Your website is an extension of your business. In some cases, your website is what people use as their first impressions of your business. Visitors to your site expect it to work correctly and provide a positive customer experience.
When things are working correctly, people are more likely to spend time exploring your site to learn about your business, your products, and your services. They may even register an online account if you offer this feature. However, when things go wrong, not only does it lead to unhappy customer experiences, but people clicking off your website and not returning.
To ensure each and every person that visits your website gets a positive experience, you need to use website monitoring. Website monitoring is using various website monitoring tools and applications to check the status of your website, web pages, load speeds, etc.
Best Practice #1: Speed Is Important
How fast your web pages load is vital to keeping people on your site. You need to verify each page can load in less than three seconds.
Best Practice #2: Ditch the Pop-Ups
It can be tempting to place pop-up boxes and ads on your pages—but don’t do it. Most people are annoyed by these things and will leave.
Best Practice #3: Don’t Over-Do It with Videos
Another annoying practice to avoid is not overloading your webpages with videos and video ads that automatically play. If you have videos on your pages, set them where the site visitor controls whether they watch them or not.
Best Practice #4: Define Monitoring Parameters
You need to define external and internal website monitoring parameters. External parameters include web page uptime, average page load time, real-time monitoring, etc. Internal parameters include monitoring memory utilization, CPU performance, bandwidth consumptions, system processes, and so on.
Best Practice #5: Don’t Accept Averages
One trap companies fall into is using averages to gauge their website performance. For example, let’s assume 100 people visited your site. Your page load report says that average load times were 2.8 seconds for all 100 visitors.
For the first 90 visitors, the website and related pages loaded in under 3 seconds. For the other 10 visitors, the pages took about 10 to 15 seconds to load. You need to find out what went wrong for these 10 visitors to avoid it happening again. Otherwise, you could potentially be losing out on 10 new potential customers or even be losing repeat customers who have had a bad website experience.
Best Practice #6: Have a Backup Plan
You need to have a backup plan in place in case your web server crashes or has other issues. Most companies have a second web server they can bring online when they have problems with their primary web server.
Best Practice #7: Enable Alerts
Take the time to configure alerts on your website monitoring tools so that you know when something is wrong. Just because the web server is up and running doesn’t always mean there’s nothing wrong. There could be page load errors, memory issues, and more. Make sure alerts target all types of problems, including those that might seem minor.
Best Practice #8: Test, Test, and Test Some More
Whenever you make changes or updates to your website, take the time to test these on all sorts of devices. Most people access website content from their smartphone or tablet these days, so you want to verify pages load and display correctly for these devices too.
For the best web server monitoring software, please feel free to contact Power Admin at 1-800-401-2339 today! Remember to request your FREE no-obligation, 30-day, full-featured trial for PA Server Monitor or other server monitoring solutions.
