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. In the last few years, it has become more challenging to meet the expectations of the internet users. They need an interactive site with great content, superior graphics plus some unique elements on the websites to possess a favorable impression. However, the addition of some unique elements especially may lead to the chance of something going wrong with the site or increase the page loading time. Having an otherwise good website that's attractive to users won't help if the website is slow, malfunctions or regularly experiences downtime. You should keep an eye on few metrics to know how your website is performingproperly. What exactly you need to monitor depends upon your business. But, below are a few general indicators that every website owner should track from time to time to measure the user experience of the website visitors.
Website Uptime This is the most basic and significant section of any website performance monitoring, its purpose is to make sure your website is online and designed for users. Whenever your website is down even for some minutes, it could affect your brand reputation, customer loyalty and sales. The longer the downtime and the more often your website experiences downtime, the more serious will be the negative consequences. In today?s business environment to be competitive you should achieve almost 100% uptime.

TIME AND ENERGY 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. That is used to measure the responsiveness of the website. Additionally it is often used to check on if the website IT infrastructure has been designed properly. Page Load Time The page load time represents the time taken to display all the content of a webpage. This metric is important because even if the TTFB is satisfactory, a visitor to your site can only just interact if all of the components of your page are downloaded. For a non-technical person, this metric is what they consider because 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 cannot be met. Additionally it is important to make sure that the web traffic is largely relevant to your website. Visitors that are not relevant are useless to your website and achieving your goals.

This metric is also helpful to assess how many visitors your site can accommodate at a time. You may want to upgrade your servers from time to time to deal with more traffic; otherwise your website might not function properly due to inadequate infrastructure.

User Journey You have designed your site to facilitate the flow of people to certain outcomes predicated on their needs. Different types of users may connect to your site in slightly various ways. For example: some may land on your own ?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 within an easy to understand process flow illustration called because the user journey