It showcases your products and services in front of your potential customers to fetch their attention while establishing your brand’s trustworthiness. But do you have any idea how it is performing? Well, there is plenty of information you must be aware of regarding your website, including page loading speed, uptime, security, SEO spam, and so on. These factors affect visitors’ activities on your site, which eventually leads to financial loss. Such factors have the power to influence your overall business. This is when comprehensive website monitoring tools come in handy to give all the information you require at your fingertips. Also, with the rise of internet vulnerabilities, complexities, and traffic, monitoring only website uptime is not enough. You must keep an eye on other aspects, including worldwide speed, how it loads on various devices, and overall performance.
Why is site monitoring important?
A report says that even a 100-millisecond of delay in page load time could cause a 7% drop in conversion rates. Hence, if your website takes over 3 seconds to load, you may risk losing a significant number of users. Let’s quickly take a look at some of the benefits.
Insights on the website’s stability 📈
How would you know if your site is facing frequent downtime? Is there a quick way to determine whether your site’s performance is improving? Without a monitoring tool, your business may stay behind, and you would never know. Instead, incorporate an efficient tool to gauge all these things. Once you have a fair idea about the exact issue, you can find ways to troubleshoot them. Now, you can also compare website performance to get an idea about the areas where you have achieved improvements.
Get notified 🔔
No matter how robust your site is, it will face downtime at a certain point in time. The reasons for this can be so many – a sudden traffic spike, poor hosting, faulty plugins, or worst, cyberattack. And when your site goes offline unexpectedly, it may cost your business in terms of reputation, finances, and customers. You cannot stop such occurrences, but the way you handle it matters. Website monitoring solutions watch over your site 24/7 constantly to check it hundreds of times daily. You can also receive notifications when the site goes offline, which you can immediately respond to and fix the issues.
Control downtime like a pro 😎
Fixing the issue might take longer times. And when it does, you can release statements through social media channels or share through the status page that you are working on the issue. You can also assure them to contact you with alternate mediums if they need any help. This way, you can improve your relationship with your customers and mitigate reputational damage.
Let’s have a look at some of the best website monitoring solutions to benefit your business across different verticals.
DataDog
Monitor your website proactively with DataDog. You can get quick alerts on the availability and performance of your website. It monitors and maintains your SLSs, validates HTTP requests from multiple locations, and offers unique integrations with your infrastructure, APM, and logs. To preserve user experience, it carries out automated tests and monitors important business transactions. It displays end-user journeys through waterfall visualization with screenshots on each step. DataDog can breakdowns performance based on devices and locations and carries out root cause analysis proactively and troubleshoots using APM integrations.
Using its Web Recorder, you can create tests within minutes. This GUI-based interface is code-free and super easy to use. It can record user activities, perform powerful validations using flexible variables and assertions. It also empowers your non-technical teams to create browser tests. DataDog’s tests are AI-powered and self-maintaining, which encourages your teams to build new features. These intelligent tests can re-identify elements after UI changes and updates other existing tests automatically to monitor fresh UI elements.
Uptrends
Test the core functions of your website like sign-ups, logins, payment screen, and shopping carts with Uptrends. It allows setting up of a transaction monitor to test browser workflows through its Transaction Recorder. You can easily record all your transactions by simple clicks and navigation through the website. Once everything is captured and activated, the Chrome browser tests the recorded steps on various checkpoints available worldwide. You can set up general transaction activities like password reset, account modification, schedule appointments, book flights perform reservations, all with Uptrends. Are you running the SaaS business? Monitor your SaaS applications to ensure users can sign up and perform necessary things smoothly.
Test the load speed anytime, monitor bottlenecks, performance trends, and other issues. Take browser screenshots to get an idea of how your page looks. You can get Waterflow charts and trace all the files that the browser has downloaded to find specific errors responsible for slow page running. Uptrends also give you the option to store certificates and transaction credentials safely encrypted inside the Uptrends Vault.
Checkly
Checkly is an active monitoring platform for developers building modern websites. You can use JavaScript to monitor the performance, correctness, and uptime of your web apps and APIs. It seamlessly combines ease of use and fast set up with programmable features and integrations developers will love. No wonder they name modern tech companies such as Vercel, Humio, or 1Password as their customers.
To monitor your frontend, Checkly runs JavaScript and open-source powered browser checks. You can dive into the code yourself or use Headless Recorder, a popular open-source Chrome extension by Checkly, to create Puppeteer and Playwright scripts. To monitor your API endpoints, you can configure fully-fledged HTTP requests with flexible assertions and Node.js-based setup/teardown scripts.
Checkly is built with developers in mind. Everything is customizable, well documented, and the powerful REST API lets you orchestrate and automate your checks, for example, with Terraform. Checks can be triggered from GitHub or run on schedule with down to 1-minute intervals across global data centers. You can get it started with a free developer plan and they offer a transparent execution-based model for larger projects. All-in-all a great solution to monitor modern websites.
Site24x7
With proactive website monitoring of Site24x7, you can check the performance and uptime of your website with IPv6/IPv4 from 110+ locations worldwide. It leverages advanced tools such as TLS/SSL certificate Monitor, Domain Expiry Monitor, and cheeks other errors through Website Defacement Monitor. Site24x7 notifies the moment an issue surfaces and provides deeper visibility on response time issues like connection time, DNS time, download time, first-byte time, SSL Handshake time, etc. You can analyze the way your website responds; gather data on TLS/SSL protocol version, understand suite details such as Bulk Encryption, Hash Function, and Key Exchange. Monitor internal networks with global server monitor on private cloud and get full infrastructure visibility as well.
Site24x7 offers a robust recorder tool to conduct synthetic monitoring and gauge multi-step user activities. You can also monitor applications like registration forms, shopping carts, HR portals, and more and analyze content accuracy as well as response time. Using Real User Monitoring, you can measure real user experience by analyzing the performance of your browser, location, ISP, and platform. Check network entities like DNS resolution time, redirection time, connection time, page rendering, download time, document processing time, and more. Receive instant alerts via SMS, emails, voice records, instant messenger, RSS, and push notifications when your website is offline. Get summary reports to understand downtime frequency, site availability, response time, etc. you can view metrics in heatmap widgets and graphs. It allows you to define SLAs while mentoring its compliance. Different types of reports it provides apart from summary reports are busy hours reports, SLA reports, TOP N report, performance report, and health trend report.
LogicMonitor
Get a complete outlook of your website’s availability and check its accessibility from multiple test locations with LogicMonitor. LogicMonitor proactively monitors, alerts, and graphs your site’s availability in real-time. It provides you with advanced dashboards where you can get all the data you may need in one place. Ping IP addresses from external locations and finds out the website performance by monitoring round trips, status, traceroutes, incoming or outgoing packets, and more.
Make periodic requests to URLs through HTTP GET, POST, or HEAD. With web checks, you can monitor response time, read time, SSL status, time for SSL handshake, connect, and DNS resolution. Compose simulations for user transactions, handle authentications, and check for particular content. Determine the issues concerning service delivery by correlating business transactions with your website performance and network. Its root cause analysis and smart analogy detection can differentiate between service-impacting alerts and non-service impacting ones, so you don’t have to check it every time. Schedule downtime, configure alerts, and define alerts based on reachability from multiple locations or sites. You can filter and view alerts from the Alerts Tab or Alerts Page based on severity, instance, and more.
Uptime.com
Were you searching for a reliable monitoring solution for your website, domains, or server? Uptime.com is one of the best you can opt for. It delivers enterprise-grade capabilities at reasonable pricing. Uptime.com checks the availability of your website every minute from 30 locations across the globe. It can send you alerts via phone calls, emails, webhooks, Twitter, or SMS when your site goes offline. You can get uptime reports along with server time reports in detail on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.
It leverages Yandex Safe Browsing and Google Safe Browsing to scan websites for the virus. Besides, it has the unmetered capability to constantly monitor all the transactions, emails, Real User Monitoring, Ping, API, HTTP(s), DNS, TCP, SSH, and more. Get detailed reporting, summaries, and graphs for a certain time period. You can also create a public status page, SLA reports, and private dashboards. Uptime.com facilitates flawless integration so you can push data to different software you already use to make your workflow easier and save time.
Dotcom-Monitor
Know when your website goes down unexpectedly with the Web Application Monitoring by Dotcom-Monitor. It lets you create scripts to emulate user interactions along with transactions on your website. You can record user path while navigating your website, monitor from different locations through its global monitoring channel, or its Private Agent. Review the waterfall charts of your scripts and receive alerts instantly in case of failures. Its EveryStep Web Recorder interacts with technologies like HTML5, AJAX, Flash, WebSocket, Silverlight, and Java Applet. It monitors your website every minute from different locations worldwide and alerts you immediately.
It offers easy integrations and a live dashboard to see real-time reporting for high-level data, including performance metrics. You can receive reports in HTML, PDF, and CSV files. Identify performance patterns, analyze trends, and predict future insights.
StatusCake
StatusCake is an industry-leading website monitoring solution, with over 150,000 customers from SMEs and large companies using them to keep their website online every day. With a free-for-life plan and competitive pricing on their paid plans, StatusCake gives everyone access to the tools that make sure websites are performing at their best.
StatusCake’s leading feature, uptime monitoring, checks your website from 43 locations in 30 different countries, alerting you of any website downtime within seconds. Don’t want to be alerted by SMS in the middle of the night? StatusCake offers 18 integrations for alerts including PagerDuty, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Skype. Get SSL monitoring that gives you alerts when your SSL certificate is due to expire, domain monitoring to ensure your domain is always safe and secure, page speed monitoring to keep you high in Google rankings and driving revenue, server monitoring to make sure you haven’t exceeded RAM usage and much more. Use their custom reporting tool to identify problem areas with your website, update your customers with a public status page, send branded customer emails when you experience website downtime, set check tags for more advanced data, and have a real-time dashboard showing you your website health.
Pingdom
Gain insights on the performance and availability of your website instantly with Pingdom by SolarWinds and deliver a better user experience. It offers complete website monitoring combining real user and synthetic monitoring for enhanced visibility and troubleshooting. For synthetic monitoring, Pingdom can simulate visitor activities with your website to inform you of what condition your website goes offline. Through uptime monitoring, it checks for site availability from 100+ worldwide locations. It also includes page speed analysis to assist in troubleshooting the issue and transaction monitoring to test complex transactions on your website. You can test new registrations, search, user login, URL hijacking, shopping cart analysis, and more.
Pingdom’s real user website monitoring lets you gain insights into how your actual users interact with your website. With this simple and scalable monitoring, you can measure website performance in real-time, understand visitors’ experience based on the device, location, and browser they use. Compare website usage metrics periodically to gauge improvements from last month, quarter, or year. You can make better marketing decisions utilizing metrics such as top visited page, top browser, top platform, and active sessions along with bounce rates. Pingdom is great for digital marketers, startups, and SMBs.
Conclusion
Your website is the first thing your visitors are going to notice about your business. Therefore, you need to have an idea about how your website performs in front of your end-users. Don’t let its speed or performance ruin the user experience. Instead, go for the above-mentioned website monitoring services to gain insights about the overall performance and uptime of your website to woo your customers and convert it into a revenue-generating machine!
