Nowadays, nearly every business has a website. Therefore, you’ll want to retain your competitive edge by providing an excellent User Experience (UX). However, you might lack the knowledge and skills to measure your site’s performance.
Fortunately, you can monitor your web performance easily with the right tools. For instance, you can track important data about your site’s accessibility, speed, and database performance. Then, you can make the necessary adjustments to improve your UX.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at website performance monitoring. Then, we’ll explore five effective ways to monitor your site. Let’s get started!
An Introduction to Website Performance Monitoring
Website performance monitoring is about tracking essential data to make your site more user-friendly. Once you identify areas for improvement, you can take the necessary steps to reduce bounce rates and boost your search rankings.
Website monitoring should be a continuous process. This is because factors that affect performance are constantly evolving and changing. This includes your connection speed, operating system, and the number of files on your site.
There are different types of website monitoring methods you can use. One of them is synthetic performance monitoring. This is an active approach that evaluates your user journey and measures your availability, functionality, and responsiveness.
You could also opt for real user monitoring. This assesses your user interactions, taking note of load time and transaction paths.
How to Monitor Your Website Performance (5 Ways)
Now that you understand a bit more about website performance monitoring, let’s look at five ways you can implement it on your website.
1. Track Your Uptime
Uptime refers to your website being available and accessible to users. On the flip side, when downtime occurs, your site is unreachable. This can result in a loss of traffic and revenue.
The main cause of downtime is a poor hosting service. Other times, unstable plugins and themes can take their toll on your website’s performance.
You can measure your uptime using a WordPress monitoring tool like WP Umbrella:
This management tool provides automatic backups, update management, and maintenance reports. Plus, you’ll be alerted by Slack or email whenever downtime occurs. Better yet, this tool can even prevent PHP errors caused by themes and plugins, which are common causes of downtime.
To improve your uptime score, you may need to switch to a quality web host like WP Engine. Additionally, we recommend that you ditch any unnecessary themes and plugins.
WP Enfine and WP Umbrella are by the way compatible and can give you a competitive edge if you want to manage multiple website effortlessly.
2. Measure Your Time to First Byte (TTFB)
Time to First Byte (TTFB) evaluates the responsiveness of your server. Specifically, it measures the time between the browser requesting a page and when it receives the first byte of data from the server.
A poor TTFB score can be influenced by many factors. For instance, it can be explained by a slow SSL certificate validation, poor network connection, and more.
To find out your TTFB, you can use a tool like Pingdom. This combines synthetic and real user monitoring to assess your site’s availability, page speed, and transaction paths:
Alternatively, you could opt for the free Geekflare TTFB tool to find out how fast your TTFB is from three different locations. Simply enter your URL and you’ll get an immediate result:
To improve your score, you can try implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare. This will ensure that your website loads quickly, no matter where your visitors are located around the world.
Another way you can improve your TTFB is by using a caching tool. Some hosting companies offer built-in caching with their plans. If yours doesn’t, you can use a plugin like WP Super Cache.
3. Check Your Page Load Time
Page load time refers to the average time it takes for your entire page to load, including all text, images, and other elements like JavaScript. It’s an important metric to monitor since it lets you know how fast your server is running.
It has been found that the bounce rate increases by 32 percent as page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds. Therefore, keeping a check on this figure can help you retain your visitors.
The easiest way to measure your page load time is to use a tool like WebPageTest. This enables you to assess your users’ real experience from different locations:
Then, you can improve your site speed by reducing image size and quantity. You may also need to compress your media files.
4. Keep an Eye on Your Bounce Rate
As we mentioned earlier, your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site after landing on one page. There are several reasons why users may decide not to hang around and explore the rest of your website. For example, they may be put off by slow speeds and poor web design.
It’s important that you monitor this metric, as it’s a large teller of your UX. Sites with high bounce rates tend to be slow and unresponsive.
If you want to keep an eye on your bounce rate, Google Analytics is one of the best tools to use:
You can also gain insight into your customer journey with features like real-time reporting, funnel exploration, and engagement levels. To boost your bounce rate, you can make sure your site is responsive, your content is readable, and your Calls-to-Action (CTAs) are strong and clear.
5. Monitor Database Performance (Connection Time and Error Time)
There are two main ways that you can monitor your database performance. The first is connection time. This refers to the time it takes for the user to make a connection with your server. The second is error time, which measures the percentage of requests that contain errors.
These metrics are especially important if your site features lots of dynamic content pulled from your database. Plus, a slow-responding site often has a poor-performing database.
SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor is a comprehensive tool that looks for database indicators like Queries Per Second (QPS) and Transactions Per Second (TPS):
It also identifies the number of open database connections and the number of queries for each error code, enabling you to find frequently occurring errors.
To improve your database performance, you can increase your memory limit, strengthen your CPU, increase disk space, and optimize queries. Most of these can be done by upgrading to a more powerful hosting plan.
Conclusion
The key to a successful website is to prioritize your UX. Otherwise, you risk sending visitors directly to your competitors. With the right tools, you can access important metrics like page load time and bounce rate, and take steps to improve them.
To recap, here are five ways to monitor your website performance:
- Track your uptime using a WordPress monitoring tool like WP Umbrella.
- Measure your time to first byte with Pingdom.
- Check your page load time using WebPageTest.
- Keep an eye on your bounce rate with Google Analytics.
- Monitor database performance using a tool like the SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor.
Do you have any questions about website performance? Let us know in the comments section below!
