Important Website Performance Metrics You Should Monitor

Everyone knows how frustrating it really is to wait for a website to load. In today?s world, users will likely switch to some other similar site and look after their needs at that site. From a business point of view, a website that's experiencing uptime issues or has impaired performance causes financial damage. In the last few years, it has become more challenging to meet up the expectations of the web 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 website or raise the page loading time. Having an otherwise good website that is 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 learn how your site is performingproperly. What exactly it is advisable to monitor depends upon your organization. But, here are some general indicators that each 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 section of any website performance monitoring, its purpose is to ensure your website is online and available 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 often your site experiences downtime, the more severe 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, enough 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 web site IT infrastructure has been designed properly. Page Load Time The page load time represents enough time taken to display all of the content of a webpage. This metric is essential because even if the TTFB is satisfactory, a visitor to your site can only just interact if all 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 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 that are not relevant are useless to your internet site and achieving your goals.

This metric is also helpful to assess how many visitors your site can accommodate at a time. You may need to upgrade your servers from time to time to deal with increased 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. Several 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 browse 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