Important Website Performance Metrics You Should Monitor

Everyone knows how frustrating it really is to wait for an internet site to load. In today?s world, users will probably switch to some other similar site and look after their needs at that site. From the business viewpoint, 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 the expectations of the internet users. They want an interactive site with great content, superior graphics and some unique elements on the websites to possess a favorable impression. However, the addition of some unique elements especially may lead to the risk of something going wrong with the site or raise the page loading time. Having an otherwise good website that's attractive to users will not help if the website is slow, malfunctions or regularly experiences downtime. You should keep an eye on few metrics to learn how your site is performingproperly. Just what you have to monitor depends upon your business. But, here are several general indicators that every webmaster should track from time to time to measure the user experience of the website visitors.
Website Uptime This is actually the most elementary and significant part of any website performance monitoring, its purpose would be to make sure your website is online and available for users. When 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 site experiences downtime, the more serious will be 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 have the first byte of information back from the webserver. This is used to gauge the responsiveness of the website. It is also 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 of the content of a webpage. This metric is important because even if the TTFB is satisfactory, a visitor to your internet 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 volume of visitors, the business enterprise objectives or the marketing goals can't be met. Additionally it is important to ensure that the web traffic is basically relevant to your website. 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 the same time. You may want to upgrade your servers from time to time to deal with increased traffic; otherwise your website may not function properly because of inadequate infrastructure.

User Journey You have designed your website to facilitate the flow of people to certain outcomes based on their needs. Various kinds of users may connect to your site in slightly different ways. For instance: 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 many paths is captured in an easy to understand process flow illustration called because the user journey