When you are running a startup, you are building trust with your customers from scratch and retaining their loyalty. Anything that will ruin that trust and make you look unreliable should be avoided, including IT infrastructural downtime.
You want to ensure your IT infrastructure, whether it is an application or a website, is accessible at all times to allow for seamless transactions on your customer's end, and this is only achievable with efficient website monitoring.
With website monitoring, you can watch your online store 24/7 to ensure its smooth operations and get alerted when there is a problem so you can rectify it as soon as possible, thereby minimizing any loss on your part.
As a startup looking to implement website monitoring, this article provides the needed guidance on how to implement it successfully for your business.
Advantages of Website Monitoring for Startup
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1. Build trust and reliance: Imagine you want to buy items from an online store, and it is experiencing downtime. This does not just happen once; it happens twice for the same brand. The chances that you will go and buy at another online store selling the same item is high, and if the other website meet your needs satisfactorily, you will make them your go-to.
In the same way, you lose trust and reliance with your target audience when your digital platform is down and inaccessible. They turn to your competitors to patronize them, increasing your bounce rate and causing a loss of trust in your brand.
Implementing website monitoring, on the other hand, will ensure you are the first person to be notified of downtimes and can quickly rectify the problem. Some website monitoring tools, like Pinghome, also allow you to share status pages with your customers to gain their trust and reliance.
- 2. Avoid loss of sales: As a startup, every sales conversion is important, and you can't afford to lose any chance to close a sale and reduce conversion rates by mistake on your end. Monitoring helps you prevent loss of sales and revenue, especially during a marketing campaign.
- 3. It allows you to focus on growth and sales: When your website is being monitored efficiently, you can rest assured and focus more of your energy on marketing strategies and how to grow your company rather than being worried every time about the functionality of your platform.
- 4. Effective incident management: Infrastructure monitoring allows for effective incident management as you will be alerted about downtimes speedily, and the appropriate personnel can quickly attend to the issues and get them solved.
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5. It will help your search engine optimization rankings: User behaviour is crucial in search results rankings on search engines like Google and Bing. Google is all out about providing a good user experience for users, so if your website is consistently experiencing downtime, it will increase bounce rate and affect your traffic. Sites that are relatively stable will be pushed to users above yours.
Prolonged downtime reduces the traffic to your site. Google analytics is a good web analytics tool to track your bounce rate and SEO rankings.
- 6. Security and compliance check: There are necessary security and compliance models you need to set in place on your IT platforms, and always ensure they are still validated and that you are still compliant. Some monitoring tools also monitor this and alert you when your certificate is about to expire.
Strategies for Successful Website Monitoring for Startups
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1. Carry out research and decide your website monitoring needs: The first strategy for successful website monitoring as a startup is to do more research and understand more about what website monitoring is all about. Then, you can outline your website tracking needs and the key metrics to monitor.
For instance, you need to optimize your uptime, your page load speed, and user experience. You also need to be alerted on time if any downtime occurs for proper incident management. You need to be able to build trust with your customers through status pages you can share with them to keep them abreast of site accessibility.
Once you outline all your website monitoring needs, the next step becomes relatively easy.
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2. Utilize website monitoring tools: Once you have outlined your website monitoring needs, choosing a website monitoring tool is vital for startups for effective monitoring. A website monitoring tool helps you keep an eye on your website performance analytics and availability round the clock even when you are away and alerts you in case of downtime.
A good website monitoring tool will do the job effectively, put your mind at rest, and set you up for successful monitoring. There are tons of website monitoring tools out there and outlining your needs helps you make a better choice.
Website monitoring tools like Pinghome help you monitor your website effectively, and it is a startup-friendly tool that will not cost you to break the bank to afford it. With Pinghome, you receive alerts in downtime almost immediately and can manage incidents effectively. Pinghome also allows you monitor your website uptime from all regions of the world, making sure business is running in all countries.
Check out more about Pinghome and sign up for a free trial
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3. Set up your tool to get the best from it: Another best practice to set up yourself for successful website monitoring as a startup is to take the time to understand and set up your website monitoring tool once you make a choice.
While ease of use is one of the crucial factors to consider when choosing a website monitoring tool, you still need some time to set it up and get familiar with all of its functionalities.
One of the crucial features to set up is the dashboard. You can only get the best out of dashboards when you have the right metrics. This requires a careful and proper setup. The same applies to other key features of the tool, including automation and integrations.
If you are going to set yourself up for successful website monitoring as a startup, you should carefully and intentionally set up your website monitoring tool.
When setting up your website monitoring tool, focus on key web pages such as the landing page, the checkout page, and the different product pages. These are important pages directly connected with making a sale happen.
For instance, if you own an e-commerce store and your customers finish all their activities on your website but can't checkout successfully, it can be frustrating on the part of the customer and cost you a sale.
Other metrics like page load times and speed will give your insight into your website performance before downtime occurs.
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4. Utilize real-user monitoring: Synthetic monitoring involves deploying bots to carry out specific actions on your site under various conditions to test your site's performance under different conditions with the aim of detecting errors, rectifying them, and improving user experience.
On the other hand, real user monitoring has to do with real users performing actions on your website to achieve the same result. Running both forms of monitoring helps you cover all loopholes and ensure accuracy in monitoring.
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5. Get feedback from your customers: Hearing and gathering feedback from your users is one of the best ways to set up yourself for successful website monitoring. Ensure to pay attention to any feedback from customers concerning your website.
Also, you can conduct intermittent opinion polls and surveys asking customers about their experience with your website. This will help you make consistent positive iterations on your website and improve user experience. This also enhances your brand identity and customer engagement when customers see your intentionality with their user experience.
Leveraging Pinghome for Successful Website Monitoring for Your Startup
Having examined the importance of website monitoring for your startup and the strategies required. It is important to take and implement the necessary steps to achieve that business growth and success.
Pinghome is an IT infrastructure monitoring tool that helps you monitor all your vital metrics as a startup with a robust dashboard, alerts you rapidly in downtimes, and helps with effective incident management.
Pinghome is a tool that is easy to set up and relatively affordable, even for small businesses. Pinghome provides a free turn-key setup to make the configuration seamless for you. Besides, you can also easily get support from the customer success team who are readily available to provide answers to your queries.
A successful strategy for website monitoring depends largely on the monitoring tool. Start a no-cost trial with Pinghome today by reaching out to our customer care team via support@pinghome.io