Why do you need website monitoring today?
Are you monitoring the performance and availability of your website ?
If your answer to this question is a “No”, you should probably re-evaluate your commitment to the success of your online business.
Your website is the storefront for your business. With the boom in the high speed internet connectivity across the globe and smart devices around, “internet” is the new market place and is the source for a major portion of your revenue.
A website is the first date between a business and users who might turn into customers in the future. With the immense amount of competition in the online space, it becomes extremely important to have a solid online presence through a website 24 x 7 x 365. Website monitoring is hence absolutely necessary to run a businesses successfully especially if a major portion of its revenue comes through their website. One simply cannot think of a successful company who hasn’t implemented or implementing it as a part of their digital strategy.
So, now that we understand the importance of why your website needs to be available to your users across the internet, let’s get the know the most common scenarios why a website could suffer a downtime.
Why does a website go down?
Downtime is inevitable. It is natural and happens to every business on the internet. Be it Amazon or the mighty Google, everyone has had their fair share of downtime and have suffered huge looses because of it. However, there are are some reasons more prominent than others that could result in a downtime. Some of them are:
Sudden traffic spikes
This is probably one of the most common causes of a website suffering downtime. This happens when your system isn’t ready or designed to receive huge amount of traffic that might run into your website especially if you are into e-commerce and running a promotional discount campaign without anticipating the amount of traffic that might buzz into your website from different platforms like Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Quora or any other platforms.
One of the easiest and probably the first step that needs to be taken to avoid such scenarios is to use a reliable hosting platform that has the necessary means to guarantee an uptime to keep your website up and running.
Scheduled maintenance
Even websites that are perfectly optimized and functioning properly need a scheduled maintenance. This is when the website goes down. The maintenance should be done only when the traffic is least or during off-peak hours to avoid any significant negative impact on the sales.
Website code issues
Poor code can result in an unnecessary load on the servers with redundant cyclic processes that aren’t required. This might also result in multiple errors in the database which over time might lead to the website becoming completely unresponsive and suffer huge performance issues and downtime.
Hacker attack
Hackers can bring down your website in multiple different ways. This can be done by injecting malicious codes to your website even when the website is under maintenance, overloading the server with DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks which flood a system with huge amount of fake traffic to use up the entire bandwidth and resources to it limits causing the website to go down. They might even steal the security credentials forcing the IT to bring down the website and resolve the issue.
Data Center problems
Sometimes the downtime is caused by the web hosting companies themselves This is when the Fyipe uptime monitoring service comes extremely handy to know how reliable your web hosting company actually is. This will also help you decide if you need to change the web hosting service to avoid any serious downtime.
These are just the major reasons why a website might suffer downtime and can be easily identified. But, there are many more reasons why a website might go down and it is extremely difficult to keep a check for all of them. This is where the need arises to have an uptime monitoring service like Fyipe in place to take care of everything and alert you when something goes down so that you can sleep like a baby.
So, what is uptime monitoring ?
Uptime monitoring refers to a regular checkup of availability and response time of a website from different locations across the world 24 x 7.
This verifies that the website is available and fully operational from anywhere your customers want to access it. If a web-page is not available, it means that the business is not available on the internet i.e., your business store is closed.
This might leave your potential customers dissatisfied and even worse will move them your competitors’ page. You should be the first person who is informed about any issue connected to your web page in order to respond as quickly as possible or your competitors who are anyways eager, will steal your customers right away.
There are many protocols which can be used for up-time monitoring like HTTP, HTTPS, PING, DNS, PING, FTP, TCP, UDP, SIP, etc.
Modern website uptime monitoring tools like “Fyipe”empower just about every business owner, user, and online entrepreneur achieve amazing visibility and gain the much-needed edge over the competition.
Uptime monitoring helps businesses be alert of the availability of their website and notifies them via email, SMS and even calls them when something goes down.
Top 3 reasons why you should start monitoring your website today
In 2013, Amazon.com suffered downtime for somewhere between 20 to 45 minutes. That short failure came with a massive price tag. Based on the company’s average sales volume of $117,882 per minute, a 40-minute outage may have cost the company almost $5 million.
This isn’t the first time this tech giant has suffered downtime. According to a large survey conducted in 2007, Amazon made around $29,000 every minute. That means that their two hours of downtime back in 2008 led to a loss of $3.48 million.
Since only the high-profile outages and million dollar losses catch the media attention, business owners sometimes underestimate the loses they might incur in this situation . Since there’s no such thing as 100% uptime, the question for every site owner isn’t “Will my site go down ?”
The questions are “When will my next outage happen?” and “How long will it last?” and “How much will it cost me? and “How would i know when it happens?”
According to a TRAC Research survey of 300 companies in the US, the average revenue loss for an hour of downtime was $21,000.
Web monitoring tools like Fyipe therefore has become absolutely necessary to keep the businesses alert of the availability of the website 24 x 7 x 365 and plan the next course of action if and when downtime happens.
It takes a lot of resources and hard work to build a brand over the years and maybe just a few down-times to destroy it.
Businesses must make themselves aware and adopt these services to improve their customer satisfaction, build brand trust and win in the long term.
Let’s look into some of the major repercussions of not having a website monitoring service in place for your business:
- Your brand perception suffers badly and you lose revenue
When a user visits your website, the first impression matters. A website with a smooth flow and fast response creates much better vibe and positive effect on the minds of the user that is already agitated and stressed in the process of searching for best product/service they require.
According to a study, just 50 milliseconds — one-twentieth of a second — is all it takes for us to form an opinion about a website. And once we’ve formed that opinion, it colors how we feel about a site’s credibility and usability, ultimately affecting whether or not we choose to make a purchase on that site.
Creating a site that is both visually appealing and high performing can be a ticket to online success. But what if it isn’t available when a user tries to search for it ?
Your online store-front (website) will appear to be closed and you will be losing the sale. All the efforts put in to attract the next queue of customers with go in vain. Not only do you lose revenue, you lose the brand image.
2. Customer satisfaction and retention crashes significantly
Every business understands that repeat customers bring fortune. Visitors who visit a platform again spend nearly double the time than the first-time visitor and the chances of them making a purchase is 9X of the first-time visitors.
Since it takes a lot of investment to get a customer to visit your page, it becomes extremely important that they convert and make a repeat purchase.
Poor web performance has a dramatic effect on customer satisfaction, both in terms of repeat visits and word of mouth. According to an Aberdeen survey of 116 companies, a 1-second delay in load time equals, on average, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. Up to 49% of users who experience performance issues when completing a transaction will abandon the transaction and go to a competitor’s site. Of these, 33% will never return to the site and 18% will share their experiences with others.
“The online market place today has become so competitive that if you lose a customer today, you might have already lost them forever.”
Hence it is easy to understand the importance of being available and delivering the best customer experience every time someone visits your website.
“It’s amusing to see how businesses in order to reduce expenses cut down over things that are absolutely critical to adding value to their business. You can’t be penny wise and dollar foolish if you want to succeed. Saving $100 to lose $10000 in sales and your brand name is plain foolish. If you have a website, you need Fyipe period.” — Founder, Genosyn.
3. Google ranking and organic search traffic gets affected too
It might sound strange but the speed and availability of your website has a lot to do with influencing the visibility of your website on Google. Google’s search algorithm is designed to rank pages based on a number of factors with page speed being one of the important ones.
If your website suffers downtime quite often or if the bounce rates are high due to poor performance, you could kiss your ranking on the first page of Google search, goodbye. With the fierce competition over keywords and ranking, you simply can’t afford a downtime let alone a prolonged outage.
Top 5 Reasons why you should start monitoring your website today:
- Be the first one to know:
This is an extremely important idea. You must know it when your website goes down before your customers do. This not only helps you in resolving the problem quickly but also helps in managing customer experience.
There are multiple social media integrations available such as twitter to let your customers know of what’s happening. This might not increase the brand trust to a large extent but will definitely reduce the negative reviews you might face when your customers are kept unaware. This makes businesses look irresponsible.
2. Downtime is inevitable, so you must be prepared:
Website downtime is inevitable. Every website goes down at some point of time. The important thing is to be aware and get notified as soon as it happens via SMS, email, phone call etc. so that your IT can go ahead and rectify the issue as soon as possible to reduce damage. Web monitoring tools like Fyipe keeps you alert and ready for such scenarios so that you don’t have to worry about it 24x7 and rather focus on being ready to resolve the issue when it happens.
3. Your company’s reputation is the first priority:
With the fierce competition today, the only thing that runs a business is its reputation across its customers. Hence, your company’s reputation is important.
But with the rise in power of social media tools, your reputation can be damaged quickly. Even some of the biggest web companies experience reputation damaging website downtime. Facebook, Amazon, Sony and Twitter being some of them. They have all experienced downtime for significant periods of time. Website monitoring allows you to identify problems before your target audience does.
4. Web monitoring is like an insurance for your website:
Web monitoring is like an insurance policy for your website. Being unaware that your website is down can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Every minute saved is money in your pocket. So a web monitoring service is a cheap way to protect your website revenues and company reputation from unexpected downtime.
5. An uptime of 99% isn’t good enough:
Even an uptime rate of 99% still means your website is down for 3.65 days a year. What if one of those days coincides with a major promotion you’re running, or with a seasonal holiday (like Christmas) that generates a large number of sales?
To beat the competition, business must target at least four nines of uptime i.e., 99.99%. Companies like FYIPE help you achieve this ambitious goal and even reach the goal of 99.99% uptime throughout the year.
Ok! I got it and I want to take the next step. What do i do now ?
Step 1: Visit Fyipe.
Step 2: Sign up for the free trial.
Step 3: Ok you can relax now. Let Fyipe take care of your rest.
Step 4: Witness the boost in your business. Share it now and help a friend experience the same.
