Know Your Site Better- The Performance Parameters to Consider Are you running your own online business and taking care of the uptime of your website? Or are you a webmaster who is actually running a number of websites? In either case, you will have to make sure that your website is up and running at all times –even when you are off doing something else. A website is online 24 X 7 X 365. So, ideally, it needs to deliver optimum performance at all times when it is online. But, you cannot be online continually. Hence, it is impossible for you to physically verify that your website is not down at every moment. Moreover, your website needs to be available to the search engine spiders as well. If your website is down every time a search engine spider visits it, its search engine ranking is bound to suffer. The time and effort that you put into creating an attractive site and informative content, goes into vain if your website experiences a downtime. Your customers will simply go elsewhere, for which they just need to click the mouse. So, it is essential that you set up an alarm arrangement where you will come to know if your website is experiencing major functionality issues. There are a number of markers which you can monitor to ensure that your website is working well. These are as follows: The parameters related to loading of the webpage There are a number of parameters related to the loading of your page which can serve as an indicator of the performance of your website. Bear in mind that if the loading is fast and error free, then only can the visitors proceed to browse your website and eventually buy your product or hire your services. Not only that, it also affects your SEO ranking. The various search engine spiders that visit your website can do so successfully if these parameters are working well. So, it is necessary to monitor the performance of these parameters related to the leading of the webpage. These parameters are as follows: 1. The most important criterion is uptime. The website must be up and running at all times. Random checks from various locations can help you to verify this. 2. Another important element to check is the speed of loading your page. If it takes too long, the impatient internet user will take his custom elsewhere. You can use ping requests which measures the time from your location till website starts loading. Alternatively you can use loading time measurements where the time to complete the download of the source code is measured. 3. You can use the special tools to measure the total time it takes for your website to load including images, flash content etc. This will give you a fair idea of exactly what your visitors are facing when they come to visit your website. Your error message Most web package comes with the option of error messages which are sent to you in case of certain contingencies. It is necessary to monitor your error messages regularly. For example, you can arrange to get an alert if the string “404 error” is included in the source code. The fact is that if you keep on getting minor error messages, you can fall into the dangerous rut of ignoring them altogether. Avoid this common pitfall. Instead, pay attention to your error messages and take timely action. The alerts and notifications are usually send out in the form of RSS feeds, emails or SMS. The shopping cart Your website is beautiful; your merchandise is attractive and competitively priced and the number of your visitors coming to your site is satisfactory.. But, unless you can guarantee them a smooth and quick checkout process, they are going to take their wallets elsewhere. Nobody likes to wait in a queue, especially if the site is down. So, you have to make sure that your customers can easily add or deduct items to the shopping cart and complete the payment and checkout fast and efficiently. Parameters related to web server The performance of your website is also dependant on the web server. Here are some criteria to be considered closely: 1. The CPU load is one basic factor affecting the performance of your website. Higher load can significantly affect performance. You can use a script to publish the CPU load to a HTML page. It can use a HTTP content sensor for the purposes of monitoring. 2. Closely related to this is the question of free disc space. As you keep on adding images, log files database entries, photos and others to your website; they take up a lot of space. Make sure to check how much free space is there because this will affect error messages as well as the time of loading your page 3. While you are concentrating all your efforts towards increasing the number of your website visitors, have you considered where your website has the capacity to serve those many visitors? It is necessary to test the load tolerance of your website from time to time. There are a number of stress tests available which can help you determine the load tolerance of your website. The geographic parameter It is a fact that the performance of a website varies according to the geographical location. If you log in from UK the performance may be different than if you log in from Mexico. This factor gains great importance if your company is globally active. You do not want to lose customers from a particular geographical region because your website is performing poorly there. But how can you know how your website is performing in Berlin if you are sitting in Washington? This is where Monitor Scout comes to your help. This can help you monitor the performance of your website from different locations all over the world. In this way you can be sure that no matter where your customers are based, they are getting the best website services. Even if your company is local in nature, your site should be available to global visitors in order to increase its visibility. Increased discussions and blogs regarding your products definitely help in generating more interest. So, even local companies need to monitor the geographic parameter from time to time. The website visitors Implementing the measures to increase website traffic is not enough; you have to quantify exactly how successful these measures have been. In order to do this it is necessary for you to collect accurate data regarding the number of your website visitors. You probably already collect data regarding sales. But monitoring only the merchandise sold is not enough to ensure that your website is performing as as you want it to do. Rather you need to also focus on other essentialities like is it attracting enough traffic? Are your steps to increase traffic flow successful enough? To determine this, you need to plot the number of visitors to your website in each time segment and take necessary steps. If the number keeps falling, you need to take urgent steps to increase traffic flow. If the number keeps increasing, you may have to upgrade to a greater bandwidth or your website may crash. The quality of the links One of the main tenets of increasing website visibility and traffic is to create a number of links. But, quality of the link is as important as quantity. Broken links can actually hinder rather than helping your website. It is necessary that you check the quality of your links from time to time. The best option is to use a tool for this purpose. High quality links will improve the visibility of your website and increase the number of paying visitors. Constant monitoring is essential The above criteria constitute fair indication of the performance of any website. If you want your website to be continuously visible and available to visitors from all over the world, it is necessary to keep these indicators working at an optimum level. You should not wait for something to go wrong before you take action. Relying solely on error messages, waiting for them to appear and then taking action may cost you valuable time and customers. Instead, it is far more prudent to use website monitoring tools and keep a close watch on the performance indicators so that you can start taking action as soon as you detect some problem. This can vastly improve the functionality of your website. Do not ignore basic quality checks while monitoring the above performance indicators. So, your website should not fall prey to such shockingly common errors including poor spelling, outdated content or incomprehensible grammar. These checks cannot be done by any automatic programs. Instead, you will have to review your website manually from time to time to check the overall quality of the site and make sure that it performs at an optimum level at all times. In a nutshell, with the perfect combination of manual and automated way you can come up with the best site ever.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 08:20:57 +0000
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