Past articles have talked about website monitoring services. The basic idea is that you use such a service to set up different types of checks – some for availability (is your website up and available to online visitors) and others for performance (is your website working fast enough to keep your visitors happy, or are they going to get frustrated and go to another website?).
The monitoring service than performs these checks on a regular basis (as often as every minute) twenty four hours a day. Website goes down? The service alerts you through one or more of the following – an email, an SMS text message or through a special app. Speed slows to a crawl, effectively costing you business? Same thing – the service will notify you instantly.
Hopefully your website is an important part of your website all year round – serving customers without tying up your employees. That makes it even more important during peak seasonal periods – just as you and your staff will be working hard taking care of your customers the website will be working overtime taking care of online shoppers. You can’t afford for it to call in sick!
Unfortunately your ecommerce website is most likely to have problems during these peak periods. More traffic to your online store means more strain on the servers that power your website. That means it starts to slow down – pages take a little longer to load, and customers start getting frustrated. Too slow and many will leave and do their online shopping elsewhere. Remember – online your competition is just a click away.
Eventually the website may fail, going offline completely – at which point your customers are definitely going elsewhere.
See the problem? You need the website most when it’s working the hardest, and that is when it is most likely to fail.
And it’s during these peak periods, when failures are most likely, that you are least likely to notice. Sure – your website is working hard, but you’re working even harder. At any other time of year you’re likely to checking your website a few times a day, but when things are busy most people just take it on faith that the sire is up and performing well.
This is why you need a website monitoring service to watch over the health of your e-commerce floral website. The service never gets tired, and it’s never too busy – it just keeps checking and alerting you to problems.
For more information on selecting and configuring a website monitoring service please see the expanded version of a related article in Floral Management magazine.