What Does a Website Monitor Really Do and Why Do You Need One?

Most website owners and operators are familiar with the fact that website monitoring services are available to them, but some may not understand what these services actually do and why they are so crucial to your website uptime. To understand the importance of website monitoring, you must first understand what a website monitoring service is.

The Job of a Website Monitoring Service

A website monitoring service makes sure that end-users are able to access your website 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is normally done at set intervals, as often as every minute of the day. It would be impossible to manage this task manually on your own, so the services are well worth the nominal cost. It's an extra, ever-vigilant set of eyes dedicated to monitoring the uptime and performance of your website.

Why Does Your Company Need a Website Monitoring Service?

First and foremost, you need to be alerted to downtime as soon as it happens. Not hours after the fact. Every minute of downtime can equate to lost profits. Unless your business is made of money and you can afford to throw profits away, you simply cannot afford downtime. When it happens, you need to know the moment it happens so you can take measures to get your site back up and running as quickly as possible. You also need to take into account what downtime can do to your search engine rankings. Too much downtime and search engines like Google are going to penalize you for it. Chances are that you have spent quite a bit of time and money getting your site optimized and ranked in the search engines. You don't want downtime to have a negative impact on all of the money and effort you have put into getting your site ranked in these engines. Some analysts estimate that 90 percent of online purchases begin with a search engine search. If your site drops in rankings, you're going to see a notable drop in your site's profitability. Another task that a website monitor can perform is that of the ever-watchful eye. If your site begins to experience performance issues, your website monitor is going to let you know about it. Performance problems can be a sign of something bigger to come in the future, such as a DDoS attack and a full-blown outage. Knowing about problems before they happen is key in maintaining your website's uptime. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

A Key Player

A website monitoring service can be a key player in the success of your online business. They can help you maintain profits and even prevent you from losing clout with the search engines. Such an important task can't be left up to chance. That is why so many of today's successful sites are using website monitoring services as an asset to their businesses.