Website Monitoring for Christmas
Another series of posts talked in detail about website monitoring services and how they work, how they are configured, etc. Basically they involve setting up a paid account with a dedicated service, and then setting up a variety of different “checks”.
The most basic checks just look at availability – is your site up and available and to visitors? Other checks look at performance metrics like the time it takes your pages to load – is it satisfactory or frustrating to the point that your customers will leave and go shopping on another website.
The service than performs these checks – as often as every minute – twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. And, if any problems do come up, you’ll be notified immediately. You generally get to choose how you want to be notified and can select email, text message, or alerts through a special mobile app (or any combination thereof).
Why It’s So Important During The Holidays
Your florist website is rarely more important to your success than it is during peak sales periods like Christmas. Hopefully you have been promoting it – driving traffic through email campaigns, receipt/invoice marketing, mailings and more. Even if you haven’t done that your website, like your physical flower shop, will be busier during these peak periods.
More people than ever will be looking for your website, and you need it to be to them – if it’s offline they will just go somewhere else. If the site is slow the problem is that same – all the research says that your customers will just go somewhere else.
Unfortunately this is also when your website is most likely to have issues. All those extra visitors looking to purchase flowers online? That puts extra strain on your eccommerce floral website. First it starts to slow down, annoying customers and prompting many to shop elsewhere, Eventually it may go completely offline, creating an even bigger problem.
See the trap? You need your website most when it’s getting a lot of traffic, but that is also when it is most likely to fail!
It’s also when you are least likely to notice it. It’s not just your online flower shop website that is working extra hard over the holidays – you’re working harder than ever too. That means that you are less likely to notice that the site is down. You just don’t have time to check it as often.
That is where the monitoring service comes in. It never stops looking – those checks happen every minute no matter what, and you are always up-to-date on the status of your website.
For more information on getting started with a monitoring service for your flower shop website take a look at our series of posts on the topic.
