7 Reasons Why You Need A Website Monitoring Tool

If you're a start-up business with a new website, or a larger organisation with multiple systems, website downtime needs to be closely monitored, and that's why you need a website monitoring tool.

I've previously covered how to choose a domain monitoring tool, and have also covered the best website monitoring tools on the market.

But in this blog post, I'm going to dive deeper and tell you 7 reasons why you need to start using a monitoring tool today and how it can save you money.

Why should I monitor my website?

Websites and blogs are now an integral part of any online or retail business, the majority of people shop online, and according to Forbes, E-Commerce is a growing trend and should be leveraged today.

To put some perspective on this topic, let's take a look at the two big reasons why you need to monitor your website:

1. In most industries, there's over 90% of the purchase decision that will start with an online search.
2. Secondly, did you know Google will penalize you for your website ranking if your website has a poor user experience, is slow or is down?

This is why it is more important than ever to start monitoring your website with an uptime checker tool than ever before.

If you're an online store, selling products such as clothes to customers, you could be losing thousands of pounds if your website has been down for more than 6 hours - money that could've been spent investing in a website checker tool.

Trying to find the best tool to monitor a website is difficult, and I know what you're thinking...

How can I find the best website monitoring tool that suits my budget and requirements?

We have an article for this, and suggest taking a look at that for the precise information that you're looking for before continuing with this article.

Did you know that most online website monitoring tools are FREE?

Yes, crazy right?

But seriously, the vast majority of monitoring tools tend to come with a FREE plan, and if you're a startup then this is likely all you'll ever need.

Okay, fair enough...

If you're a larger company then it might be worth paying for one of these tools instead of using the free plan...

Why?

Because...

• Paying for an uptime checker tool will likely include faster check frequencies
• Be able to monitor more of your systems
• Retain logs for a longer period of time and go back on your history

7 Reasons you need a website monitoring tool

I'm going to tell you some of the reasons why you need to invest in one of these tools...

You'll save thousands of pounds

Okay, so by far, the biggest reason why you need to start using a domain monitoring tool is because it'll save you money.

As a business owner you don't have time to keep a check on whether your website is online or offline, you've got a business to run, and a website to manage.

If a website is down for just even a few hours, you could be losing thousands of pounds or dollars for your site just being offline, and if Google tries to crawl your site at the moment where your site is down...

You'll end up losing your SEO ranking in the search engine.

It might be that your website has gone down for several reasons, here's just a few reasons why your website might go down:

• Your domain has expired
• Your SSL has expired and there's no redirection to a non-HTTPs version of your site
• Human error
• Hardware failure

Okay, so I get it...

Some of the reasons your site might go down could be down to uncontrollable circumstances, such as hardware failure.

But knowing when your site has gone down will benefit you because you'll be able to start going through a checklist to find out the cause behind your website downtime.

Check your domain's expiry date and SSL expiry date

When was the last time you registered your domain name for your website? Do you know what day it was?

Chances are, you might remember the month and year, but to pinpoint the precise day is likely to be difficult, especially if you've got multiple domain names.

What's worse is when you start adding SSL certificates to the equation, then things become increasingly difficult for you to remember the dates.

You could go back through your receipts that you might've kept, but chances are you'll forget these pretty soon with all of the other things on your mind.

So this is where a website monitoring tool can come in - you can add domains and monitors and they'll alert you of website downtime and domain/SSL expiry so that you don't have to have loads of Google calendar reminders.

Are you even using Google calendar to manage SSL and domain expiry dates? If you are, it's probably best to drop that because like me, you might've forgotten whether you've added the right date to the calendar, or even the wrong calendar.

You'll improve your SEO ranking

It might be difficult to understand exactly why a monitoring tool will improve your SEO ranking, but Google will penalize websites which are:

• Slow
• Down for long periods of time
• Irrelevant

And these are all legitimate reasons for Google to do so.

Besides your website being down, how will your customers feel if they can't access your website to buy that special gift for someone, or use that service they've been subscribed to for months...

They'll ask for a refund, and you'll lose a reader and a loyal customer.

You could lose reputation

If your website has always been seen as an authority, or have gained reputation over a long period of time for having excellent website uptime, customer service and content, then you could lose reputation if you start to let a lot of website downtime slip into the mix.

Website downtime isn't something any website owner wants, and as I've discussed before, sometimes it'll happen for a reason beyond your control.

But with careful planning, and redundancies in place, you'll be able to retain your website reputation and ranking in the search engine by ensuring your site is online.

Happy customers

No one likes a website to have sluggish performance or one that is full of errors on every page that barely works right?

You certainly wouldn't want that from a top website that you visit often, such as Amazon for instance.

Websites such as Amazon and Ebay will have multiple servers in place that mean if one goes down, they'll have redundancy so that you can still access their website and browse products.

If one of your competitors has a better, more refined and reliable user experience than you, they're going to win over your customers that were once happy, and now have gone to your competitor.

According to an article from Akamai...

"Sites that went down experienced, on average, a permanent abandonment rate of 9%"

This figure is huge, imagine if 9% of your customers abandoned you and went to the competition, that's potentially 9% of your revenue if those customers are paying customers - vanished.

Hacker detection

A website monitoring tool tends to offer more than monitoring, it'll offer the ability for you to monitor your website's performance and response time (that's the time taken for your server to respond to a given request)

Hackers might attempt to bring down your website with what's called a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, this is where hackers from multiple locations and servers will try to overwhelm your website and server with a bunch of requests.

In turn, this will essentially cause your site to go down without you knowing the cause behind it.

This is where our website monitoring feature will allow you to monitor your website availability and uptime so that you can identify more quickly whether your site is down due to a DDoS attack!

Better sleep for you!

Yeah, really.

If your website is online, operating normally and you're not worrying about whether it's up or down, your nights will be more enjoyable since you'll be able to (hopefully) sleep better.

Our domain monitor will constantly check your domain to find out whether your domain name is about to expire, and will also keep a check on whether your site is up or down for you.

Go ahead and get some rest, we'll take care of monitoring your site for you!

Wrapping up this post...

Website uptime is important for both you and your customers, failing to ensure your website is up could result in you losing thousands of pounds...

And if you don't monitor your website, you're likely to lose customers and customer satisfaction which might prove devastating for your business.

I suggest using a website monitoring tool so that you can put your mind and rest, and be alerted of domain expiry, SSL expiry and website downtime.