Important Website Performance Metrics You Should Monitor

Everyone knows how frustrating it is to wait for a website to load. In today?s world, users will probably switch to some other similar site and look after their needs at that site. From a business point of view, a website that is experiencing uptime issues or has impaired performance causes financial damage. Over the past few years, it has become more challenging to meet up the expectations of the web users. They need an interactive site with great content, superior graphics and some unique elements on the websites to have a favorable impression. However, the addition of some unique elements especially could lead to the chance of something going wrong with the site or increase the page loading time. Having an otherwise good website that is attractive to users will not help if the website is slow, malfunctions or regularly experiences downtime. You should keep track of few metrics to know how your website is performingproperly. What exactly you have to monitor depends upon your business. But, below are a few general indicators that each webmaster should track every once in awhile to assess the user experience of the website visitors.
Website Uptime It is the most basic and significant section of any website performance monitoring, its purpose would be to ensure your website is online and designed for users. Whenever your website is down even for a few minutes, it could affect your brand reputation, customer loyalty and sales. The longer the downtime and the more regularly your site experiences downtime, the more serious are the negative consequences. In today?s business environment to compete you have to achieve almost 100% uptime.

Time To First Byte (TTFB) After initiating a request to the webserver, the time to first byte (TTFB) represents the time taken to receive the first byte of information back from the webserver. This is used to measure the responsiveness of the site. Additionally it is often used to check if the website IT infrastructure has been designed properly. Page Load Time The page load time represents enough time taken to display all the content of a webpage. This metric is essential because even though the TTFB is satisfactory, a visitor to your site can only just interact if all of the elements of your page are downloaded. For a non-technical person, this metric is what they consider as the speed or responsiveness of the site. An individual experience and speed of the site depends upon the speed of the page load time.

Web Traffic Traffic can be an important indicator of your online success. Unless there is sufficient level of visitors, the business enterprise objectives or the marketing goals can't be met. It is also important to make sure that the web traffic is basically relevant to your site. Visitors who are not relevant are of no use to your internet site and achieving your targets.

This metric can be helpful to assess how many visitors your site can accommodate at a time. You may want to upgrade your servers every once in awhile to deal with more traffic; otherwise your website might not function properly because of inadequate infrastructure.

User Journey You have designed your website to facilitate the flow of visitors to certain outcomes based on their needs. Different types of users may interact with your site in slightly various ways. For instance: some may land on your ?Home? page and go directly the ?Products? page, while other visitors may check out the ?About us? page first. This flow of the visitors through the various paths is captured in an clear to see process flow illustration called because the user journey