A wide shot of a woman working on a laptop at a wooden table in a large woodworking studio. The woman has reddish hair pulled back from her face and she wears a light blue collared shirt. In the background are large pieces of machinery and more tables piled with tools.
With real-time site monitoring tools, you can immediately find out about any issues with your website and work out a fix before your customers are impacted. — Getty Images/monkeybusinessimages

If your business operates primarily in the digital sphere, you know how important it is to have a functional website. Monitoring tools can help businesses keep their websites functioning properly so they don’t lose revenue or deliver a poor user experience.

Here are five monitoring tools that can operate in the background of your website to ensure optimal performance.

Why use website monitoring tools?

Monitoring tools offer benefits beyond just keeping your website running smoothly. Here are just a few advantages.

Improved SEO

Monitoring tools help businesses improve their SEO by providing insights for strategy refinement to achieve better visibility. These tools monitor metrics including keyword performance and backlink strength, and they look for bottlenecks in website performance that could be impacting SEO results like search engine rankings.

Real-time monitoring

Using monitoring tools, businesses can observe their website in real time to ensure any problems are addressed immediately. These tools help to increase website uptime by identifying and rectifying security and functionality issues across the site, monitoring everything from mobile responsiveness to server errors and broken links.

Tracking analytics

Web monitoring tools can help your business track users’ journeys and offer useful insights into audience behavior. Analyzing metrics, such as bounce and conversion rates, helps businesses pinpoint successful strategies and highlight areas of improvement for higher engagement and better website performance.

[Read more: 6 Digital Analytics Tips From Industry Experts]

5 monitoring tools to improve your website

Below are just a few of the many monitoring tools available to help businesses boost their website performance and prevent downtime.

DataDog

DataDog is a cloud-based website monitoring tool that helps protect businesses against website disruptions and cybersecurity threats. Offering full visibility into your IT stack, DataDog helps businesses monitor their infrastructure, networks, and applications in real time. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) for efficient problem-solving and performance analysis and offers a scalable log management system for easier troubleshooting.

Pricing begins at $15 per host, per month; 14-day free trials are available for up to five hosts, with no credit card necessary.

Monitoring tools help businesses improve their SEO by providing insights for strategy refinement to achieve better visibility.

Pingdom

Pingdom is a user-friendly monitoring tool that helps businesses with web performance optimization and improving user interactions across their website.

With its synthetic monitoring, businesses can simulate user behavior to verify website functionality and ensure a positive user experience. Its Real User Monitoring (RUM) feature offers real-time insights into the way visitors interact with the website, tracking their behavior across various devices and locations.

Pingdom offers a fully functional 30-day free trial for users to test its features. After the trial, services start at $10 per month for each tool.

Semrush

Semrush is a digital marketing suite designed to help businesses optimize website performance and improve online visibility.

This well-known tool offers detailed reporting features, like its website auditing, as well as actionable insights that help businesses identify and resolve issues affecting website performance. The platform’s position tracking feature offers daily updates on website keyword rankings and insights into historical rankings. Plus, its On Page SEO Checker helps businesses refine their SEO strategies by ensuring keyword usage boosts content quality without keyword stuffing.

Semrush offers a seven-day free trial. Plans begin at $129.95 a month, with options for add-ons targeting locality, social media visibility, and more.

Uptrends

Uptrends is a website monitoring tool that offers a comprehensive view of a business’s website, API, and IT performance.

It uses Synthetic Monitoring to test multi-step interactions and ensure web application functionality, alongside tools like bandwidth throttling and website speed analysis, which uncovers website loading times under different internet speeds. The tool can integrate with many widely used applications and offers a customizable alerting system to ensure businesses are notified as soon as there’s an issue.

Plans begin at $100 per month, with a 30-day free trial available to start.

WebPageTest

WebPageTest helps businesses test their website performance and speed across various browsers, network speeds, and locations by mimicking real user interaction from across the world.

This tool has advanced testing capabilities and can be integrated with Lighthouse to conduct detailed audits, providing targeted suggestions to improve accessibility and SEO performance. Plus, WebPageTest recently unveiled its Carbon Control feature which enables businesses to evaluate their website’s carbon footprint.

WebPageTest offers a free plan with reduced capabilities and a paid plan starting at $180 per year.

[Read more: How to Ensure Your Business Website Is SEO-Optimized]

CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.

CO—is committed to helping you start, run and grow your small business. Learn more about the benefits of small business membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, here.

Published