If you’ve spent a lot of time designing, coding, and generally laboring over your website but you aren’t monitoring your metrics and statistics, you’re losing out! What are you losing out on exactly? A lot of things. You could be losing out on money, new visitors/subscribers, all sorts of things really. Let take a look at this situation a little closer and get more granular on the idea of keeping track of various website stats.

First of all, you need to understand that the landscape has changed in terms of the data set that you should be monitoring. Years ago, it was enough to just monitor uptime and make sure that your site was online. Now, things have changed and there are social metrics, applications, and other digital anomalies that you need to be watching. At a very basic level, you need to be monitoring your uptime and website speed. Beyond that though, if you have a website where you’re selling something or using a digital shopping cart, you’ll need to have some sort of web app monitoring in place in order to make sure that they are functioning properly and you aren’t losing visitors. Even having a simple registration form where you capture user data is something that you can be monitoring to make sure that you aren’t missing out on potential leads.

All this talk about monitoring this and that raises questions about how this is done; there are actually a few different ways that you can accomplish this. First of all, you can install scripts on your server and use those to monitor metrics, but the problem with self hosted scripts is that if the server goes down, these scripts will be basically useless. The best solution is to use remote monitoring, and there are two ways you can go about that: free and paid. There are some free services where you can monitor a small amount of factors like basic uptime and some user metrics for free, for one site or sometimes one page. If you’ve spent a lot of time and money on your site, it’s often a better choice to pay for something a bit more robust. If you have public-facing apps on your site, you should have a service or protocol in place for monitoring web applications for down time; remember, it’s not enough to simply monitor the uptime/downtime of your site because users today will be just as unhappy if specific elements of your site don’t work properly as they would be if the entire site was down. Most of the top web monitoring services offer free trials so you can test out their services, and also offer customizable plans to suit your needs. This means that you don’t have to pay for an extensive monitoring plan if you only have a few metrics that you want to monitor. Keep these points in mind, and consider what you can gain if you start monitoring your website more closely, and even more importantly, consider what you have to lose.