Do you need a website monitoring tool? A lot of site owners check their site periodically, and if their site is up and running, they’ll never know when their site is down. The problem is that connectivity issues, slow speeds, and random server drops lead to lost sales.
If your site is down, you’ll:
- Lose 100% of sales
- Lose 100% of ad revenue
- Lose 90% of leads
A study done by Akami found that 90% of visitors never return to a site that’s offline. Permanent sale loss means that the visitor likely went to one of your competitors.
Making matters worse, downtime may also impact your search engine rankings.
Google states that a short downtime of one or two days isn’t enough to impact your site’s search rankings, but the search giant also doesn’t want to keep “dead” sites in their results. Some studies suggest that even short downtime can lead to ranking fluctuations.
There is a period of correction where rankings may drop and go back up following six or more hours of downtime.
And if your rankings drop 30% or 40% for a week or two, that means lost sales and revenue.
Google will also consider your site’s downtime as a whole. If you keep experiencing downtime issues, you can lose a significant amount of traffic, according to StatusCake.
4 Main Reasons for Website Downtime
If your website monitoring tool keeps detecting downtime, it can be caused by a variety of issues, with the most common being:
- Server Issues: Your site’s server is often the main culprit when experiencing downtime. Your server may not be able to handle traffic surges, server maintenance may occur or you’re on a shared server where some sites may utilize all of the resources available. In all cases, you’ll want to upgrade to better web hosting to reduce the risk of server issues causing your downtime.
- Security issues. A DDoS attack is a main suspect for downtime, and it may not be your site that is the direct target. Hosting companies, or sites hosted on a shared host, can be the target and lead to your site suffering from downtime in the process. Cloudflare is a great tool to improve web and domain security.
- Update or redesign issues. Your site can go down if a CMS update goes wrong or if a developer makes a mistake on the server-side, leading to your site going down.
- DNS issues. Every website has to go through a domain name system (DNS), which converts your domain name into an IP address where your site’s data is stored. Outages or slow connections, as well as propagation, can lead to site downtime.
Your website may experience downtime because of failed third-party software installs, misconfiguration, or coding errors.
The first step to correcting these issues, improving user experience, and increasing revenue is to properly set up website monitoring tools. When you use the right tools, they’ll routinely ping your website to ensure that its uptime is sufficient.
When downtime is detected, you’ll be notified of the issue.
How Website Monitoring Tools Can Help Improve Sales and Revenue
Unless you’re checking your site every ten minutes, day and night, you’ll likely never know of the downtime that your site is experiencing. The solution to downtime is detection, which is followed by a correction.
Website monitoring tools can help with the detection process.
A few of the most common monitoring tools are:
- Uptime Robot
- Uptrends
- StatusCake (Give it a free try!)
Why We Prefer StatusCake
StatusCake is trusted by over 120,000 customers, including some of the biggest companies in the world like Microsoft and Electronic Arts. We prefer StatusCake because the platform makes it effortless to monitor your website thanks to:
- 24/7 uptime monitoring, with testing from 43 locations in 30 countries.
- Options to set the website check interval to keep server loads minimal.
- Full historical monitoring to better understand why and when your site is down.
- Diagnostics of downtime, so you can make informed changes to your site.
But that’s just the start of what StatusCake has to offer. Full page speed monitoring is offered to ensure that when your site is online, it is running fast and efficiently. Speed matters when it comes to both search engine optimization and sales.
One survey found that 70% of consumers admit that site speed influences sales.
While speed has a lot of variables that can impact it, issues can also be server-related and may lead to downtime in the future. The speed monitoring features also allow you to run reports on page speed and even view speed by region.
And if your site is down, you’ll receive notifications so that you can get your site back online ASAP. You might not be able to negate all sales and revenue loss due to downtime, but knowing when there are issues will allow you to minimize your sales losses.
Website Monitoring Tool FAQs
How Do Website Monitoring Tools Work?
Website monitoring tools will ping your website periodically to see whether the site is responsive. Platforms have a network of computers, often spread around the world, that are used to monitor your site’s uptime.
When downtime is detected, these tools will send out a notification of some kind to alert you of the issue.
Reports may or may not be provided that allow for further understanding of how often your site is down. You can use these reports to identify the most common times that downtime occurs and discuss issues with your hosting provider if the uptime is below their guarantee.
Will Monitoring Tools Decrease My Site’s Downtime?
No. The tools themselves do all of the monitoring for you, but it’s up to you or your team to make the changes necessary to correct the downtime issues.
What Should I Do to Fix Downtime?
If you’re experiencing a lot of downtime, it’s time to take action. You’ll want to look at the common culprits, described previously, and make any adjustments that you can. If you’re lucky, the downtime may be caused by maintenance or misconfigured software.
But in more consistent cases, you may need to change hosting providers or move to scalable cloud servers.
You can also keep server resources to a minimum by using a CDN or optimizing your database. Caching and other measures may also reduce resource-intensive processes that are causing your site to go down.
Website Monitoring Tools Are the Solution
Website downtime is a major concern for businesses. Consumers have options, and if your site isn’t available, your leads will go to your competitors. And if your site is running but very slow or not responding to requests, you’re still losing money.
Downtime cost Facebook almost $90 million during one outage, and while the behemoth can withstand the downtime, small businesses cannot.
It’s estimated that a small business will lose $427 per minute of downtime, while medium- and large-sized businesses lose $9,000 or more per minute. Cash-strapped startups that are trying to gain a foothold in a market can suffer drastic losses, even closure, due to downtime.
If you want to safeguard your business’ website from downtime, improve sales and revenue but need a professional’s help, we’re a call away.
