With the increasing reliance on the internet for information and services, customers expect websites to be fast, reliable, and easy to navigate. In today’s digital age, a company’s website serves as its virtual storefront, and is often the first point of contact for potential customers. Any downtime or slow loading times can lead to frustration and a negative perception of the company. To ensure a smooth, seamless experience for end users accessing your site, incorporating a robust website monitoring solution becomes important for businesses to ensure smooth functioning and optimal performance.
Need for website performance monitoring
Since your website serves as a brand ambassador for your company portfolio, ensuring enhanced digital user experience for your website is a vital component of building a positive brand reputation for your company.
There are various possibilities where your website might experience unexpected performance hiccups—such as downtime, slow page response, spikes in web traffic, or sudden security breaches—which might impact your day-to-day business operations overnight. Any hits to performance makes an end user’s experience complicated and leads to a negative impression overall.
There is no guarantee to completely avoid such unexpected impacts on website performance. Which is why it’s necessary for businesses to take precautionary steps to ensure their website stays up and running and does not fall prey to such issues—or at least be cautious enough to stay alert and handle any performance issues instantly. In addition, analyzing the performance of your website well in advance—to detect potential issues, then taking corrective actions to resolve them immediately—is the key to ensure enhanced end-user experience. Keeping proactive website monitoring software in place is crucial.
Challenges in website monitoring
There are many factors why a website might go down. While some of them arise due to issues in backend servers and are resolvable, the rest arise due to unavoidable external factors. Whatever might be the reasons, the following are some of the common challenges observed in website monitoring:
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Unexpected downtime: Sudden fluctuation in the health and availability of your website during peak hours can impact your business operations at a greater scale.
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Slow response time: Experiencing a delay in the page loading time of your webpages gives away a lot about your website’s performance, leading to end-user frustration.
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High bounce rate: Observing huge drops in the page view count of your website can indicate poor usability and performance, impacting your website’s page score and brand reputation.
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Heavy traffic: Dealing with sudden surges in the volume and frequency of web requests or actions can put a huge load on servers that are hosting the website, which in turn impacts the website performance.
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Page loading issues: Improper content delivery across different devices, browsers, and regions due to session or connection timeouts affects the flow of your website journey for your end users.
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Security breaches: Unexpected injection of malicious content or software—as well as phishing attempts by hackers—can tamper with the integrity of your website, causing your website to be blacklisted from the internet.
Website performance monitoring with Applications Manager
To ensure seamless website performance to end users, a good website monitoring solution should be able to provide deep insights into how your website is performing based on various performance aspects. It should also have real-time alerting to notify you instantly as and when any abnormalities are encountered. Here is a list of key capabilities that are needed for effective website monitoring:
URL monitoring
The first thing one needs to look for in website monitoring is to ensure your website is up and running without any issues. Even if a single webpage takes time to load, there are significant chances visitors might lose interest in exploring the website, resulting in lower web traffic.
With Applications Manager’s URL monitoring, you can track the availability and performance of crucial URLs of your websites, both on the Internet and in your intranet. It ensures your websites are functioning smoothly by tracking the response time of individual URLs and instantly notifying you whenever there is a slowness in the page loading time of your website. You can also use URL sequence monitoring to easily simulate the sequence of individual URLs that are commonly accessed by online visitors in your website, then analyze them further to detect and resolve any potential issues (if any).
Synthetic transaction monitoring
After your website is up and running online, it is crucial to find out whether your website is performing properly for end users accessing the site. Tracking the website journey step-by-step and analyzing the performance of each individual step becomes vital, especially when it comes to critical business transactions such as internet banking or shopping on an e-commerce website.
Applications Manager’s synthetic transaction monitoring helps you track the performance of your website from an end user’s perspective. It helps you simulate critical user actions and navigation paths such as user logins, adding an item to a shopping cart, etc. These actions can then be played back on real web browsers (such as Firefox or Chrome) from multiple geographical locations (such as your enterprise branch offices). This enables you to identify and resolve possible critical issues well in advance, before they affect your end users.
You can also analyze individual components or bottlenecks affecting your website performance. By monitoring from multiple locations, you can analyze whether downtime or slowness is affecting your users across all regions or is isolated to a specific geographical location. Along with synthetic tests, you can also monitor essential network services such as DNS, ping, etc. These tests can help you understand whether a problem is due to a network issue or not, and thus rule out the network factor.
Real User Monitoring
No matter how much you track your website performance, there’s still the potential for users to experience unprecedented performance issues in real time. Identifying which element of your website is causing the disruption becomes complex at that moment.
Applications Manager’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) plays a major role in enhancing the digital end-user experience of your website. It provides insight into the front-end performance of your website or web application based on actual traffic to the site. You can get detailed info into front-end, back-end, and network response times. You also get insights into web transactions, user sessions, AJAX calls, Javascript errors, etc. It also helps you compare how your website is performing across geographies, browsers, devices, ISPs, and more.
Web Page Analyzer
Analyzing webpage performance is necessary when it comes to tracking various components of your website. Applications Manager’s Web Page Analyzer provides you complete visibility into your webpage performance by identifying and analyzing which component actually slows down your webpage performance. It keeps track of how your webpage is performing based on various parameters such as response time, page size, resource size, request count, and more.
Additionally, it provides detailed information on PageSpeed insights of your website by providing scores and grades based on various webpage rules, giving you a clear idea on where your webpage lacks in terms of performance. These insights can help your marketing and customer experience teams focus on pages with higher traffic and revenue to advertise products as necessary.
Website content monitoring
Website defacement is one of the most common challenges companies face when it comes to web security. Hackers make continued attempts to tamper with webpage security by gaining unauthorized access and modifying the webpage contents illegally, resulting in compromised data security and business continuity.
Applications Manager’s website content monitor helps you secure your website by constantly monitoring the integrity of your website. It keeps track of changes performed in basic HTML elements—such as Text, Script, Image, Anchor, Iframe, and Link—and triggers instant alerts whenever any content changes are detected in the webpage.
Brand reputation monitoring
A company with an interactive website presence needs to ensure their webpages have a positive impression for the users visiting their website. Be it for a startup or a major business conglomerate, ensuring a good brand reputation of your website becomes a top priority to ensure seamless and positive online presence on the internet.
Applications Manager’s Brand Reputation monitoring feature aids you in maintaining a positive brand reputation and ensures your website does not fall prey to blacklisting. It continuously monitors your website and notifies you whenever a webpage is found to have malware, phishing, or unwanted software, based on the regularly updated Web Risk list provided by Google.
ManageEngine Applications Manager has been in the industry for over two decades and offers more than just website monitoring. It provides APM, infrastructure monitoring, and end-user experience monitoring—all in one console. You can experience the capabilities of this solution by downloading a 30-day free trial or scheduling a free, personalized demo with our experts to learn more about monitoring with Applications Manager.
