Why your business can’t afford to skip website monitoring

Why would I monitor my website in the first place?

Your website is your business’ storefront, sales team, customer service department, and potentially even your primary revenue channel. Just like you’d protect the physical presence of these aspects of your business with a security system, you also need to protect the online aspects too. That means keeping an eye on your website with monitoring.

How much does website downtime cost?

When figuring out the cost of website downtime, there are two factors at play - direct costs and indirect costs.

Direct costs of website downtime

You can calculate the direct costs. Figure out how much money your website makes you per hour or minute and then multiply that number by the amount of time your site was down.

Of course, the amount your website makes is a lot easier to calculate for e-commerce sites than other businesses such as consultants. But, you can still get a rough idea by considering the amount of inquiries you get on your website per hour or day and the rate that you turn those inquiries into sales.

Indirect costs of website downtime

Then, there are the indirect costs. While they’re more difficult to account for, they cost your business all the same. Here are a few examples of the indirect costs to website downtime:

• Brand reputation damage: Nowadays, people expect websites to always be working. When potential customers visit a website that’s down, they start off with a negative impression of the brand. They associate it with brands that cut corners and offer cheap services or products.
• SEO ranking penalties: Google constantly indexes websites so they have the most up-to-date information on your pages. If your site is down while Google is trying to crawl your site, it will negatively impact your rankings since it returns an error code to the Googlebots.
• Customers go elsewhere: According to a study by Adobe, if your site doesn’t load, 41 percent of people go elsewhere. This drives your potential customers to your competitors.
• Increased support costs: You likely have self-help articles on your website. When those go down, customers who need help must revert to calling your customer service line which increases your support costs.

Real-world examples of website downtime impacts

The costs of website downtime aren’t just hypothetical. They cause real-world impacts. Let’s go over a few of the many times website downtime has cost companies millions:

• Amazon's Prime Day disaster: In 2018, Amazon went down for some users on the worst day for them, Prime Day. It’s one of their major shopping days and users couldn’t access the site. Amazon estimates this outage cost them upwards of $99 million.
• British Airways' internal chaos: Internal issues can arise from website downtime too. British Airways’ 2017 disaster is a perfect example. Their IT systems went down forcing them to cancel flights for up to 75,000 passengers.
• Facebook’s $90 million day: After just five hours of downtime, Facebook lost 4.9 percent of its share value. That resulted in Mark Zuckerberg losing roughly $6 billion in wealth.

Why startups can't afford to skip website monitoring

All too often, startups consider website monitoring a luxury to buy once they get bigger. The reality is that bigger companies have enough resources to survive through downtime issues whereas the same problems for startups can become fatal. Here are a few of the reasons why startups need website monitoring:

• Myth of startup resilience: People think of startups as agile companies that can quickly adjust for any problems that arise. While it’s true that startups are agile, they also don’t have as much runway to adjust. That’s why startups need website monitoring that notifies them of downtime immediately so they can act right away. If it goes unnoticed, startups can run out of runway before they even get started recovering.
• First impressions are critical: We already touched on how website downtime can give customers a bad taste in their mouth. What we haven’t shared yet, though, is that according to Northern Arizona University, 88 percent of users won’t return after a bad user experience. And your website being down is absolutely a bad first experience. Website monitoring helps identify downtime as the issue as opposed to a different issue such as a poorly designed website.
• Launch timing: There’s a cruel paradox where website downtime occurs when it’s least welcome, like the launch of your product or a feature. You’ve spent countless hours and thousands, if not millions, on your launch. If your website’s down, you can’t capitalize on it. Website monitoring can help you predict downtime to avoid these circumstances.
• Investor confidence: When pitching your startup to VCs, you usually need to present a demo and let them try your product. If your network goes down during these meetings, you’ll be hard-pressed to get a VC to come back another time, let alone invest in your startup. Your odds go up if you can cite your downtime statistics to show the VC that this is an outlier and not the norm.

What else should you monitor on your website?

Monitoring the binary of whether your website is up or not leaves a lot of data off the table. That’s why alongside website downtime monitoring, you should also monitor:

Performance metrics

Both users and Google care a lot about your performance metrics. Sure, your users don’t know how long it takes for your site to load, but they definitely know if it takes too long. And Google has figured out exactly what “too long” is. That’s why they use your website speed as a direct ranking factor. You should apply this to all customer-facing online services. An overwhelmed server slowing down your online service or website is different from downtime, though, so it requires separate monitoring.

Functionality testing

Website downtime monitoring won’t monitor for a broken user journey. That means when a user clicks a link or opens a menu, that link or menu doesn’t work. Services monitor for functionality by continuously running simulated user journeys identifying issues before they impact real users.

Third-party service integration

Every third-party service you use introduces a potential point of failure for your website or online service. Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t use third-party services. Every business depends on at least some third-party services. It only means you need to monitor their integration. APIs get updated all the time and those updates can break your integration. Third-party service monitoring ensures you know what’s working and what needs work at all times.

Security monitoring

A study conducted by IBM looked at how long it takes the average company to identify a security breach. The results are a shocking 197 days. That’s over half a year before a security breach gets identified. This is why security monitoring is crucial and why modern website monitoring services integrate security monitoring into their downtime monitoring. Any efforts to reduce that time to identify a breach help you minimize the damage it can cause.

Recap: Why you need website monitoring

Monitoring your website and online services is all about preventing you from jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. That’s to say, without appropriately monitoring your website, you can incorrectly identify issues or not even realize an issue exists in the first place. Then, based on incorrect information, your attempts to fix the problem can make the problem worse.

For instance, if you notice a big uptick in your bounce rate after a marketing campaign, you might think the campaign flopped. But, it could be an issue with your site being overwhelmed causing it to slow down or go down completely for some users. With quality website monitoring, instead of scrapping an otherwise successful campaign, you can fix the core issue. That’s just one example of the value of website monitoring. Whether you’re a startup or an enterprise, website monitoring gives you the information you need to manage your website like the pros.