to complete a sale? When a website goes down, the customer knows it’s down and may decide to come back and try again later. When a website is performing poorly, that customer may get fed up with the site, assuming it’s just the way your site operates, and leave without ever coming back for that sale. This is why it is important that any website monitoring service that you put into place monitors website performance as well as website downtime.

How Poor Performance Affects Your Website

While website downtime can be measured in lost sales for each minute your site was down, it can be a bit harder to measure losses due to poor site performance. The fact of the matter is, if it takes your site’s pages more than three seconds to load, your visitors are going to start getting frustrated. If your page load times exceed five seconds, chances are you are going to lose them to a competitor site. Poor website performance affects a number of factors that are crucial to the success of your business including your conversion rates, your revenue, your user satisfaction, customer retention, bounce rate, brand perception, and more. Again, it becomes very clear why website monitoring that offers performance monitoring in addition to downtime monitoring is crucial to the success of your online business.

Looking at the Numbers

So exactly how much does poor performance cost your website? This can be a bit harder to estimate than the cost of downtime. First, let’s assume your site experiences a one second delay in page load times. On average, you can expect that one second delay to result in a 7 percent decrease in conversions. In addition, you can expect to have 11 percent fewer page views per visitor. In addition to decreased customer satisfaction, your site will experience a decrease in profits. If your site averages $50,000 a day in sales, these estimates would equate to a loss of $1.25 million in sales a year. That may actually be more sales lost due to performance than you would ever lose due to downtime, which is why your website monitoring service needs to employ practices that monitor your site’s performance in addition to your site’s uptime.

Working with the Right Website Monitoring Service

If you work with a website monitoring service that monitors your site’s performance in addition to your site’s uptime, you will know if your site is experiencing page performance issues. This means that when your site’s performance starts to lag, you’ll be notified and can take proper action to get your site running seamlessly again. Lost profits are lost profits, regardless of whether they occur from downtime or performance issues. The right website monitoring service can help you avoid both.