What Is Website Monitoring?

Website monitoring is the practice of regularly observing, evaluating, and testing a website’s performance. The goal of website monitoring is to provide a superior experience for website visitors by ensuring that a site works as intended, that pages load quickly, and that the site is secure and easily available to users.

Websites have become the primary way that many businesses engage customers and sell products and services. As a company’s online presence, websites are a crucial part of a brand and a reflection of quality in a business. This fact makes website performance monitoring a mission-critical priority.

Customers expect websites to offer 24/7 availability and to load quickly. They want websites to be easy to use and completely secure. They don’t have patience for links or page elements that don’t work. Web monitoring helps businesses to meet these expectations and provide better user experiences by quickly identifying problems, eliminating outages and downtime, and reducing latency and bottlenecks to improve speed and performance.

Website monitoring includes an array of tools that collect data, track performance, and glean insight about how websites are working and how users interact with them. Web monitoring may monitor the actions of real users (real user monitoring, or RUM, such as Akamai mPulse) or they may track the results of tests applied to websites (synthetic testing, such as WebPageTest).

Web monitoring tools run website speed tests and website performance tests to see how quickly pages are loading, how well pages are rendering, what happens when a user clicks on a link on a page, how well functionality like searches and ecommerce shopping carts are working, and how each page is performing on different devices like smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

Development teams and administrators use a number of methodologies for website monitoring.

• Synthetic testing: This approach monitors the performance of a website by deploying scripts that simulate the actions that real users might take as they interact with a website. Synthetic testing is done in a controlled environment, enabling teams to test different variables like devices, browsers, networks, and cached status. Synthetic testing excels at early detection, allowing teams to fix performance issues or bugs before users encounter them. It’s also ideal for regression testing, where performance is measured after significant changes are made to a site.
• Real user monitoring (RUM): Also known as real-time user monitoring, RUM monitors web performance by tracking the experience of actual users, which may reveal different performance issues than synthetic tests built by developers who know the site and understand the intention of each element. RUM offers insights into how users interact with the site, which pages they visit most often, and how long they stay.
• Uptime/downtime monitoring: Website uptime monitoring quickly provides alerts for issues with web page and website availability, allowing teams to address them before they impact user performance.
• API monitoring: With the rapid rise in use of application programming interfaces (APIs), this monitoring function helps teams address any API issues that may affect the availability and performance of a website.
• Error monitoring: By tracking, analyzing, and troubleshooting errors on a website, teams can quickly diagnose bugs and issues that may affect website performance and degrade the experience of users.
• Security monitoring: To defend against cyberattacks and data breaches, security solutions monitor traffic to search for signs of malware or intrusion and to ensure that firewalls, SSL certificates, and DNS are free from attack.
• Transaction monitoring: This functionality tracks the performance of interactive elements on a website that enable user transactions such as logging in, making a payment, or conducting a search.
• Infrastructure monitoring: Solutions for infrastructure monitoring and server monitoring keep an eye on the hardware and software that websites run on.
• Network monitoring: These tools monitor networks by tracking the health and performance of infrastructure like routers and switches, and using ping tests to measure latency.
• Analytics monitoring: Analytics reveals how well a site is working for users. It measures the number of site visits, where visitors come from, how they navigate the site, which pages are visited most often, and other critical metrics.
• Application performance monitoring (APM): APM tools analyze the performance of web applications to ensure they are running as intended.
• Status pages: These pages allow websites to communicate the reliability and health of web services to users and customers. This practice builds trust with users by ensuring clear communication and greater transparency.

The marketplace offers a great number of website monitoring services with extensive capabilities for tracking performance and monitoring critical metrics. Some of the best website monitoring solutions like Akamai mPulse, Datadog, UptimeRobot, Dynatrace, Pingdom, Uptrends, and Site24x7 provide comprehensive RUM and/or synthetic monitoring capabilities with advanced features, along with integrations for platforms like Slack and Microsoft teams.

When choosing a solution, organizations should look for providers that offer monitoring features like:

• Automated 24/7 monitoring to quickly identify issues and streamline workloads for web teams.
• Easy-to-use diagnostic tools that let web teams quickly pinpoint the root cause of degraded performance or poor user experiences.
• Instant alerts and SMS notifications that let IT teams know when websites go down or when metrics fall below established SLA thresholds.
• Reports for real-time and historical data that can easily show trends in usage, user behavior, and website performance.

Website monitoring tools may include:

• Performance monitoring software that tracks how quickly individual elements and entire pages load.
• Network monitoring software that keeps tabs on servers, firewalls, response times, bandwidth utilization, and other behind-the-scenes metrics.
• Security monitoring software to scan for malware, monitor activity logs, uncover vulnerabilities, and alert teams if the site shows up on a blocklist.
• Analytics software that reveals in-depth insights into the visitors to a website, where they came from, what brought them there, and how successful their experience on the site was.

Monitoring the performance of websites, web applications, and mobile apps provides significant benefits for organizations.

• Reduced costs. By continually optimizing websites, improving performance, and addressing issues early, IT administrators can prevent the kinds of problems that require costly fixes.
• Better search engine rankings. Strong overall website performance will help maintain metrics around speed, availability, and performance that impact search engine results.
• Improved customer loyalty. When a website is working well, it provides the experiences that customers expect, encouraging them to return.
• Reputation protection. When a website is not working well, customers quickly lose trust in a brand.
• Reduced shopping cart abandonment. Website monitoring helps development teams solve the kinds of problems that frustrate shoppers and cause them to leave a page before finishing a purchase.
• Important insights. The intelligence derived from website monitoring solutions can help companies better understand the needs and behavior of users, making it easier to improve the quality of interactions and better serve their needs.
• Stronger security. Website monitoring can prevent the kinds of security threats that result in downtime, customer frustration, and negative publicity.