Websites can go down for a variety of reasons, which include hardware failures, DDoS attacks, or even instances of human error. In such cases, your company will lose opportunities to connect with your existing and potential customers or clientele. Even short periods of downtime can result in your customers losing confidence in your company and its services, especially if they have shared confidential information with your website. That said, you can reduce the chances of this by using uptime monitoring for your website. This article discusses what this monitoring is and why it is essential for your website and your business.
What Is Website Uptime Monitoring?
Website uptime monitoring is the process of inspecting your website for instances of downtime. It also entails taking measures that can correct or prevent downtime from occurring. All of this is controlled by a software system, so a person does not have to monitor the website themselves. This entire process is automated and works in the background.
Two Common Types of Uptime Monitoring
There are various types of website monitoring systems, but two are far more common than others. These include active and passive uptime monitors. Active systems can be more effective at determining any signs of downtime than passive ones. They ping your website server at 30-second intervals to identify downtime. Passive systems use third-party tools that use Google, Bing, or networks to check if your website is accessible from the respective networks.
Even though the methods are different, both of these types of tools are responsible for monitoring websites to maximize uptime. Uptime is calculated as a percentage of how long your website was running as opposed to the duration it was down (if it was down). So, if you’re measuring the uptime for a year, it will take into account the uptime of your website for every second during the 365 days of that year. 100% uptime means that your website never went down.
Why You Need Website Uptime Monitoring
If you have a small to medium-sized business (or even a large one, for that matter), it is important to have capable website monitoring. Opting for website monitoring services can save your company a lot of money in the long term and make the user experience for your customers and clients better. With that said, here are some of the benefits of having this system for your website.
It Helps You Determine When Your Website Is Down
The most obvious benefit of website monitoring is that you will automatically be notified whenever your website is down. You can receive these notifications via different channels, including platforms like Slack, email, text, and so on. So, even if you don’t have any automated measures in place to counteract the source of the downtime, you can have your IT professionals address the issue right away.
It Identifies the Cause of the Downtime
One of the best ways to prevent website downtime is to understand the causes. For example, if human error was responsible for downtime, you could use automated processes in the areas where the mistake was made to prevent the problem.
Uptime monitoring systems for websites also have technology that identifies the cause of the outage. Therefore, you’ll know exactly what measures you can take to correct the issue right away and prevent it in the future. You won’t need to go through the process of figuring out the issue.
It Helps Ensure That You Know That Your Website Is Working Around the World
This factor is especially useful for businesses that have clients or customers in more than one country or part of the world. Thus, website uptime monitoring systems check your website’s operations in every part of the world in which your site is accessible. This way, you won’t compromise the user experience.
It Helps You Keep Records of How Your Website Is Operating
Keeping records of your website’s operation is important for making new updates and to improve its performance and user experience. Thus, monitoring software can also help retain records of past outages and other details about each outage. You can use that information to even identify any patterns for outages. In turn, you can develop measures to keep them from happening in the future.
It Saves You Money (or Helps Prevent Losing Money) in the Long Term
You must remember that website downtime is equal to losing money. Every second your website is down, you are unable to get traffic on your website. Users cannot learn about your business, make purchases, or read any interesting information you may have on your company’s blog. Thus, you are missing out on potential leads, and you’re also hurting your SEO ranking. Your SEO ranking is the position your website is placed on a search engine’s results page. The higher your website page position is on the results page, the more likely you are to get traffic.
It’s important to understand that website downtime is likely to happen. However, the damage it causes can be significantly minimized with the right tools, and uptime monitoring systems are designed to do exactly that.
Final Words
If you want to protect your company, you can get website uptime monitoring. It’s not complicated to use. Once you install the website monitoring solution to your server, you can get a lot of information about your website in real-time. It may also include plugins that can offer speed tests, backups, or some security features. If you need effective website monitoring solutions at competitive prices, then check out what Boulevard has to offer.