Website Monitoring - An Article in Floral Management Magazine

Mother's Day 2014 was very difficult for some florists that had significant issues with their websites. They were offline for many hours leading into the holiday and, when they managed to avoid extended outages, they experienced multiple brief outages (the kind that end sessions and send customers to other websites).

Ryan Freeman of Florist 2.0 started providing more information on the problem shortly after it happened in a great article called "Why Your Website Shouldn't Twerk".

The problem with a twerking site (going up and down rapidly or intermittently) is that you might not know it’s offline. It can be ok one minute, or for one user, and then down next minute for another customer.

He also discussed the serious SEO implications:

If Google detects the pages are slow in loading, or encounters multiple errors loading your site, they will scale back the crawling of your site and possibly lower your ranking.

These are serious problems that can really damage the ecommerce component of your floral business. The first step in fixing them is being aware of them. You assume your flower shop website is working well and taking care of customers 24 hours a day but how can you be sure?

The answer is a website monitoring service that will watch over your florist website, testing for a variety of problems every minute and letting you know as soon as anything goes wrong. Mark's article in Floral Management talks about just that – how monitoring services work and how you can use one to watch over your flower shop website.