Monitor Your Web Site’s Performance
The goal of monitoring performance is to ensure that, at any given time, your site is available to visitors and that your pages load quickly. There are numerous ways to measure the performance of a site, and an increasing number of tools and services can help. Use this checklist to learn what aspects of performance are critical to e-commerce success, so you can choose the monitoring method that’s right for your business.
Essentially, Web performance monitoring consists of measuring various components of a site’s performance at regular intervals. How do you know exactly what a monitoring program should measure? Think about the real-world equivalent of your online business, a brick-and-mortar store. In order to have a satisfying shopping experience, customers must be able to get into the store, move around the sales floor without hindrance, and view merchandise quickly and conveniently.
Thus, for your Web store, you need to ensure four things above all else:
- Your site must be accessible to visitors.
- Your Web server(s) must respond quickly and accurately to page view requests.
- Your pages - especially those displaying merchandise - must appear without significant delay.
- Your links - whether internal or external - must all be in working order.
The metrics that correspond to the first three of these goals, respectively, are downtime, response time, and download time. The following checklist explores the significance of each measurement and suggests appropriate monitoring methods to help you accomplish all four of these goals.
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