By Leigh Brown
While marketing has done its job of getting prospects and customers to your site, the last thing you need is a performance issue to turn them away. If your site is unavailable or there’s an issue with critical transactions, you’re preventing customers from purchasing, using, or logging in to your product. Especially during the holidays and peak shopping season, when the expectations are high, you cannot afford downtime.
It’s no secret: monitoring your web performance is crucial. SolarWinds® Pingdom® monitors availability and performance 24/7 from over 100 probe servers around the world. With thousands of customers and over a decade of experience, we know a thing or two about web performance. We’re fact-checking some web performance myths with a little game of Two Truths and a Lie, so you can have peace of mind during the stressful time.
Fact or Fiction
Testing in development can identify issues before production. TRUE
Before you push a change into production, you should make sure it isn’t going to have a negative impact on the availability or performance of your web application. You can test performance while in development and troubleshoot issues in production to minimize user impact. By doing so, you’ll proactively identify bottlenecks, get actionable insights, and possibly even speed up your web application. In the peak holiday shopping season, you may be optimizing your site or adding new features. With Pingdom synthetic monitoring, you can make sure everything going live does so smoothly. Your customers keep getting the seamless experience they expect from your site.
Making sure your website is fast is a great way to keep your customers engaged. TRUE
Once you have customers on your site, you want them to enjoy the experience and stay engaged. However, that’s even harder now: the latest study on human attention span says it’s now less than that of a goldfish[1]. If your web application is slow, you risk losing their attention—and their business. If your competitors have a speedy site, they might just go with whatever is loading the fastest. It’s important to monitor your page speed load times and optimize for speed and efficiency. With Pingdom page speed reports, you can get a detailed breakdown of every element of your site and with our timeline metrics, pinpoint where and how you can improve your page speed score. Having a fast site can help ensure a smooth digital experience for your customers this holiday season.
Most outages are covered by a web-hosting SLA. WRONG
You might think relying on your service provider’s web-hosting SLA is enough to ensure peace of mind about your site’s performance. But what people don’t know is most outages aren’t covered by a typical web-hosting SLA. “When it comes to hosting, an SLA will typically cover connectivity and not your specific site/application performance… If your website’s performance should drop and/or the site goes offline, unless it is a DIRECT result of the host’s network connectivity (not your code, not the server or any other reason), then it probably is not covered by the SLA.”[2] Yikes! And if you’re on the receiving end of a service and an outage occurs, you won’t know until they notify you—or your end users start calling. Plus, you’re at the mercy of their notice speed, and their MTTR. That’s why many web owners also monitor their web applications with Pingdom for full coverage and peace of mind.
Make or Break the Holiday Shopping Season
While your web application may be under stress, you don’t have to be. By proactively monitoring your web app, you can make sure you’re the first to know of an outage—especially during the peak holiday shopping season. You can find and fix the issue immediately, helping reduce troubleshooting time and customer impact. Incidents happen, but with SolarWinds Pingdom, you can be notified of an end-user experience issue in real time, so you can ensure a worldwide, seamless digital experience. Start monitoring your online business today with our free trial and use code STRESSFREE for 20% off any annual plan*.
*This promotion expires December 31, 2020 and applies to your initial online purchase of Pingdom, annual contract only. Not valid for prior purchases. The promotional code can be used only once. At the end of your contract, pricing will revert to Pingdom standard pricing, and this discount will cease to apply. Offer may not be combined with any other promotion or discount. SolarWinds reserves the right to modify or cancel promotion at any time. Void where prohibited.
[1] https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/
[2] https://fatlabwebsupport.com/blog/service-level-agreements-web-hosting/
