Be Proactive with Website Monitoring, Not Reactive

There is a fine art to running an online business, but there is an even finer line between success and failure. Let’s imagine a scenario, launching an average online store. You’ll have to remember the SEO, the usability, getting across the right branding… so much to remember… It’s okay because although you’ve spent night after night working on ensuring everything is perfect you get to push that button and go live. It’s your time to celebrate and see your dreams come to fruition. It’s your moment of glory!

Oh you’re site went down over night and your months of hard work and you didn’t know till the morning. Google can’t crawl your site hurting your long term rankings, your visitors come in droves with the intent of giving you money, but can’t and social media users? We’ll they know your site is down before you giving you no time to react and control the negativity. Your lunch was an utter failure that will take weeks if not months to recover from; hope you’re ready to work through the night for a while longer yet!

It may sound like a sales pitch for website monitoring, and in many ways it is (you’re reading our blog after all), but it’s something we have heard time and time again. Over a third of our users first get monitoring once their site has been down for a prolonged period without them knowing. They launch their site and focus on every avenue except the worst case scenarios, but why? We asked a few of our users the reason they delayed getting monitoring, and the answers surprised us

1. I’d notice myself

This is one of the more common responses given when asking people why they took a while to get monitoring. It seems to discount entirely the idea they might need to sleep but furthermore discounts the fact that downtime isn’t black and white. Your site might function perfectly from your London apartment but completely fail to load from Manchester or New York. When monitoring yourself, you’re getting a small window into it’s availability not the bigger picture that matters.

2. I’m too small to need monitoring

We’re presuming they mean their website or business is too small rather than them personally speaking, but either way is a strange way to look at things. To grow in the vastly competitive e-commerce world, you need to make as few mistakes as possible. To this end, going down for a prolonged period before noticing will not just hurt for that short time frame but months into the future. Downtime can do damage to search engine rankings and even public perception. Take our largest competitor, they experienced a prolonged period of downtime over a year ago and yet we’re still getting customers mentioning it to us when they sign up with StatusCake

3. Even if I know about it, I can’t fix it.

Okay, it makes perfect sense that if you don’t know how to resolve an issue then really there is no point hearing about it. I mean if your car has a flat tire, and you don’t know how to change it why bother knowing about it? Just hope someone else fixes it at some point and we’re sure everything will work out! Not knowing how to solve the problem or even if you don’t have access to solve the problem doesn’t mean your powerless. Downtime happens and when it does communication with your visitors via social media channels lets them know the problem is being addressed. Being seen to be proactive rather than reactive to an issue gives the impression of a company that is on top things and even can help to improve trustability.