Building a website with a superb design is a major step toward establishing your brand and facilitating business growth. But it’s enough to sustain growth over the long term. You must keep an eye on your site to ensure its availability, performance, function, and speed are up to the task.
How long will you typically wait for a web page to load? Will you stay on a site that you can’t navigate or find what you’re looking for? What if there have been known security issues with the site?
The web has opened up countless opportunities to companies and consumers alike. But to maximize the benefits, you must invest in the time, energy, and money necessary to monitor and update your business website. Fortunately, many tools on the market make doing so a relatively simple task. Below, Markets Herald explains website monitoring in more detail.
Why Monitor Your Business Website?
If your company prioritizes its website, regular monitoring is a requirement. For one, it helps you to prevent significant loss of revenue. Consider if your site isn’t working well or it’s hard to use; your potential customers will simply move on to your competitors.
Also, monitoring your website helps to protect your brand reputation. Your site is a professional reflection of you and your team, and people will quickly lose trust in your organization if it’s not up to par.
Website monitoring helps you to prevent potential security exposures from morphing into major problems, such as a data breach or another type of attack. And consider how the slightest website issue can damage your search engine rankings. A bad user experience can impact your rankings as much as your site crashing or experiencing a hack.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that you can see how visitors interact with your website. Regular monitoring allows your company to collect valuable data you can use to inform improvements down the road.
Strategies for Monitoring Your Business Website
You’re convinced to monitor your website, but how do you start? Here are three of the most critical steps to take first:
- Adopt BPM
It’s crucial to tailor your site to the needs and expectations of your target customers. Actually, your site should exceed their expectations. One way to accomplish that is to embrace business process management (BPM). BPM automates laborious tasks and streamlines workflows by analyzing data. The right tools will help you redesign your site to optimize the user experience.
Look for tools designed specifically to BPM standards. Once you’ve invested in the right technology, create a framework that you consistently monitor and improve over time.
- Know Your Metrics
To effectively monitor your website, you must know the metrics to measure. For instance, be sure you evaluate how many visitors you have to your site because it will reveal how many consumers you’re drawing to your web pages.
And consider your bounce rate. This metric tells you the number of people that leave your website after looking at just one of the pages. Among other metrics, these data points provide valuable insight for boosting your online presence and organization as a whole.
- Use the Right Tools
You have a general sense of what website monitoring is. But you won’t get very far without incorporating top-notch technologies that get the job done. You need tools to track your website performance, alert you of site downtime, notify you of potential problems, show you key performance metrics, and assess your hosting provider. Here are some of the best tools on the market:
- Dotcom-Monitor
- StatusCake
- Site24x7
- SolarWinds
- UptimeRobot
- Pingdom
- Montastic
- Uptrends
- Sematext
- NewRelic
These are just some of the many website monitoring tools worth considering. You can find free and paid software to fit your specific needs and budget.
Conclusion
If you want your company to succeed long-term, you must maintain a world-class website that represents your brand as you envision. The best way to make that happen is to invest in regular monitoring.
Embrace BPM and get any necessary tools to streamline your processes and align your site to customer expectations. Research other technologies to help you get the most from your website monitoring processes. And gain a deeper understanding of all the metrics you should be looking for.