Website Monitoring 1: Overview

Hopefully you have an ecommerce website that is an important part of your business, tirelessly serving customers, generating orders and making a great impression 24 hours a day. But how can you be sure? Especially at those peak industry periods when you are at your busiest and customers are most likely to be visiting your site?

Let’s look at some of the things that can go wrong:

• Your site can go “down” for an extended period, meaning it is offline or not available to vistors, who will instead see an error message when they visit. Our industry is one of extremes and websites are sensitive to volume - a site that performs fine with limited traffic in August will be under a lot more pressure in February or May and fail as a result.

• Your site can go offline (or respond so slowly that it appears to be offline) for brief periods throughout the day. It will usually be available when customers visit it, but it is also likely to return an error while they are placing an order – forcing them to start the process over again… or just go to a more stable competing site.

• Your site can run so slowly that it frustrates your users, perhaps to the point that they decide not to come back.

• Your website provider (the company that you pay to provide you with the website) can add links and or products that you do not want appearing on your website.

This is just a partial list. Running an online flower store is a complicated business and a lot can go wrong.

So how do you keep track of it all?

Some florists try and make a habit of checking manually. They make a point of trying to check their websites (usually with just a quick visit to the home page) on a regular basis but this isn’t enough. Most florists, even those that visit their sites every day, probably won’t be aware of any problems until they hear from a disappointed customer.

There is a solution in the form of website monitoring services. These services let you set up different “checks” that test your site for a number of different problems, as often as every minute, and alert you via email, SMS text message or app. They work around the clock to make sure that your website is online and providing a great experience to everyone that visits.