In a marketing survey to consumers by BrightLocal, it was found out that 36% of consumers trust a business if it has a website. Nowadays, how we do business has changed. By going digital, we save time through the many options that the World Wide Web is allowing us to offer, whether they are products or services, that our potential customers may wish to buy or avail of. Not only are businesses able to save time but also increase lead and revenue generation through company websites. And it is always an advantage to achieve both – saving time and increasing sales. Achieving both does not sound that difficult at all. Thanks to your website performance Monitoring team. A website monitoring makes sure that your site is optimized and functioning at its highest performance 24/7. This is especially true for businesses that rely 100% on their sales to online transactions. A website monitoring measures and audits your site’s performance through different parameters such as uptime testing, and load time testing, among others. Through these processes, you make use of monitoring tools to ensure that your business remains available to your consumers any time of day and anywhere in the world.

Website monitoring is chiefly focused on monitoring your website’s uptime at the highest percentage possible, detects and reports problems relating to your site’s availability before they can occur, or recommends a solution when availability issues happen. There are two ways to do this: Internal monitoring and external monitoring. If you want to know more about these two types of website monitoring, better read on. Or if you want to gauge which kind of monitoring should you invest in for your business, keep reading to know more about your options. 

Internal Website Monitoring

The monitoring happens within your company’s corporate firewall, where your IT department regularly runs tests and checks your business website performance. Internal website monitoring ensures that the server behind the corporate firewall, including all internal infrastructure and IT management systems, are at their peak performance and in healthy and functioning conditions. This type of monitoring runs tests that access memory usage, CPU load, site load timing, disk space, and many other related processes. The reports you will expect from your internal monitoring team include the comprehensive capacity of your corporates server’s health, its memory capacity, and the network traffic. Out of these reports, your internal website monitoring team is equipped with the right precautionary measures to foresee and prevent issues related to the performance of your business website. When you are aware of your website performance, you prevent long site downtime, which poses an impact on your lead or revenue generation efforts.

The Pros

Since internal monitoring is focused within your corporate firewall, one of its greatest advantages is giving you a continuous awareness of the overall health of your corporate server. Issues such as those related to your website design, poor connection to the server, or an error in the codes can be foreseen, immediately detected, and can be solved promptly. We have read and been told how slow website load time and long downtime can negatively impact your business. Internal website monitoring allows you to look within your firewall and identify the cause of the problem. It also lets you prepare for necessary upkeeping protocols and gives you the time to inform your customers of a scheduled downtime due to maintenance.

The Cons

The drawback of internal website monitoring lies in the fact that it is only looking within your corporate firewall. Your monitoring capabilities are as good as when everything on the server is running. But when the server is down, you will not be able to perform the monitoring processes. You will remain unaware of your site’s downtime until your customers will raise a complaint about your website’s unavailability. We, in as much as possible, do not want that to happen.

External Website Monitoring

This is where external website monitoring comes in. It is a third-party monitoring service that runs website performance tests and detects issues from the outside of your corporate firewall. This type of monitoring prevents the drawback of the nature of internal website monitoring by running tests and performance audit processes across the entire data routes. This means that it is an end-to-end website uptime monitoring that puts high regard to the end-user experience – also known as customer experience. External website monitoring offers the same monitoring capabilities as your internal monitoring with value-added services that report when and where your site is down, and a whole range of other areas such as URL content, behavioral patterns, and your site’s response times. 

The Pros

The primary advantage of external website monitoring is it focuses on the overall experience of the end-users, or better known as your customers – the very reason why you create your website. It is considered as your digital marketing’s safety net by acting as the earliest alert should there be any customer-experience problems on your website. Since it is a third-party service, your monitoring capabilities are still functioning even when the server is down. 

It also has a notifications feature that sends reports or alerts in cases of website availability issues in real-time, 24/7. It notifies your team in cases of site downtime or outage through a channel that best works for your business. A real-time and round-the-clock website monitoring service is especially important for the e-commerce industry where 100% of revenues are generated from online transactions. The output of the external monitoring service makes you aware of the downtime patterns and what caused this to happen. 

The Cons

Unlike internal website monitoring which can be tasked to your IT department, external website monitoring is an outsourced service. This means you have to invest money to hire a professional service for external website monitoring. 

How much does external website monitoring cost? The answer depends on the needs and requirements of your business. There are companies that offer free uptime testing, however, you do not only choose based on the prices. There are various factors to consider when you plan to get this service. It is important to ask these questions to your monitoring service providers: 

1. How many checks does the service include? This is especially important because external website monitoring data that are collected over time can be made use to understand the downtime patterns and thus, be drawn on as the basis of your recovery plan. 

1. What is the time interval of each website checking or testing? For this aspect, the shorter interval is better to allow you to collect data at different times of the day. 
2. How are you going to get notified? Reports and notifications of site outages or downtime are the reason why you get this service. The faster you get notified of any issues about your site’s performance, the sooner you can solve the problems. Choose a channel that is best and most convenient for your business.

So, which type of website monitoring is the best for your business? If your business relies completely on your website, our recommendation would be to get both – internal and external website monitoring. You cannot compromise the revenue and lead generation of your business by sticking only to one measure. Monitoring your website performance on two sides will give you a clear picture of the health of your server and a great customer experience that translates into sales. Frustrated customers cannot wait for a website that is poorly performing, slow, and often displays errors. In this digital world, the competition is just a click away.