Website Monitoring Best Practices

Choose a Good Website Monitoring Tool

When picking a website monitoring tool, think about:

• How easy it is to use
• What features it has
• How much it costs

Look for tools that offer:

• Real-time monitoring
• Alerts
• Ability to monitor different parts of your website, like Uptime, Speed, User experience

For example, if you pick Uptimia, you can set up real-time monitoring for your website and get alerts via email, SMS, many 3rd party tools when an issue is found. This lets you quickly fix problems before they affect your users.

Use Synthetic Monitoring with Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Synthetic monitoring involves pretending to be a user to find possible issues. This can help you find problems before they affect real users. Real User Monitoring (RUM) shows how actual users interact with your website, including:

• Page load times
• Error rates
• User journeys

By using both synthetic and real user monitoring, you can get a better overall view of your website's performance.

Use synthetic monitoring to test specific things and find possible slow points, while RUM helps you see how these issues affect real users. Look at data from both monitoring methods to prioritize fixes and changes based on how they impact user experience.

For instance, if synthetic monitoring finds a slow page load time, use RUM data to see how many users are affected and how much it impacts their experience. This information can help you prioritize the issue and decide how to use your resources.

Use Application Performance Management (APM) for Detailed Analysis

For deeper insights into code-level performance issues, think about using Application Performance Management (APM) tools. APM provides detailed metrics on your website's backend performance, including:

• Database queries
• Server response times
• Resource use

Use APM to find and fix performance bottlenecks that may not be clear through synthetic or real user monitoring alone.

Find Critical Pages and Parts

To monitor your website well, focus on the pages and parts that have the biggest impact on user experience and business goals. Monitor these critical pages first:

• Home page
• Product pages
• Shopping cart
• Checkout process
• Search function
• Account login

To find which pages are most critical for your website, consider these steps:

1. Work with various teams (e.g., sales, marketing, customer support) to understand which pages are most important to users and the business.
2. Make user journey maps to show the paths users take to complete important tasks on your site.
3. Review and update your list of monitored pages regularly as your website and business needs change.

Set Performance Standards and Limits

After finding the critical pages to monitor, set clear performance standards and limits. This means defining acceptable performance levels and deciding when alerts should be triggered for issues.

Key metrics to set standards for include:

Use these guidelines to set appropriate limits:

• Use industry standards, competitor standards, and historical website data to set realistic and achievable limits.
• Find a balance between being proactive and avoiding alert fatigue. Setting limits too low may result in too many alerts for minor issues, while setting them too high risks missing important problems.
• Monitor your website's performance against these standards continuously and adjust limits as needed based on user feedback and impact on business metrics like conversion rates.

Look at Past Website Performance

Looking at historical website performance data is important for setting realistic goals and benchmarks, and for finding trends and patterns that can guide future optimization efforts. By looking at past performance metrics such as page load times, uptime percentages, and error rates, you can learn valuable information about how your website has performed over time.

Use this historical data to set baseline performance levels and achievable targets for improvement.

Compare your website's current performance to historical data regularly to measure progress and find areas where improvements have been made or are still needed. This can help you focus your monitoring efforts and use resources well.

Find Performance Bottlenecks and Areas for Optimization

By looking at performance trends over time, you can find specific pages, components, or functions that consistently underperform or cause performance issues. For instance, you might see that a certain product page on your e-commerce site has much higher load times than other pages, showing a potential bottleneck.

Use this information to focus your monitoring efforts and resources on the areas that will have the biggest impact on overall website performance. In the example above, optimizing the slow product page could involve:

• Compressing images
• Minifying CSS and JavaScript files
• Using caching techniques
• Optimizing database queries

Look at performance trends regularly to make sure your optimization efforts are working and that new issues haven't come up. This ongoing process of monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing helps ensure continuous improvement in your website's performance.

Customize Dashboards for Different Stakeholders

Creating dashboards for different roles and teams in your organization can help make website monitoring data more relevant and actionable. Here are some examples of dashboards for different stakeholders:

Marketing Team Dashboard

Technical Team Dashboard

When creating dashboards, keep these best practices in mind:

• Focus on metrics that matter to each role or team
• Use visualizations like graphs and charts
• Provide context with benchmarks or historical data
• Make dashboards easy to access and share

Set Up Targeted Alerts for Critical Issues

Targeted alerts notify you when critical website issues occur. Set up alerts for key metrics like:

• Website uptime/downtime
• Page load times
• Error rates
• Form completion rates

Define thresholds for when alerts should be triggered, such as:

• Uptime dropping below 99.9%
• Page load times exceeding 3 seconds
• Error rates surpassing 1%
• Form completion rates falling below 80%

Alerts should provide context and information, including:

• The metric that triggered the alert
• Current and expected values
• Historical data for comparison
• Links to relevant dashboards or tools

Review and Update Monitoring

Staying current with monitoring best practices and tools is key to keeping a high-performing website. As new monitoring solutions become available, think about how they can be added to your monitoring strategy to help you find and fix issues faster.

Here are some examples of when to review and adjust your monitoring setup:

Encourage a culture of improvement and data-driven decisions in your team. Have team members regularly review website performance data and suggest optimizations based on what they find. Making monitoring and optimization a shared responsibility leads to a more proactive approach to maintaining website health.

Work with Cross-Functional Teams

Website performance affects many areas of your business, from marketing and sales to customer support and technical operations. To create a complete and effective monitoring strategy, get stakeholders from different departments involved.

Some examples of cross-team work:

• Marketing team: Identify key pages and user journeys to monitor for campaigns and promotions
• Development team: Set up alerts and dashboards that provide insights for troubleshooting and optimization
• Customer support team: Monitor website performance from the user's view and quickly identify and escalate issues that impact user experience

Share monitoring insights and data across teams so everyone has a clear understanding of website performance and can contribute to optimization efforts. Hold regular cross-functional meetings to review website performance metrics and discuss improvement opportunities. This helps break down silos and fosters a more collaborative approach.

Be Proactive for Website Performance

Instead of waiting for issues to happen, teams should actively monitor website health and take steps to prevent potential problems:

• Do regular load testing to find performance bottlenecks before they impact users
• Monitor server resources and scale infrastructure proactively to handle expected traffic spikes
• Use a continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) process to catch and fix issues before they reach production