Website monitoring service: how to choose the best one?

Website monitoring is just as simple as it sounds – a way to check your website in real-time to prevent any issues or resolve them as soon as possible. It helps in a lot of cases by pointing out where the root of the problem is, making it easy to fix everything that can be easily fixed. Therefore, it helps with keeping a website stable and accessible for as much time as possible.

For the webmaster working with business-related websites providing a properly set up website monitoring is a must. Because otherwise, businesses will have to bear consequences – financial and reputational losses as well as audience outflow. And a lot more, if you keep issues unresolved for long.

Because business is all about competition. And your website is one of the frontline faces of this competition. Therefore, it must not have any issues like slow webpage loading, long unannounced downtimes and so on. It will literally make users, even the most loyal ones, leave and look for more attractive alternatives.

All said above means that you must secure yourself a reliable method for website monitoring.

Otherwise, you will be actually facing all possible problems unprepared. Which will lead to a lot of things that are completely unwanted for any website owner.

What are website monitoring tools?

If you’re told that you need something, then you surely want to know what it is and how to work with it. So you need to know what website monitoring is and what it can help with when you’re managing your website.

Website monitoring itself, obviously, is a process of checking various aspects of the website to ensure its smooth and proper operation and provide the best experience to users as to potential customers. This process includes execution of various software instances to check, test, observe and gather statistics from the website. In other words – using website monitoring tools.

In a nutshell, those tools will check the website’s accessibility, stability, loading speed, overall performance and so on. Those tools will measure various metrics and parameters vital for the website and compare them to nominal values. As well as search for inconsistencies, errors, bugs and other things that might affect the website’s operation.

Vital metrics monitored by monitoring tools include, but are not limited to, server and website availability, current website uptime, server resource usage, web page loading speed, database performance, and content integrity. Among other things, monitoring tools check the expiration date of SSL certificates and domain names, as well as the overall functionality of the website.

Concluding all the above, there are a lot of tools to deal with. Therefore, it is important to find a toolkit that works autonomously without the need from you to interfere in its operation except when you configure it. There are a lot of tools like this all around the Internet.

Is it worth investing in quality website monitoring?

All in all, if you consider all that was mentioned, there are plenty of reasons to get a grip and pay some for website monitoring. You won’t regret it later when something happens with the website you’re managing. And if something happens and you won’t be able to prevent it, at least you will be able to react fast and deal with everything.

On top of it, having a perfect website monitoring service will help in a lot of ways, including saving a lot of time to work on other tasks. Simply put, you won’t need to monitor everything on your own, just set everything up and forget about it until something happens. Good service will notify you if there are any issues.

Furthermore, there are some practical reasons to work with the best of the best toolkits. Therefore, if you opt-in for, for example, host-tracker.com website monitoring service, you will have a lot of benefits for a reasonable price.

Website overall improvement

First things first – website monitoring will really help in improving your website’s stability and performance, making its operation smooth. With in-depth data provided by a good monitoring service, you will know about all problems with your website, its bottlenecks, stability issues, content inconsistencies and so on. Therefore, it will be a lot easier for you to improve the website and make it the best one among competitors in terms of accessibility and stability.

User experience improvement

Just as website monitoring helps with overall improvement, it helps with creating the best experience for your website’s users. Even if it’s not a full-fledged functionality and UI monitoring, it will check webpage loading speed, content integrity, UI elements loading and a lot more things. And if you know where to look and what to improve, you will do everything better for your audience.

Website promotion assistance

Not directly, but proper website monitoring will help with the website’s promotion and development. Because if your website is unstable, has loading speed issues and so on, Google Search, Ads and various promotional services will consider it untrustworthy and unreliable. Therefore, those services will lower the website’s ranks in their queues.

Simply put, Google Search won’t show your website on top of its search results for queries, Google Ads won’t show its advertisement in blocks, promotional campaigns won’t work with it and so on. Therefore, if you get rid of all issues and will be able to quickly fix occurring troubles with the help of website monitoring, your website will be promoted and developed at better rates.

Security improvement

Considering that website monitoring checks various vulnerabilities like SSL and domain expiration, it helps with improving the website’s security. Not to mention that it really helps in dealing with DDoS attacks and the like. Therefore, it will be the right thing to say that with a properly set up website monitoring toolkit, you will be able to deal with various threats to your website’s security and stability as fast as possible. And it will help keep your website and your website’s users’ data secure.

Main website monitoring routines and tools

If you decide to opt in for a website monitoring service, taking all benefits you can have into account, you need to learn at least a bare minimum about the tools and metrics they work with. Of course, you can try the basics manually by yourself, for example, using host-tracker.com/en/ic/ping-test and other tools from HostTracker. But it won’t give you an understanding of what you’re dealing with.

Uptime and stability monitoring

Overall website availability monitoring is the very first routine to deal with if you want to keep your website working stable. And uptime monitoring stays on top of it, because uptime is the most vital metric for every website.

Percentage between the time when the website is working and the time when the website is down is considered the most important metric for the website by every single search, advertising and promotional service all over the Internet. The higher it is – the better.

Because otherwise, all those services will mark your website as unreliable. And this will affect your website’s user experience, reputation and, following all this, it will lead to losing potential profit – a thing that no website owner wants.

Performance monitoring

Website performance is a routine to deal with webpage loading speed issues, database problems, scripts and all other things which can affect how the website works. From top to bottom, if you set everything up thoroughly. This will help you a lot with improving and promoting your website as well as with providing the best possible experience for your website’s users.

Website functionality monitoring

As useful as it sounds, this monitoring routine is for providing stability and smooth operation for all systems interacting with databases, scripts, services, APIs and so on. Simply put, those tools check everything that’s related to proper functioning of the website for users – from shopping API to inner survey forms and even buttons.

Server hardware monitoring

If you have full access to your server or if your hosting provider allows some level of access, then you can use monitoring tools to check on server hardware status. Those tools will help with providing back-end server-side stability for your website. Usually, server performance monitoring includes, but is not limited to CPU load and temperature checking, server-side software stability testing and overall accessibility checking.

Vital features for website monitoring service

Considering everything that was said earlier, there are some tools and services which are a must for proper and reliable website monitoring service. Some of those around the Internet sadly has a lot of features missing. But there are some services with all website monitoring tools – host-tracker.com/en/ic, for example. It’s packed with manual and automated checks and tests for all occasions and includes all vital features.

Monitoring scheduling

If you’re working with an automated service to monitor your website, it’s a must to be able to change the frequency of each and every test and check. Because you will need to adjust monitoring timings in accordance with your website development, promotion and audience growth. With such a feature it will be awfully easy to make monitoring routines smooth and reliable.

Monitoring from multiple locations

If you want to check your website properly, a monitoring service of your choice must be able to do it from all over the world. Because there will be cases when users from a particular region or even from a certain ISP won’t be able to access your website. Therefore, you will need tools to check it yourself. For example, HostTracker service has a worldwide access point network with 150+ locations.

Instant notification system

Some may think that such a system is nothing much and every service has it. But no, not every service has a notification system. And mostly it can’t be properly configured. But there are some services with well-made notification systems.

For example, there is HostTracker service which has a highly adjustable instant notification system with its scheduling, changing contact info depending on a time of the day or day of the week and so on. It can work with multiple users as well, changing recipients depending on the situation.

Statistics gathering

Reports and statistics are a must if you’re monitoring a website. Because without those two features, it will be impossible to trace back long-lasting issues. There are times when you need to trace a thing that started from a minor problem which was deemed unimportant and left unresolved before it became too late. And if you have access to logs, reports and statistics, you will be able to do the job.

In conclusion with everything that was said about website monitoring in general and tools to do it in particular, it is worth mentioning that you need to choose wisely and don’t miss a thing. You should find yourself a reliable and trustworthy service that will be able to deal with all vital routines at once and inform you about any issues you deem dangerous for your website.