Today, there are enormous businesses that rely extensively on their websites to create various touch-points with their stakeholders. Consumers can find everything online; from clothes, accessories, and electronics to even carton boxes for their packaging needs and nannies for their little ones.

Boxbee.com provides boxes and storage space for your stuff and it guarantees delivery on your specified date. On the other hand, Care.com, a consumer-matching platform, provides a trust-worthy medium for families to find care for their needs. Imagine many such companies fulfilling your various needs by the click of a button.

In the case of above and many such businesses, the websites are the primary and, in some cases, only touch points with its consumers. Hence, the reliability and availability of the website is extremely crucial for today's businesses.

> See also: 4 ways to minimise system downtime

With increasing Internet penetration, it truly signals a promising future for the thriving e-commerce market. For these businesses, while it is easy to create a website, what really matters is how they monitor its availability and performance from various geographical locations.

Even a few seconds of downtime can prove to be disastrous during a peak business period. Various studies demonstrate the direct relationship between website performance and user behaviour.

A study by Akamai shows that 47% of users expect an e-commerce page to load in two seconds or less. Slow loading of pages can result in customer abandoning the transaction, which may result in loss of revenue. It further would lead to reluctance for future purchases, thus affecting the whole purpose of the business.

Additional findings indicate that quick page loading is a key factor in a consumer’s loyalty to an e-commerce site, especially for high spenders.

A leading e-commerce company in India on its most awaited sale day went slow disappointing many of its customers. This also led to a lot of negative social media noise about the company and how its competitors leveraged this opportunity. 

Additionally, there are instances when a website works fine in one particular region but is simultaneously down in other regions. This is critical in today's global market. Now not only in e-commerce, think of similar issues with internet banking, booking tickets online, Cloud technology providers, education institutions running online test exams, etc.

So what does it take to make your website a roaring success?

The performance and accuracy of certain key elements are directly proportional to a websites' uptime. A good website monitoring tool keeps an eye on all these critical elements, from different geographical locations, to keep you abreast of any issues with your website.

Additionally, such tools should alert you in real-time about the discrepancies, before your end-users notice.

Certain metrics of the websites, which need to be monitored proactively, include:

Periodic web page analysis to ensure the availability of a website. This also warrants constant monitoring of some essential website metrics.

Server monitoring to help look out for server outages and performance issues like a server spike or network traffic overload.

Remote website monitoring to check the availability of the website from different locations. For any online business catering to global audience, this should be the priority.

SSL certificate monitoring to alert you before the SSL certificate of your website expires. It ensures you have a valid SSL certificate to maintain customers' confidence on your website.

> See also: The seven steps to stopping e-commerce fraud in its tracks

Cloud monitoring analyses the health and performance of your cloud computing resources.

Web application monitoring to measure and monitor the performance of the web applications in the website such as feedback forms and shopping carts. These web applications are the user interfaces in the website, giving customers a direct point of contact with your company.

Mobile access to render apps for your android and iOS devices to track the status of your websites from anywhere.

In terms of the players offering website monitoring tools, there is a significant market potential for them as e-commerce remains to be the darling of venture capitalists.

ith the economic gloom prevailing over the IT industry, the e-commerce industry is booming and paving way to the growth of the players offering website monitoring tools.

Sourced from Hemalakshmi B, Marketing Analyst, ManageEngine