It is true that technology has contributed largely to the growth of many businesses worldwide. This is the reason why almost every business today has a business website from which they reach out to the ever increasing numbers of internet users. While this may seem like a huge technological breakthrough of all time, there are still numerous challenges that still face it. For instance, the level of competition online has become so high that many businesses remain invisible when it comes to search results.
As a result, many business websites does not receive any significant traffic to drive a good number of sales. This reality has prompted businesses to go out of their way to ensure that they remain above competition. In order to realize this dream, you need to start by ensuring that your servers, transactions, website and associated applications are performing well.
What metrics should you monitor for your site performance?
When you decided to set up your business website or a web application, you expected that the end users will interact with it optimally. So, what metrics should you keep tracking to ensure that this comes true?
- Direct traffic and unique traffic
- Bounce rate
- Page load time
- Requests per second
- Error rate
- Throughput
- Conversions
- Response time
- Start render time
It is very important to track the above metrics because the results will inform you whether your website and applications are performing well or not.
A high performing website and apps are important in the following ways:
- You get constant traffic
When you monitor your website from the end user perspective, you will be able to optimize the experience of your visitors, customers and other users. As a result, they will keep visiting your website because you provide good content that is relevant and valuable to them. The frequent visits to your site will eventually lead to high conversion rates.
- Reduce bounce rates
When the performance of your site is poor, you will find that many users move away from it after viewing only one page. This could be as a result of them finding nothing that is of value to them, a complicated landing page or the website design is not pleasing at all. With monitoring, you will know your sites bounce rate value and make adjustments as required.
- Improve your page load time
For technology to serve its purpose today, speed is very important. Users simply do not have time to wait for your web pages to load and they will simply click back and go to the next site. It has been shown that the average time that users expect a page to load is two seconds and any delays of even 0.5 seconds can be detrimental to your site because it will cause higher bounce rates, lower rankings on SERPs, less page views and eventually low revenues.
- Get a high search engine ranking
Search engine ranking is very important for any website. This is because visitors can easily click on your site when it is on top of SERPs than when it is placed further behind. This means that you need to follow good SEO practices which include a website that is highly performing, functional and fast. This ensures that your users will have a good experience and get value when they visit your site.
Any technology needs to be monitored and maintained from time to time. Without monitoring the performance of your site and applications with tools like Microsoft Application Insights, you will never know how they are performing as well as the areas that need to be improved for a better user experience and higher revenues.