Why Monitoring Website Performance Is Just as Important as Monitoring Website Downtime

Here at Alertra we frequently discuss the importance of monitoring your website for downtime. We often remind our readers that website downtime equates to lost profits and that the only way to truly protect your online business’s bottom line is to minimize the downtime your website experiences. However, downtime is not the only thing that you need to worry about when it comes to lost customers, a drop in search engine rankings, and lost profits. Website performance also plays an important role in the success of your online business. If you have yet to discover just how vital website performance is to the success of your online endeavors, there are a few things you should keep in mind.

Is Poor Site Performance Actually Worse Than Website Downtime?

When your website goes down, chances are that your website visitors are presented with an error message alerting them of the issue. It is also likely that your company is utilizing online platforms such as social media to inform your customers of your site’s downtime issue and that you are keeping them informed as to what you are doing to resolve the matter. As a result, your customers know there is a problem and they see that you are working to resolve it. Poor website performance, on the other hand, is an entirely different game. When your website is performing poorly, there are no notices for your visitors to see or any social media outreach letting your customers or potential customers know that your site is experiencing an issue and that you are working to resolve it. Instead, your website visitors just encounter slow loading pages and site errors that frustrate them to the point that they simply leave your site and don’t give a second thought to ever returning, thinking the experience they just had was your site’s status quo. Sure, your site may still be able to make sales when it is performing poorly. After all, it is still online and available. The problem is, you never really know how many sales your site is actually losing due to the performance issues it is encountering. When your site goes down, calculating the damages is rather simple and straightforward. When your site is performing poorly, it is a bit harder to determine the damages the performance issues have caused.

Exactly How Much Will Poor Website Performance Cost Your Business?

As mentioned above, calculating the losses that poor website performance can result in is difficult, to say the least. As a general rule, however, you can estimate a 7 percent decrease in conversions for each 1 second delay. For example, a 2 second delay would result in a 14 percent decrease in conversions. A 3 second delay would result in a 21 percent decrease. Each additional second adds another 7 percent conversion decrease. So if your page load times are being delayed by five seconds, you are looking at a conversion decrease of approximately 35 percent. The longer the delay, the lower your conversion rate will be. In addition to lost conversions, you will also experience fewer page views per visitor when your site is performing poorly. Your site will also be likely suffer from a lack of repeat visitors, a higher bounce rate, lower search engine rankings, and other effects that are detrimental to your business. Needless to say, your site’s performance is just as important as its uptime, which is why you need to utilize a website monitoring service that not only monitors your site’s uptime, but also monitors your site’s performance. This will ensure that you are alerted of issues that could be affecting your business’s bottom line on any front – not just when downtime occurs.