5 Industries That Absolutely Must Use a Website Monitoring Service

In today’s day and age almost every single online business (and nearly all Internet entrepreneurs) understand the value of a quality website monitoring service. The problem is that oftentimes these professionals fail to see the big picture when it comes to the utilization of such a service. Some tend to be stuck in the mindset that a website monitoring service is nothing more than a means to measure a website’s uptime. The reality is that the benefits of such a service go far beyond this single feature.

While the fact remains that nearly every online establishment can benefit from the use of a quality website monitoring service, there are five specific industries that absolutely cannot go without such a service. Only by partnering with a quality website monitoring provider can these businesses truly reach their full potential in terms of both profits and positive brand recognition. Here are the five industries that absolutely must have a quality website monitoring service in place for their websites if they have any hope of ensuring that their businesses will succeed in the cut-throat ecommerce marketplace and on the Web in general.

1. Ecommerce Websites

In the world of ecommerce, time truly is money since every minute of unnecessary downtime equates to profits flushed down the drain. It is crucial that every ecommerce website utilize the services of a quality website monitoring provider. The sooner the proper employees are notified that something is awry with the site, the sooner those professionals can get to work to fix the underlying problems. Without a quality website monitoring service in place, it could be anyone’s guess as to how long it would take the appropriate personnel to realize that the site is suffering from performance issues or complete downtime. A website monitoring service, on the other hand, alerts your pre-selected staff members the moment your site starts having problems so you can put failsafe measures into place and go to work to fix the problem sooner rather than later.

Another issue to consider when determining whether you really need website monitoring for your ecommerce website is just how cut-throat the industry is and how easily your customers can be won over by your competitors. If your site is performing poorly or goes down completely, you can bet you’re losing sales and the faith of your customers. In most cases a website visitor will give a website page a matter of seconds to load before they become frustrated and move on to another website. If your site isn’t completely down but isn’t performing up to par either, your website monitoring service can alert you to the problem and help you determine exactly what the problem is and how it is manifesting. This not only saves you diagnostic time but also ensures that you can get your site back online sooner rather than later.

2. Financial Institutions

A financial institution has an obligation to provide their account holders with access to their banking details 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. If a financial institution’s website or app goes down, it can cause consumers to wonder just how secure their data really is. After all, if someone can hack into a financial institution’s back end and bring the website down or even just affect the performance of the institution’s tools or apps, it is only logical to assume that the very same hacker could access personal accountholder information. Because privacy and security are such intrinsic aspects of online banking, it is crucial that all financial institutions doing business on the Web have a website monitoring service in place. This allows the proper parties to be notified if the website has become vulnerable to a DDoS attack, is suffering from poor website performance, or encounters other downtime and performance issues that may cause customers to lose faith in the security of the financial institution that they bank with online.

3. Government Websites

It isn’t uncommon for the government to set the pace for the private sector in terms of security measures and online risk mitigation. When all eyes are looking to you to set the golden standard, it’s crucial that your website’s security and performance exceed all expectations.

In 2011 the government presented an 80-page report that set the standard for continuous monitoring of websites. A full section of this report is dedicated to website monitoring services. In recent years, after the release of this report, website monitoring services have become even more crucial to both the government sector and public sector combined. Reputable website monitoring services can provide real-time reports that allow IT security professionals to respond to external and internal threats as soon as they present themselves. Many government websites have begun to trust quality website monitoring services with the delicate task of helping to protect government systems and IT infrastructures. All government websites, even small local ones, should partner with a quality website monitoring service to not only protect the data and security of the sites, but to set the pace for the security of public sector websites as well.

4. Website Hosting Providers

When it comes to uptime, a hosting provider’s track record can make or break the entire business. When hosting servers go down, it affects all websites hosted on the affected servers. Those websites belong to paying hosting customers and those paying customers will not take the downtime of their site lightly, especially if that downtime is due to the hosting provider’s failure to secure the servers and minimize customer downtime. Frequent downtime not only cuts into profits, but it can also bring the hosting company’s reputation into question, making it difficult to procure customers in the future. As such, it is crucial that each website hosting provider be able to discover a downtime or performance issue the moment it occurs.  By partnering with a quality website monitoring service, a hosting provider can immediately go to work to get their servers back up and running when an incident does occur.

5. Small Mom and Pop Websites

Just like in the brick and mortar world, there are small “mom and pop” websites on the Internet. These sites don’t rake in millions per hour like retail giants such as Amazon, yet they can’t afford to lose what profits they do generate due to unnecessary website downtime. When a small Internet business’s website goes down, the site can’t make money until it is back up and running. The best way to minimize damage to the company’s profits and reputation due to downtime is to partner with a quality website monitoring service. This service ensures that the website owner knows the site is down the moment an issue arises, allowing the business to minimize downtime and the associated profit loss and loss of customer confidence.

Knowing Which Tools You Can’t Live Without

One of the keys to being successful online is knowing which tools are optional and which tools you absolutely cannot do without. While almost every single site on the Web should have website monitoring service in place to protect their profits and their reputation, it is especially important for websites that fall into one of these five industries discussed. Without website monitoring service in place, an online business runs the risk of falling behind the competition (which is most likely using a quality website monitoring service to protect their profits and branding efforts).

If your website falls into one of these five industries and you have yet to implement the help of a quality website monitoring service, now is the time to take action and find the service that best suits your needs. Try Alertra today!