A lot of times, we come across such websites, which appear to be inaccessible due to some unknown reason. A website’s downtime portrays a bad impression for the related business entity in the eyes of their site’s visitors.
The sole purpose of the existence of any website is its optimum accessibility for an audience from around the world, at all times. It is well expected of it to portray maximum uptime and cater to the informational needs of the people who are looking for relevant information at any time of the day.
To a very large extent, a website’s Uptime and Downtime counts for its popularity among the target audience. It can cost you money, loss of engagement and bad search engine reputation.
The Terminology: Uptime Vs. Downtime
For starters, a website’s Uptime is the duration for which the website is up and running for access. On the other hand, the website Downtime is the duration for which the website is inaccessible to the requesting site visitors.
Some factors that determine website Uptime/Downtime
- Your choice of web hosting service and its type
- Memory of the infrastructure
- Software/Hardware in place
- Security
- Speed
Why is it so important?
Simply put, a balanced website will help you boost your business, bring in more visitors and enhance your SEO rankings. So, if you are not monitoring your website’s Uptime and Downtime cautiously, you would be putting these website positives in trouble.
With so many options to choose from, selecting the ideal website builder is a vital decision if you wish to aptly monitor your website’s Uptime and Downtime. Suggestively, WordPress is an easy to use content management system and it would minimize the involvement of professional help, hence reducing the load on your pocket. So, now let’s dive deeper to help you increase your website’s Uptime and minimize the downtime.
How to determine your website’s uptime and downtime?
If you weren’t already, now you are aware of the vital terminologies that your website’s uptime and downtime are. The next question in place would be how do you determine these stats because it is not possible for a real person to keep a check on the website 24/7/365. Also, this real person might not be technically sound to run these tests to ensure constant availability of the website functions. For such instances, many tools have braced the website market to help you do so. Let’s talk about the best ones.
Pingdom
If you have been a website owner for a significant period of time now, you have probably heard of this one. The Pingdom tool has been designed to test the loading speed of your website so that you can take corrective measures if things aren’t working well. It runs the ping test every 1 minute from several locations so that your website is properly monitored for any downtime. As a result, it provides performance-related statistics to help you make corrective changes for your WordPress website performance.
FYI, visitors tend to abandon a website if its loading speed is more than 3 seconds, says a report.
Uptime Robot
As the name clearly suggests, this website monitoring service runs multiple tests every 5 minutes which includes checking the HTTP(s), ping, port and keywords aspect. For any unusual activity, the users are alerted through SMS, email etc. One of their advanced features includes the option of the service ignoring any downtime during maintenance activity.
SiteUptime
Very similar to the above monitoring service, the SiteUptime service informs you well in advance before your visitors notice a glitch in the uptime. With a 2-minute time bar and 8 different locations, it checks your website from across 5 continents. Their standard plan will cost you $10/month whereas the Pro plan has been set at $20/month. With many monitoring options in place such as HTTP, SSL, web page content, custom TCP ports and six others, SiteUptime is one of the best website monitoring services out there.
Uptimia
Touted to be one of the world’s most reliable website monitoring services, Uptimia will hardly let you down. With a 30-day free trial in place, you rest assured that you pay for what actually works for your website. With 171 checkpoints, this service constantly monitors your website as often as 30 seconds. It also monitors the website speed and never gives out any false alerts with a triple check in system.
Bonus Mentions:
If you have a WordPress website that you wish to monitor for its Uptime and Downtime, you can try the two plugins that we have mentioned below to help you maintain your website’s performance.
JetPack
With over 4+ millions of trusted users, you could be making the best decision for your WordPress website, if you choose to get started with this plugin. Through its security and backup services, you can successfully monitor your website’s Uptime and Downtime through email alerts. Its site stats and analysis features are on point and can work wonders for your site’s performance.
ManageWP Worker
Easy to set-up and get started, ManageWP makes your WordPress website monitoring a hassle-free task. With its Uptime monitor, you won’t miss out on any important updates that could cost you the online reputation of your website. Available as a premium add-on, the monitoring service provides email and SMS notifications to keep you alerted. For $1/month, you can monitor a single website and for 25$/month, you can access the service for up to 100 websites per month.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it is the audience that gets to testify your website for its performance, user-friendliness, and ease of navigation. Apart from monitoring the downtime and taking corrective measures, it is also imperative to maintain other performance checks on a daily basis, clear the dashboard clutter and secure your website so that it stands out for your target audience to see.
