Website Monitoring and why it is so important

Website monitoring is in fact one of the most important feature to have so to ensure you have a smooth and running website free from downtime. As webmasters we spend most of our waking hours online – in fact many of us in the online world seem to spend very little time sleeping!

However even the most vigilant webmaster cannot keep an eye of their website 24×7, 365 days a year.  Whether you’re asleep or away doing other things your website is still online – or is it?  It’s difficult enough keeping track of one website, but if you’re a webmaster with a whole portfolio of websites then that task becomes more difficult still. That’s why website monitoring is exceptionally important to be able to have a working website 24/7.

Many of us will have come across websites that have been down for days on end. Is it that the webmaster of that site didn’t care or is it, more likely, that they didn’t know?  Whatever the reason for that website going down, and staying down, it’s bad for business and online reputation. Although some of us may have ventured back, perhaps out of professional curiosity, to check on the website some time later to see if it’s back-up, the reality is most of your customers won’t be quite so forgiving – or curious!

In the online world competitors are only a click away. There’s no need for your customer to take a walk a block or two away or get in their car. Just as the ability for them to find you in the first place has become easier – so is their ability to go elsewhere.  And research shows that online consumers are far less forgiving and far less loyal than their bricks-and-mortar counterparts.

Retaining an online customer is far cheaper than acquiring a new one! So the last thing you want is website downtime ruining your relationship with your customers. But it’s not just your visitors disappearing to your competitor, along with their money, that should concern you.

Search engines are designed – in theory at least – to deliver the “best” user experience for those web users looking for particular products or services. But if your website is down each time a search engine crawler comes looking at your site what message does this send back to the search engine? The message is clear – this site is down – a lot,  so don’t promote this website as highly as other websites offering the same products and services which are up all the time! And if the search engine crawler can’t access your site how can it index the new content you’ve just spent hours lovingly creating?

So minimizing website downtime is important not only to keep your customers happy and loyal and keep your brand intact, but is absolutely critical in ensuring that you keep the search engines happy as well. After all if your search engine rankings suffer you’ll have even less visitors in the first place!

Using StatusCake.com to monitor your website’s downtime you’ll be alerted to any problems the moment they arrive. There are a whole number of ways we alert you to downtime, whether it’s email or Skype or Twitter. But for many of our customers who can’t always be in front of their computer 24/7 they chose instant push notifications to their iPhone, Android or Blackberry or SMS text messages. Because the sooner you’re alerted to any problem the sooner you can get your website back up and running!