“100% website availability.” Which webmaster would not want to see this availability report? Every website owner would like their website available for users to be 99.9% all of the time. Without a website that is accessible and running smoothly at any time of day, all web-related investments will go to waste. That is why website availability monitoring is so important.
In this article you will find out:
Website availability means that users can access a certain website successfully. Access by means such as entering the URL or clicking a link from social media, emails, referral websites, etc. if the URL shows the expected content, then that website is “available”.
“Uptime” is another term for availability. System administrators use uptime to measure how long a system keeps functioning without interruption.
Availability monitoring is crucial to every business. Imagine your e-commerce website is inaccessible on a sale day for 1 hour. It may only be an hour of downtime, but it can greatly affect the user experience. If it happens frequently, it can severely damage your company’s reputation and revenue.
An example of this is the July 2018 Amazon Prime Day promotion. There were many eager online shoppers that day expecting to find sale items on the market. Unfortunately, they were greeted by error pages. Though the outage did not affect all users, there were still a lot of shoppers who failed to utilize the site for several hours. Amazon sold over one million products that day, but the numbers could’ve been higher had there been no downtime.
Since website availability plays an important role in an excellent user experience, website availability monitoring should not be ignored. Availability monitoring provides developers with timely alerts in case of a website failure.
Website availability is presented in percentage. To get the availability rate, divide uptime by the total time span. Your unit measure can be in hours, minutes, seconds, or days; it all depends on your preference.
Website availability monitoring is a powerful service that continuously tests your site’s uptime around the clock. In case an outage occurs, the system generates notifications. Stackify Retrace APM tool is an example of this service.
Retrace consistently monitors websites and alerts developers for outages or problems that cause downtime.
But there are still so many reasons why you need website availability monitoring.
According to an Akamai study, 9% of site visitors never return to an inaccessible website or down website. There is a high probability that this 9% will simply go to your competitor. What does this mean? Losing prospects or visitors means losing conversions, leads, and revenue.
Remember that in the online world, time is money. A 98% uptime result can lose nearly $200k potential revenue.
If you think availability results can only affect revenue, you are wrong. A decrease in visitors also decreases your online exposure. Google can penalize your website’s ranking if it is constantly inaccessible. It can take months for a website to recover and by then, your customer might be long gone.
If you have a monitoring tool like Stackify Retrace, you will be alerted of an outage which you can act accordingly.
There are tons of reasons why a website goes down. Some may be intentional while others are not. Those unintentional downtimes are what you should watch out for. Website availability monitoring will serve as a primary shield that helps identify such reasons.
Now that you know what website availability is and understand its importance, it is time to learn how to properly monitor your website availability.
In checking the availability, you can use these questions as your guide to properly monitor your website uptime:
If your website serves a global audience, it is understandable that you need to verify the availability and performance of the website locally. Find out if your pages are loading correctly through constant automated testing from different locations.
Website availability results may be down due to issues of a single element such as image loading or a problem with a SQL query. That is why your chosen monitoring tool should monitor problems including error messages on top of the regular website availability testing.
There are lots of website availability monitoring tools in the market. However, it is best to have more services on top of uptime monitoring alone, like Stackify Retrace.
Stackify Retrace can help developers monitor your website’s availability and detect outage conditions. By setting outage conditions, the system will alert the users.
But that is not all. Through Retrace real user monitoring (RUM), developers can monitor front and back end code together, and accurately locate and resolve bottlenecks swiftly. As a result, you get a highly optimized website performance with pages that respond quicker and more interactive.
If the website is highly accessible and loads faster, then end-users are happy, more engaged, and more likely to buy.
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