Why You Need to Monitor Your Website

Business
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Your website is your lifeline in a world of online information and knowledge and an economy increasingly reliant on digital operations. It’s not enough anymore to simply have a website. If you’re not monitoring, developing and adapting then your site will become dead in the water. Google is king when it comes to whether your site is a success or not and will penalize those sites that constitute a poor user experience. So, why should we be monitoring our websites?

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#1 Downtime

Huge amounts of sales are lost due to websites being down. This leads to not only a loss of revenue but also a loss of credibility and trust for your visitors. If your business relies heavily on online transactions then you could be losing thousands if your site experiences several hours of downtime per month. A service that consistently monitors your uptime is therefore very important.

#2 Image

You can’t underestimate the power of brand image. A good image is essential for success and this positive branding needs to be protected. Customer experience and satisfaction are key so if your site is often down, if it’s not safe, has broken links or hasn’t been updated in an age then your reputation and trust levels will suffer. If visitors cannot easily find information or conversely, are bombarded by too much information then they won’t stick around.

#3 Hackers

Downtime can be caused by problems with hacking. If a hacker brings your site down and installs malicious code onto it, then you will definitely notice major setbacks for your site. You’ll want these problems identified immediately and resolved with as little disruption as possible to normal service. Google doesn’t always notify site owners of a hack, meaning sometimes they don’t know it’s occurred. If you are constantly monitoring your site, you have the chance, if you move quickly, to rectify the issue before Google notice and your rankings suffer.

It can take a long time for a website to recover its previous traffic levels if it’s been hacked and flagged by Google. You may want to re-examine your back-up practices. Automated back-ups should be happening often, being stored off site and kept for as long as you can.

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#4 Content

Google’s latest algorithms focus on the content quality of your website and if there are gaps in your content, you could be penalized. Here are some areas where you could be going wrong –  duplicate content internally so Google doesn’t know which page to rank for. You’ll be judge as having low quality content and your site’s rank will be negatively affected. External duplicate content, whether copied by you or by malicious robots. Mobile optimization issues are also being judged by Google so if you have content that appears on desktop view but not on mobile view then your ranking will take a hit. Not enough content or poorly informed content will also be penalized as there needs to be an understandable topic or how can a page be ranked for that information?