Monitoring your website’s performance is important for ensuring that it stands the test of time. Any number of website issues can put your customer’s data at risk, hurt the reputation of your business, or undermine your marketing efforts. Keep an eye on your website performance so you can avoid potential problems and deliver a top-notch experience to your customers. In this article from Penmark, you’ll learn why you should care about your website performance.
1. Enhance the Customer Experience with Process Intelligence
By monitoring processes and your website analytics, you’ll gain a better understanding of your customers and what they want. Get familiar with business process management (BPM) and how the practice can improve the customer experience. BPM involves evaluating existing data through process mapping and uses process intelligence to continuously acquire process data across every system involved with your operations. For example, by using process intelligence you’re able to create a user-friendly website experience that directs your customers to the pages or products they tend to look for most often.
2. Improve Your Brand Alignment
Does your website branding align with your brand’s key messaging? Brand alignment is about creating a cohesive and consistent brand image, one that your customers will recognize regardless of how or where they’re interacting with your business. Regularly surveying your website visitors to ask them questions about your branding is a great way to find out whether you’re on the right track. You can also analyze your customer data to create targeted brand messaging that better aligns with the needs and interests of your audience.
3. Protect Sensitive Data from Cyber Threats
Beyond monitoring what your customers think of your website and how they interact with it, be sure to monitor what’s going on behind-the-scenes as well. Website monitoring is particularly valuable for preventing cyber-attacks. Sectigo recommends monitoring your website traffic for unusual behavior, like a large spike in traffic coming from another country or large drops in traffic that could indicate Google has flagged your site for malware. It’s also important to stay on top of any security patches released by your web hosting company or website building platform.
4. Avoid Costly Downtime
Another reason to monitor your website performance is so you can avoid downtime. According to EN Computers, small businesses earning less than $50M in annual revenue can face downtime costs of $8,600 per hour! Whether due to server failure, network outages, or ransomware attacks, downtime results in lost revenue and productivity.
Use a website uptime monitoring tool to test the availability of your website 24/7 and notify you if something is wrong. These tools will check if your website is performing correctly and make you aware of potential weak points where your website could fail, such as during peak traffic hours.
Help your IT team to stay informed about common coding errors that can cause major problems, and the solutions that will make them outdated. They can learn more about how to identify and address these issues online, so that you don’t have to experience costly downtime.
5. Rank Higher in Search Engine Result
Do you know where your website is ranking in Google search results? Even if you’re in a good position now, don’t assume it will stay this way. Search engines like Google are constantly adjusting the methods used to rank websites in search lists, which is why search engine optimization (SEO) is not a set-it-and-forget-it process. Monitoring important SEO metrics will help improve your position in search results and identify any new issues that may be hurting your rankings.
Geekflare explains that SEO monitoring can help you boost your site performance, get ahead of competitors, and avoid being penalized for violating search engine rules. Thankfully, SEO monitoring tools make it easy to keep an eye on your performance and improve your on-page SEO without hiring a web developer.
Optimize and Protect Your Website
Your website can help drive the growth of your small business, but only if you can maintain its performance. Set up systems to monitor your website for cyber threats, changes in performance, SEO issues, and customer experience problems. By monitoring your website, you’ll be able to act quickly when there’s a problem so you can maintain your competitive edge and keep your business moving in the right direction!