Your business website is the gateway to the consumer’s mind and ultimately their wallet. It’s near impossible to compete in the modern world without a strong web presence, especially as many consumers prefer an online shopping experience. It’s not enough to have a website anymore. You need to have one that performs well.
Here are some compelling reasons why you need website monitoring for your business, and what metrics you should be mindful of.
The Role of Application Monitoring
Monitoring your website and applications tells you what’s going on in the systems your business uses to operate. You could be using a file monitor to provide you with information surrounding what’s being moved and uploaded as well as sending you alerts when things are going wrong. With the right technology in place, your monitoring software won’t just tell you when a problem has occurred. It will also offer solutions and temporary fixes.
Furthermore, it will be able to analyze when a problem could potentially arise based on analytics of past events. This results in a reduction of downtime when a problem arises and allows you to allocate resources in a strategic way to solve the problem.
Short Attention Spans
Attention spans are shorter than ever. It’s estimated that you have two seconds to grab someone’s attention, whether it’s through imagery and compelling headlines or a website that loads efficiently. Problems in the back end of your site could slow your loading time. Even a delay of ten seconds can deter your customers from continuing the shopping experience, losing you the opportunity for revenue generation.
With website monitoring in place, you’ll be able to foresee any potential issues with memory to determine whether your site will run optimally. By setting alerts triggered by these issues, you’ll be able to correct them before your site reaches its threshold. This feature is especially crucial during holiday shopping seasons when traffic to your site could overload the system.
Troubleshooting
When you don’t have application performance monitoring in place for your website, the main problem is that you’ll become aware of an issue when everyone else does. The second problem is that you’ll have no insight as to what may be causing the problem to help you solve it. With performance monitoring in place, you’ll know why something is going wrong with your website and could even be notified of a potential fix. You are able to create reports based on previous issues, so you always have information to go back to.
Not only does this limit the time spent finding a solution to the problem, it keeps your costs low. Rather than having a team of IT professionals looking at the issue and trying to find a problem, you can dedicate one or two individuals to implementing a solution in an efficient manner. When considering the potential for lost revenue and costs incurred, the return on investment for performance monitoring becomes apparent.
The Psychology of Selling
Selling to a customer is a psychological process. Creating a user flow that encourages customers to not only add things to their cart but complete a transaction is paramount. In many cases, using deals, tripwires and other psychological sales tactics is what encourages a customer to make a decision quickly, before they start to overthink their purchase. Delays and downtime can interrupt this process, resulting in abandoned carts and lost revenue. Performance monitoring can show you where there are bottlenecks on your site to allow you to allocate memory and adjust the user flow accordingly.
Takeaway
By having website monitoring in place, you make it easy for your customers to put profits in your pocket, ultimately increasing your revenue and business success.