Real estate professionals have said for years that the three most important factors about a property are location, location, and location. Well, for organizations with a web presence — which these days is the vast majority, and 100% of e-commerce companies — the three most important factors about their site are visitor experience, visitor experience, and (let’s all say it together!) visitor experience.

Visitors want, expect, and frankly demand a flawless experience where everything loads quickly and works perfectly the first time: every button, every graphic, every form, every page. Consider the following statistics:

• 47% of visitors will not wait longer than two seconds for a site to load.
• 88% of visitors will not return to a site after a single bad experience.
• 57% of visitors say they will not recommend a business that offers a bad experience.

Naturally, when it comes to delivering a perfect visitor experience, organizations cannot “cross their fingers and hope for the best.” Instead, they must be proactive and rigorously test their site to find and fix issues — before their visitors do. And that brings us to two heavyweights in the site monitoring world: Real User Monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring.

Real User Monitoring

Real User Monitoring (RUM) uses passive techniques (i.e., it does not disrupt the visitor experience) to continuously observe, collect, and analyze actions and interactions — with a primary focus on availability, functionality, and responsiveness.

Synthetic Monitoring

Synthetic Monitoring simulates common and critical user journeys on a website to detect issues and benchmark performance — before real users ever encounter a problem.

Issues with Real User Monitoring

Some site uptime software vendors make bold claims that Real User Monitoring is vastly superior to Synthetic Monitoring (of course, these same vendors only offer RUM, so their bias is predictable).

However, when we look past the marketing hype, it’s clear that RUM isn’t always ready for prime time. Specifically, here are seven drawbacks that are often downplayed or overlooked:

1. Data Dependency
   To be effective, RUM requires a vast amount of traffic data — which many organizations simply don’t have. They may catch some issues, but without enough data, many problems will go unnoticed… until visitors discover them first.
2. Site Changes Disrupt Accuracy
   Even if you have adequate traffic, RUM’s usefulness can diminish — or even become irrelevant — after a major site update. It can take weeks or months to gather new behavioral data and accurately assess the user experience post-change.
3. Implementation Complexity
   RUM is compelling in theory but can be difficult to implement and manage. Visitor behavior is highly variable, and the resulting data can be inconsistent and complex to query, interpret, and visualize.
4. Lack of Consistent Benchmarking
   Monitoring performance over time requires reliable baselines. But inconsistent traffic and diverse user environments (browsers, devices, regions) make meaningful comparisons difficult with RUM.
5. Too Much Data, Too Little Insight
   Ironically, even when data volume is high, it can become a burden. RUM casts a wide net, making it difficult and time-consuming to filter through noise and find actionable insights.
6. Blind Spots Outside the Site
   RUM often fails to identify performance issues caused by external factors, such as third-party services or network latency. This can leave teams guessing about root causes and delay resolution.
7. Unexpected Costs
   RUM solutions can be surprisingly expensive to implement and maintain — especially for enterprises with large user bases. The time-to-value may be far longer (and costlier) than vendors lead you to believe.

The Final Word

Real User Monitoring isn’t a liability — but it’s not a silver bullet either. Vendors should be transparent that RUM is not automatically “better” just because it reflects actual user behavior. Like any tool, it has limitations that must be considered in context.

For many organizations — especially larger ones — Synthetic Monitoring offers a more powerful, practical, and profitable solution. Because it doesn’t rely on real user traffic, it excels at the most critical job: finding problems before your visitors do. Click here to learn more about Synthetic Monitoring.

AlertBot: A Leader in Synthetic Monitoring

AlertBot is proud to be one of the world’s most trusted website monitoring platforms. Leading organizations like Microsoft, Disney, Dell, Forbes, and Adidas — just to name a few — rely on our robust and proven Synthetic Monitoring tools.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. Start your 100% free, no-obligation trial today. There’s nothing to install, no credit card required, and you’ll be up and running in minutes — on your way to delivering a flawless user experience.

Remember: making a great impression the first time — and every time — isn’t optional. In today’s hyper-competitive digital world, it’s essential.
Click here to start your free trial now.

Synthetic Website Monitoring Best Practices

Synthetic website monitoring (also known as synthetic testing) involves simulating the actions that visitors perform on a website and the journeys they take, in order to evaluate performance and proactively spot any issues or problems.

For example, synthetic testing can help answer critical questions like:

• How fast is our website, and is it fast enough?
• Are all transactions (e.g., filling out forms, adding items to carts, etc.) working properly?
• Are some areas of the website getting limited traffic, and is this normal or problematic?

However, not all synthetic testing solutions or strategies are equal. To help ensure that you generate the most important and reliable results — so that can take fast and correct actions — here are four key best practices to keep in mind: 

1. Configure Alerts (What, How, When & Who)

Your team needs to know if things are working as expected, or if there are issues and problems. But does this mean everyone has to be informed at the same time, and on an ongoing basis? For all but the smallest businesses, the answer is typically no. That is where alerts enter the picture.

You can set up synthetic testing alerts on four levels: what, how, when, and who. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these, since they are all equally important.

• What: You can set up alerts to inform you about essential things like website status, page speed, and transaction functionality.
• How: You can receive alerts through various methods such as automated SMS (text), email, or phone call. Often, organizations will start with SMS, and then escalate to email and then phone if the problem is not addressed.
• When: Sometimes, a website may go offline (or appear to do so) or experience page speed slowdowns that are temporary, lasting only a few seconds. You can choose to receive alerts immediately for all issues found, or set a schedule for when these alerts would come to you.
• Who: You can choose who receives alerts based on the issue or problem. For example, a website going down (and not as a one-off for a few seconds) is a major concern, and typically multiple people should be informed. Alternatively, it may make practical sense to have only certain individuals, like members of the Web Development Team, receive alerts about issues with a transaction workflow.

2. Use Script Recording to Set Transaction Monitoring

For all companies, but especially those in the e-commerce space, it is absolutely vital to know that all transactional elements are working properly.

As such, it is both wise and practical to choose an uptime monitoring solution that has built-in script recording for synthetic testing. Simply click “record” and perform actions that your customers typically take: filling out forms, adding and removing items from their cart, and so on.

When finished, simply end the recording and upload it to your account and the uptime monitoring solution will rigorously test the transactional workflow. If there are any problems or gaps, you will be able to address them proactively vs. waiting for your angry customers to bring it to your attention (assuming they even bother — many will just leave and head to a competitor!).

3. Monitor Your Website from Several Locations

You definitely want to continuously monitor and test your website from multiple locations around the world, so that you can proactively identify and address any performance issues — including localized content delivery network (CDN) outages.

4. Keep it SIMPLE

Last, but certainly not least: the synthetic testing and website uptime monitoring solution you choose should be refreshingly SIMPLE to configure and use. In the same light, the various reports should be straightforward and intuitive (i.e., you shouldn’t need multiple advanced IT and computer science degrees to understand them).

Try AlertBot Today!

With AlertBot, you will benefit from all of these synthetic testing best practices. AlertBot empowers you to:

• Choose what, how, when, and who to alert regarding problems or issues, as well as ongoing “everything is good” status updates via weekly email reports.
• Use intuitive script recording to capture any and every transaction workflow, down to the smallest detail.
• Monitor your website from locations around the globe to ensure that ALL visitors have a positive experience.

And of course, AlertBot has earned a stellar reputation for being extremely simple to use and adjust based on changing needs and goals.

Get a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot. There is no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be set up in minutes. Click here to get started!

What is a HTTP 500 Error & How Can You Fix It?

One of the most valuable features of AlertBot’s web monitoring solution is that is automatically and continuously scans web pages for hundreds of possible errors, uniquely identifies them, and even captures a screenshot. Today, we’re going to take a deeper look at one of the many possible errors that AlertBot flags as part of its ongoing scans: HTTP 500 errors.

What is a HTTP 500 Error? An HTTP 500 error is an all-purpose error code. Basically, any error that doesn’t fit into an existing error code (e.g., 400: bad request, 403: forbidden, 404: not found, etc.), gets labeled as HTTP 500. Here’s what an HTTP 500 error looks like over at Google:

Image source

Potential Causes & How to Fix Them Here are some of the common triggers for an HTTP 500 error, along with possible solutions:

• A corrupt .htaccess file. This is a text file that instructs software to enable or disable certain functions. It may be possible to fix this by examining your site’s .htaccess file and verifying that it is properly structured. Check out this easy-to-follow tutorial.

• A permission error. This could be caused by networking issues, end user mistakes, or that most hated of virtual creatures: bugs! It may be possible to fix this by adjusting the permission on a CGI or PHP script.

• A database connection error. Begin your (hopefully short) troubleshooting journey by verifying that the database login credentials are correct. If that doesn’t do the trick, then your database may be corrupted. Unfortunately, this is quite common; especially if you use WordPress, since the database is constantly being modified by users, plugins, and themes. Start by logging into phpMyAdmin, selecting all of the tables in the database, and then choosing the “Repair Table” option from the drop-down menu. If this doesn’t work, then restore your site from a working backup (you DO have a working backup, right?).

• Faulty plugins. As you might expect, the simplest (but admittedly, not all that enjoyable) troubleshooting approach here is to start deactivating plugins one-by-one, starting with the most recently added.

• Exceeding your PHP memory limit. Basically, PHP allows a default amount of memory to be used when processing a site. But sometimes, a certain page needs more than memory. If the problem is on the server-side, then try any/all of these methods: edit the PHP.ini file, edit the .htaccess file, edit the wp-config.php file (If working in WordPress), increase the PHP default memory using cPanel (if working in cPanel), or increase the PHP default memory via ini_set() function. Here is a simple tutorial for each method.

• Browser compatibility issues. The best way to deal with this is by avoiding it in the first place by conducting rigorous cross-browser testing. If you did that and you still get a HTTP 500 error (or if you didn’t do that, but you pledge to do it going forward!), then check out these potential solutions.

The Final Word Use the above strategies to help you pinpoint and eliminate HTTP 500 errors — ideally as quickly and easily as possible. You can also rely on AlertBot’s comprehensive failure reporting to get notified when and where HTTP 500 errors occur.

Start a free trial of AlertBot today. There is nothing to download or install, no billing information is required, and you will be 100% setup in minutes. Get started now: click here.

A Closer Look at AlertBot’s Email Reports

At AlertBot, we know our customers don’t want too much data about their websites and tasks. Instead, they want clear, organized, and reliable intelligence that tells them: what happened recently, what’s happening now, what’s likely to happen in the near future — and what they can do about it. That’s where email reports enter the story.

Here are the five sections in AlertBot’s email reports: Availability, Performance, Common Errors, Failure Events, and Confirmed Failures.

Availability

The Availability section of the email report displays the overall uptime of the websites that you are testing. Additionally, it is color coded.

• Green indicates that everything is working perfectly (or nearly perfectly).
• Yellow indicates that there may be some minor concerns.
• Red indicates significant concerns that should be addressed.

Performance

The performance section of the email report provides details for the websites that you are testing. It displays a breakdown (measured in seconds) of each process, along with individual web pages that are associated with that process.

This is useful for daily website monitoring and studying long-term patterns to ensure their functionality. It helps in checking the performance of websites on a regular basis and analyzing trends over time. This is important to ensure that websites are functioning properly and meeting their objectives.

Common Errors

The email report’s common errors section shows all failures and transition errors that happened within a certain time. The list includes confirmed events, as well as those that are intermittent. Use this information to check for problems with websites or processes, or issues that need more investigating and analyzing.

Failure Events

Here, you will find a list of all confirmed failures (as indicated in the Common Errors section) for each hour in the past week. The failure events are also color coded:

• Red indicates significant areas of concern.
• Yellow indicates minor areas of concern (some confirmed failures).
• Green indicates no areas of concern.

Confirmed Failures

Finally, the confirmed failures section of the email report logs all problem areas. Notably, these have all been confirmed from a secondary location — i.e., they are actual failure events and not false positives.

With this in mind, there can be scenarios where confirmed failure events do not necessarily indicate a problem. For example, you may see that over the past week a website failed 10 times at 1:00am. However, after digging deeper you may discover that this is happening due to maintenance. If so, then you can simply set up a maintenance window.

The Final Word

In the 1990s flick Apollo 13, the big brains at NASA said that “failure is not an option.” Unfortunately, down here on earth, sometimes things in general — and websites and their related processes specifically — don’t work as expected.

Fortunately, that’s where AlertBot’s detailed, yet clear and focused, email reports make a transformative difference. It’s not just raw information. It’s actionable intelligence!

But what sets AlertBot apart is not just the information it provides, but how it presents it. Our reports are clear, concise, and focused, ensuring that you can quickly grasp the key insights without getting lost in a sea of technical jargon. We understand that not everyone is a tech expert, and that’s why we’ve made our reports accessible to all.

So why wait? Take control of your online presence and ensure that your website is running smoothly. Don’t let website issues hold you back – let AlertBot be your trusted companion in the digital realm.

Getting started with AlertBot is a breeze. With our free trial, you can experience the power of our email reports without any commitment. No need to download or install anything, and rest assured, we won’t ask for any billing information. In just a matter of minutes, you’ll be fully set up and ready to uncover the hidden potential of your website: click here.

As you may have already discovered (or will soon encounter), many vendors that offer uptime monitoring solutions charge a setup fee. But instead of seeing this as a legitimate cost, you should view it as stop sign. Here are three reasons why:

#1: Set up…what exactly?

A site uptime monitoring solution should be fast and simple to set up. A vendor that wants to charge for this is revealing one of two things: 1) their solution is excessively complex; or 2) their solution isn’t excessively complex, but they’re trying to squeeze extra money out of you.

Either reason is unacceptable. If it’s the former, then you can count on plenty of hassles and headaches in the future. If it’s the latter, then ask yourself why you’d want to do business with a vendor that, from day one, is trying to deceive you.

#2: Transparency isn’t optional.

Nothing is wrong with a vendor that wants to raise their prices. It’s a free market. But what IS wrong, is when a vendor tries to hide this through a setup fee — which as noted above may be (and probably is) bogus to begin with. Basically, a vendor that tacks on a setup fee is trying to manipulate customers. After all, it’s not like customers have a choice: the setup fee is mandatory. So why not just integrate this amount into the overall price?

Transparency with customers should be a principle — not an option.

#3: Setup fees are probably just the beginning.

If you agree to pay a setup fee, the vendor will continuously ask for additional money. This will happen regardless of whether you agreed to it directly or indirectly. Of course, they won’t hit you with more setup fees down the road — because they don’t want you to wake up and realize that they have normalized something that isn’t normal. Instead, they will likely try and add some other mystery costs like “upgrade fees.”

These upgrade fees may seem harmless at first, but they can quickly add up and leave you questioning the true cost of the service. It’s like a never-ending cycle of hidden charges that you never signed up for. And let’s not forget about the dreaded “maintenance fees” that may conveniently pop up after a few months of using the service. It’s as if the vendor is constantly finding new ways to squeeze more money out of you.

But why should you have to deal with all these additional fees and hidden costs? Shouldn’t the price you initially agreed upon cover everything? It’s frustrating to think that you’re being taken advantage of, especially when you were promised transparency.

That’s why it’s crucial to carefully review any contract or agreement before committing to paying any setup fees. Don’t just skim through the fine print; take the time to understand what you’re getting into. Ask questions, seek clarification, and don’t be afraid to negotiate. Remember, you have the right to know exactly what you’re paying for and how much it will cost you in the long run.

If a vendor is not willing to be transparent about their pricing structure or tries to brush off your concerns, it might be a red flag. Trustworthy companies understand the importance of building a strong relationship with their customers, and that starts with being upfront about all costs involved.

So, the next time you come across a service that requires a setup fee, think twice before agreeing to it. Consider whether the vendor’s pricing practices align with your values and expectations. Don’t settle for hidden fees and surprise charges. Demand transparency and hold companies accountable for their pricing strategies. After all, you deserve to know exactly what you’re paying for without any unpleasant surprises along the way.

The Bottom Line

When evaluating site uptime monitoring vendors, naturally you will focus on things like features, functions, technology, and integrations. But you should also scan for setup fees (which may be called something else like “deployment fees” or “implementation fees” — they all mean the same thing).

Regardless of what a vendor might tell you: setup fees are not an “industry standard.” And we’re the proof! AlertBot is a top site uptime monitoring solution provider. We have never charged any setup fees. Our solution is remarkably easy to setup and configure, and our pricing is 100% transparent with absolutely no hidden costs.

Launch a free trial of AlertBot’s acclaimed site uptime monitoring solution. No credit card. Nothing to download or install. Get started in minutes. And if you decide to purchase our solution, rest assured there are NO setup fees!

A Closer Look at AlertBot’s Alert Group Feature

If we start by sharing that AlertBot’s alert group feature lets you, well, alert certain groups, then you might wonder what earth-shattering revelations we have in store — such as water is wet, fire is hot, and the pain of Game of Throne’s final season will never, ever go away (seriously, whatever happened to Gendry?!).

Yes, you’re right: the alert group feature IS about alerting groups of people about a site failure — but as George R.R. Martin would say: there is much more to the story! Here’s a rundown of some interesting details that you may not be aware of:

Notes

When you set up an alert group, you can add notes if you feel that it would benefit your team. For example, you can let your Web Team know who the communication point person during a failure event should be or if it should include several people from the team, provide updates about vacation schedules, and anything else that you deem relevant.

Notification Order

You can choose when members of an alert group are notified of a site failure, from immediately all the way up to 48 hours later. For example, your Web Team can be alerted right away during a site failure event, and your CTO can be alerted 1 hour later into a site failure event and so on (if the problem persists). You can choose the frequency of alerting and how many times individuals or a group of people can be alerted during downtime events on your site.

Contact Method

You can also choose which email address will be contacted, based on the notification order. For example, an immediate alert can be sent to [email protected] and other teams/emails if selected, and then an hour later another alert can be sent to [email protected] and so on until the site is back up and running.

Monitors

What happens if you’re doing some testing or updating, and you don’t want failure events across all site monitors to trigger an alert (and maybe spark some anxiety)? No problem: you can choose which specific monitors are associated with an alert group.

But don’t worry: if you have a whole bunch of monitors and want to include them all, then you don’t have to manually add each one to an alert group. Simply select “All monitors in the account” and you’re good to go!

Do You Have 30 Seconds?

We’ve saved the best part for last: setting up a new alert group doesn’t take hours, or even minutes — it takes seconds. Simply choose the options you need, and you’re all set. And changing an alert group’s settings is just as fast (maybe even faster).

Try AlertBot Now

Reading is fun. But experiencing is better (unless you happen to be reading Game of Thrones and are perfectly happy learning about White Walkers vs. hanging out with them). Put AlertBot to the test by launching your free trial today. Play around with alert groups, along with many other features and functions.

 There is nothing to download or install, no billing information is required, and you will be 100% setup in minutes. Get started now: click here.

Unleashing the Web Guru: How Website Monitoring Boosts Traffic

by Louis Kingston

In the vast, mystical realm of the internet, where websites come to life and cat videos rule the land, there resides a hidden hero – Website Monitoring. Armed with lightning-fast reflexes and a vigilante’s keen eye, this unsung champion is the secret sauce to soaring traffic.

Picture this: your website is a thriving carnival, with merry-go-rounds of content and rollercoasters of creativity. But, alas, like an absent-minded wizard, you’ve forgotten to keep an eye on the gates. Enter Website Monitoring, the loyal gatekeeper who ensures no trolls sneak in to mess up your virtual fiesta. With a mischievous grin, it sends you real-time alerts the moment any gremlins try to mess with your website’s uptime. Your website’s downtime days are numbered!

Now, let’s journey into the realm of speed. In a world where every second counts, your website’s performance is its very heartbeat. But fret not, dear web adventurers, for Website Monitoring is the swiftest hare in the web-jungle. Armed with its trusty stopwatch, it tracks your page loading times like a hyperactive roadrunner, shouting, “Faster! Faster!” before your visitors can even say, “Are we there yet?” Voilà! Your website now zooms like a caffeine-fueled cheetah on the digital savannah.

Oh, but the fickle web travelers; they change their minds like chameleons change colors. Fear not, for Website Monitoring is here to unravel this enigma. With its mystical analytics, it becomes your crystal ball, revealing the mysteries of visitor preferences and behaviors. You’ll know what they like, what they loathe, and what they yearn for more than a lifetime supply of authentic New York style pizza. Armed with this newfound wisdom, you’ll sprinkle enchanting content like fairy dust, keeping your visitors spellbound and coming back for more.

Behold the battlefield of the mighty search engines, where websites engage in an epic struggle for visibility. But alas, valiant webmasters, Website Monitoring dons its armor of SEO prowess. It crawls through the darkest corners of the interwebs, sniffing out broken links and bad keywords like a digital bloodhound. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll climb the search engine ranks like a warrior scaling Mount Everest – and trust me, you won’t need oxygen!

In this whimsical tale of website wonders, we’ve unveiled the magical powers of Website Monitoring – the tireless protector of uptime, the guardian of speed, the oracle of analytics, and the knight of SEO. So, dear webmasters, heed this advice: with Website Monitoring by your side, you’ll wield the mighty sword of traffic-increase like a modern-day King Arthur.

Embrace the power of Website Monitoring and may your website’s journey throughout your site be filled with joy, triumphs, and an army of loyal visitors marching towards your digital domain!

Say goodbye to web nightmares and embrace the hero you deserve: AlertBot! Our supercharged website monitoring service is the ultimate sidekick you need to keep your online kingdom running smoothly. With AlertBot by your side, you’ll enjoy 24/7 vigilance, lightning-fast alerts, and more data than you can shake a unicorn horn at. So, what are you waiting for? Join the epic quest for flawless websites and unleash the power of AlertBot today – because even Gandalf would agree, “You shall not pass…without website monitoring!”

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

7 Deadly e-Commerce Checkout Sins

Back in the 1970s when bell bottoms roamed the world and 8-tracks reigned supreme, the Eagles warned us that Hotel California was a place where you could “checkout anytime you like, but you can never leave.”

Well, on the 21^st century e-commerce landscape there is a similar dilemma facing customers who want to buy everything from gardening equipment to a new car: they can try to checkout anytime they like, but they can never buy.

Below, we highlight seven deadly e-commerce checkout sins that lead to lost sales and reputation damage:

1. It takes too long to buy stuff.

Patience may be a virtue, but most customers aren’t in the mood to refine this noble characteristic when they’re ready to buy stuff. After all, they’ve already invested their valuable time choosing item(s). They want to cross this task off their to-do list right away. In fact, 70% of customers say that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

2. The process is too complex.

People who buy things online are intelligent and savvy. But that doesn’t mean they want to feel as if they’re putting together IKEA furniture when going through the checkout process. They want the experience to be straightforward and simple.  They just want to provide the required information — and nothing more. Less is definitely more.

3. Not displaying a progress bar.

A progress bar tells customers where they are in the checkout process (e.g. cart summary, sign-in, address, shipping, payment), so they know that things are headed towards a satisfying, successful conclusion. Without this information, they can get irritated if they expect the next screen to say “thank you for your purchase”, but is yet another form to fill out.

4. No ongoing form validation.

This one is tricky. Waiting for customers to get to the end of a form before telling them that they need to fix one or multiple fields can lead to an “I can’t be bothered with this, I’m getting out of here” reaction.

The best practice here is to configure form validation to scan and report as customers move from one field to another, or possibly one section to another (e.g. shipping address to payment information). Admittedly, some customers will still be irked by these “please fix the error” messages. But sending small notes as they move through the form/section is still better than forcing them to back up after they’ve reached the finish line.

5. No guest checkout.

For businesses, granular customer data can be far more valuable than an actual purchase. However, online sellers need to resist the temptation to force all customers to create an account before they can checkout. Otherwise, they are going to lose customers; not necessarily because those customers are reluctant to share their data, but because they just aren’t in the mood to pick a username and password, and then validate their email address.

With this in mind, sellers should provide incentives for customers to create an account by, for example, informing them that doing so will enable them to track order fulfilment, save time in the future, etc.

6. Failing to EXPLICITLY mention all costs.

Customers hate discovering surprise costs at checkout. Ideally, sellers can avoid this problem entirely by having zero extra costs of any kind. But realistically, most sellers need to charge shipping/handling (at least until a threshold is met), and potentially other fees based on the item(s) being purchased, the location of the customer, and other factors.

The best way for sellers to deal with this is to make potential/inevitable extra costs explicit. Burying these details at the bottom of a page, and in font so tiny that customers need a telescope to read them, is more than worthy of a pair of Bad Idea Jeans.

7. Dysfunctional buttons, fields and other elements.

Nothing screams “please don’t buy from us” louder than a checkout process where buttons, fields and other elements don’t work, or when customers are presented with a dreaded 404 Page Not Found (ironically, the funnier or more creative this page might be, the more incensed customers can get — as if the seller is shrugging off their pain and suffering).  Using a solution like AlertBot to automatically and continuously test page integrity — and proactively send alerts when something goes wrong or doesn’t work — is an absolute must.

The Bottom Line

The e-commerce landscape is fiercely competitive, and it typically takes much less for online customers to head for the virtual exits than it does for in-store customers to head for the physical exits. Online sellers need to ensure that they aren’t committing any of the seven deadly — and wholly preventable — e-commerce sins described above. Otherwise, instead of fostering engaged customers, they will trigger outraged ones.

Why Your Website Monitoring Solution Needs a Do-Not-Disturb Feature

It is so low-tech that Gen Z’ers and other digital natives may faint (or perhaps the avatar in a VR game that they are playing may faint) to learn that one of the greatest inventions in the history of our species is the humble do-not-disturb sign. Indeed, this magical placard is like having a very own private Gandalf shouting: YOU SHALL NOT PASS!

However, the glory of do-not-disturb is not limited to hotels, motels, and teenagers’ bedrooms. It is also a must-have feature in website monitoring solutions.

Why is a Do-Not-Disturb Feature So Important?

It does not take a Jeopardy! champion to know that do-not-disturb means (…wait for it…) “do-not-disturb” — which seems like the very last thing that organizations would want if there are site performance issues. On the contrary, the alarm bells via SMS, email and/or phone call should ring loud and clear. Or…maybe not.

In some cases, it makes perfect sense to pull individuals or teams off the notification list. For example:

• An individual such as a CTO or SysAdmin is on leave (vacation, illness, personal, etc.).
• A site is being tested, migrated or updated, and as such it will go offline for a specific and predictable period of time.
• Per policy, certain individuals/teams do not get alerted to website performance issues during specific times (e.g. after hours, weekends, holidays, etc.).

What to Look For

A do-not-disturb feature is essential. But this does not mean that all website monitoring solutions that claim to offer this are in the same class. Here is what to look for:

• An extremely easy-to-use dashboard. Advanced technology is dizzyingly complex. But if you need a PhD in computer science and a wall full of industry certificates to use the do-not-disturb feature, then keep looking. Easy does it.
• The ability to create as few or as many do-not-disturb events as required, and to see all of them at-a-glance through the extremely easy-to-use dashboard.
• The option to add notes so that everyone understands why a do-not-disturb schedule was created. For example: “we are migrating to new site on 2/15 and as a result the site will be down from 12:00am to 4:00am”.
• The option to select individuals or teams who will not get notified.
• The option to schedule the do-not-disturb as a one-time or ongoing event.
• The option to select what sites the do-not-disturb applies to. For example: the Dev Team will not be alerted to uptime issues for, say, the “ACME Anti-Roadrunner Anvils” site from 12:00am to 5:00am on 2/15, but they will be alerted to performance issues for all other sites that are being monitored.

The Bottom Line

 Without a versatile do-not-disturb feature, members of your organization will be very disturbed — because at certain times, they will be alerted to website performance issues that they cannot and should not do anything about. This is a waste of time and resources, and can trigger confusion and chaos (and, let’s face it, it’s not great for blood pressure levels, either).

AlertBot’s website monitoring solution has a built-in do-not-disturb feature that checks ALL of the boxes described above. Learn more with a free trial. There is nothing to download and install, no billing information required, and you will be 100% setup in minutes. Get started now: click here.

The year was 1995. Michael Jordan returned to the NBA. Amazon sold its first book. Windows 95 unleashed the era of taskbars, long filenames, and the recycle bin. And when people weren’t dancing the Macarena, they were flocking to see Apollo 13 and hear Tom Hanks utter the phrase that would launch millions of (mostly annoying) impersonations: “Houston, we have a problem.”

Thankfully, the eggheads in space and the eggheads on the ground worked tirelessly (and apparently smoked a whole lot of cigarettes) to get the crew home. But it was the pivotal moment when the failure was first reported that triggered the spectacular problem-solving process. If it happened an hour — or maybe even a few minutes — later, then the outcome could have been tragic instead of triumphant.

Admittedly, the brave, intrepid professionals in charge of keeping their organization’s website online and functional DON’T have to deal with life-and-death scenarios. But they DO need to deal with problems that, if left unsolved, will significantly damage competitive advantage, brand reputation and sales (immediately if we’re talking e-commerce, and eventually if we aren’t). And that’s where AlertBot’s failure alerting feature enters the picture.

What is Failure Alerting?

Failure alerting is when designated individuals — such as a SysAdmin, CTO, CIO, CEO, and so on — are proactively notified when something goes wrong with a website, such as downtime, errors, slowness, or unresponsive behavior.

As a result, just like in Apollo 13, the right people can take swift, intelligent action to fix things before visitors/customers sound the alarm bell, or worse, head out the (virtual) door and go straight to a competitor without looking back.

Notification Methods

AlertBot customers can choose any or all of the following methods to notify team members of a website failure event:

• Email
• Text Message
• Phone Call

For example, a SysAdmin could receive an email, a text message, and a phone call the moment something goes wrong.

Automatic Escalation

Now, if we were in NASA Mission Control circa 1970, someone wearing really thick horned-rimmed glasses would rise above the cigarette smoke and ask: What happens if the SysAdmin doesn’t receive the email, text message, and phone call? It’s a good question, and there is an even better answer: don’t worry about it.

AlertBot’s failure reporting feature can be configured to escalate the website failure warning if certain individuals don’t respond within a specific timeframe. For example, if a SysAdmin is indisposed for any reason (driving, sleeping, etc.), then after two minutes the alert can be pushed to another designated team member such as the CTO. And if the CTO doesn’t respond within two minutes, then the alert can be pushed to the CIO, and so on.

Ideally, the individual (or multiple individuals) who are sent the first alert receive it immediately, and take rapid action. But if they don’t or can’t, then the alert is escalated accordingly. It is important to note that all of this happens automatically, so there is no possibility of human error.

Granted, none of this is as entertaining as watching Apollo 13. There’s no rousing soundtrack or Tom Hanks. Heck, there’s not even Kevin Bacon.

But when it comes to fixing website problems as quickly as possible, organizations know that the less drama, the better. That’s precisely what AlertBot’s multi-channel, auto-escalating failure reporting feature delivers. We don’t need an Oscar. We just need extremely satisfied customers — and we have a lot of those.

Next Up: Reviewing Failure Events Online

 In our next blog, we’ll explore reviewing failure events online to pinpoint issues and detect problems. Stay tuned!

Launch a free trial of AlertBot’s acclaimed site uptime monitoring solution. No credit card. Nothing to download. Get started in minutes. And if you decide to purchase our solution, there are NO setup fees!

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Just How Bad is a Down, Slow, or Dysfunctional Website? It’s Worse than You Think!

Have you ever watched a movie (*cough* Godfather III) and said to yourself: “wow, this is so incredibly bad — I don’t think this can get worse!” But then it does. Much, much worse.

Well, having a down, slow, or dysfunctional website is similarly nightmarish — just when you think the reputation devastation is finally over, there’s more on the horizon. With apologies to Shakespeare: hell hath no fury like a customer scorned.

Not convinced? Here’s what happens to companies that get on the wrong side of their customers:

• 61% of customers say they will switch to a new brand after one bad experience. (Zendesk)
• 13% of customers who have a negative experience will tell 15+ people. (Esteban Kolsky)
• $289 is the average value of every lost business relationship in the U.S. per year. (Neil Patel)

Scary stuff, huh? “But wait — there’s more!”

These days, many unhappy customers publish reviews to punish companies that fail to meet their expectations. But guess what? These eviscerating appraisals are not just seen by other potential customers (many of whom quickly decide not to move into becoming actual customers). They are also seen by potential job candidates who are not enthusiastic about joining an organization that is used as target practice by denizens of the interwebs (everyone from THE ALL CAPS BRIGADE to the “tl;dr” force to the League of Extraordinary Grammarians).

However, just as all nightmares eventually come to an end (hey, even Godfather III mercifully rolls credits at the 2-hour-42-minute mark), there is something that companies can do to dial back — or better yet, eliminate — customer outrage caused by a down, slow, or dysfunctional website: get AlertBot.

AlertBot’s fully integrated monitoring platform monitors all your websites, web applications, mobile sites and services — all in one place. Unlike many other products in the marketplace, AlertBot doesn’t merely monitor a URL’s basic availability. It dives much deeper and monitors full page functionality using real web browsers in order to verify every page element, script, and interactive feature. As a result, you can proactively scan for errors, track and optimize load times, pinpoint issues, and get alerted to problems and failures.

The bottom line? A down, slow, or dysfunctional website can be so catastrophic that it makes Godfather III look like, well, Godfather I or Godfather II. Don’t hope for an Oscar just to win a Razzie. Get AlertBot and inspire your target audience to cheer vs. churn.

Start a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes.

How Site Uptime Impacts SEO (Hint: It’s a REALLY Big Deal)

It is arguably the most important 3-letter acronym on the digital marketing landscape. No, it’s not ROI. It’s SEO. Consider that:

• Google processes over 5 billion searches every day.
• More than 90% of online experiences start with search engines.
• 5% of searchers click the first organic result, 15% click the second organic result, and 11% click the third result.
• 75% of searchers never scroll past the first page of results.

Clearly, effective SEO is extremely important. And for many businesses — especially smaller companies that are competing against big, established enterprises — it’s a matter of survival. However, for some decision-makers outside of the digital marketing world, the link between SEO and site uptime is less clear. Let’s fix that.

For Search Engines, it’s All About Relevance

 Realtors like to point out that the three most important factors in evaluating a property are: location, location, and location. Well, the big brains behind search engines like Google and (to a lesser extent) Bing and Yahoo are obsessed with: relevance, relevance, and relevance.

What this means, is that when responding to a search query — anything from “tennis rackets” to “what’s this itchy red bump on my foot?” — search engines strive to produce results that will be seen by searchers as relevant. Otherwise, eventually searchers will switch search engine brands (e.g. leaving Google and using Bing). Relevance is the glue that keeps the relationship sticky. And unlike with those glorious model airplanes that many of us failed to create when we were kids, in this case, the more glue the better.

 Downtime Damages Relevance

 Since search engines strive to deliver relevant search results (and therefore positive user experience), it makes sense that downtime — which can be defined as a site being inaccessible or outright disappearing — is the enemy.

After all, if a searcher looking to buy a tennis racket clicks a site and discovers that it’s unavailable, then they won’t just punish the company that they hoped to engage: they will, in time, punish the search engine that pointed them in that direction. That fear keeps search engine folks awake at night (including mighty Google which commands more than 90% of the desktop and mobile search marketplace), and it explains why downtime is such a threat: it damages relevance.

 Is 100% Uptime Absolutely Vital?

This warning about downtime begs an important question: do companies that want to stay far, far away from Google’s, Bing’s and Yahoo’s penalty box have to ensure 100% uptime? Not necessarily. While uninterrupted availability is ideal, it is not realistic. Occasionally, a site will go down for a few seconds or perhaps even longer. There are a variety of reasons for this, such as problems with a web host, an unexpected spike in traffic, and ol’ fashioned human error (hey, we all make mistaks…er, mistakes).

However, the top priority for all businesses that want to win the SEO game must be to minimize site downtime in terms of both frequency and duration. They also need to know why site downtime occurs, in order to proactively address issues and keep them from recurring. And that is where site uptime monitoring enters the picture.

What to Look for in Site Uptime Monitoring

 There are many site uptime monitoring products in the marketplace, ranging from superficial (and usually free — hey, we get what we pay for), to robust and reliable. Obviously, organizations need to choose from among the latter and avoid the former. To that end, here is what to look for in a site uptime monitoring solution:

• Full site monitoring. It is not enough to monitor a site’s basic availability — because that only confirms that it exists, not that it is actually functional. It is also necessary to verify each page element, script, and interactive feature, as well as scan for errors, track load times, and pinpoint problems.
• Automated alerts delivered by phone, email and/or texts to specified individuals (e.g. CTO, IT Director, etc.), in the event of site downtime — so that the right people can take immediate action.
• The ability to record and monitor multi-step web processes with real browsers (across desktop and mobile devices), mouse clicks, and keyboard interactions.
• The ability to monitor any port on any server or device to ensure that it is up and running, including: ICMP, TCP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, FTP, Telnet, and custom ports.
• A range of performance reports including website load times, geographic performance, failure analysis, and more.
• Ongoing monitoring from a large group of locations around the world, which is essential for avoiding false alarms and verifying that a site is truly down/unavailable.

And it goes without saying: a legitimate and reliable site uptime monitoring solution must be backed by a responsive team of experts who will immediately take ownership of an issue and see it through to resolution. This cannot be emphasized enough, because the only thing worse than site downtime is trying to get help from people who don’t know what they’re doing. It gets ugly in a hurry.

SEO is Here to Stay

The rules of SEO will change — this much is certain (Google tinkers with its algorithm hundreds of times a year). But what isn’t going to change for search engines is the supreme importance of delivering relevant results. This means effective site uptime monitoring is not an option. It is essential, and companies that fail to heed this wisdom will soon be expressing another 3-letter acronym: SOS.

AlertBot is a leading site uptime monitoring solution that checks ALL of the features and functions above, which is why it’s trusted by some of the world’s biggest brands. Start a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. 

Multi-Step Monitoring: Why it’s Essential and How it Works

 The term “essential” is thrown around pretty loosely these days. That new show about the hospital (no, not that one… not that one either… yeah that one) is advertised as essential viewing. A newly-released track by a hip hop artist that describes how little they need to release new tracks in order to live much, much better than the rest of us? That’s essential listening. And how can we forget that new muffin that cannot legally be advertised as a muffin, because is technically more of a candy. That’s essential snacking (“mmmmmm….pseudo muffin”).

But then on the other end of the hype spectrum, there are things that are legitimately essential, because going without them could lead to dire consequences — or maybe even a catastrophe. And for e-commerce companies, one tool that truly qualifies as essential is multi-step monitoring.

What is Multi-Step Monitoring?

In a break with tradition in the complex world of technology, multi-step monitoring is pretty much what it sounds like: a way to track the various steps that customers take as they move through pages on a website. This way, businesses can proactively identify and fix problems such as buttons that don’t work, forms that won’t submit, links that don’t go anywhere, pages that take too long to load, and so on.

Why is Multi-Step Monitoring Essential?

 Most customers who run into problems don’t shrug them off. They get mad. And that compels them to hit the brakes and head for the exit. In fact, a whopping 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after just one bad experience. So, yeah, preventing about 9 in 10 customers from disappearing is important. One might even say that it’s… wait for it… ESSENTIAL!

How Multi-Step Monitoring Works

In AlertBot, configuring multi-step monitoring is remarkably easy, and doesn’t require an advanced degree in Hypercomplex Supergeerkery, with additional specialized certifications in Megaultra Nerdology. Here is how it works (a video tutorial is also available):

• Step 1: Login to AlertBot
• Step 2: Go to “Monitors”
• Step 3: Set up a new monitor.
• Step 4: Select the TrueBrowser® Multi-Step Monitor option.
• Step 5: Download the AlertBot Recorder (available for PC currently — this step only has to be completed once).
• Step 6: Give the monitor a name (e.g. “Amazon 1 Multi-Step Monitor”).
• Step 7: Launch the AlertBot Recorder, input the URL of the site (e.g. Amazon.com), and record a script simply by simulating actions that a customer would take. It is also a good idea to label steps/phases (e.g. “Homepage”, “Add to Cart,” etc.), which can be helpful when analyzing reports later on.
• Step 8: Save the script with a unique name (e.g. “Amazon test”).
• Step 9: Upload the script into TrueBrowser® Multi-Step Monitor (which was launched in Step 4).
• Step 10: Hit the “Test” button.

And that’s all there is to it. When the test is complete (this can take up to two minutes), a report is automatically generated that shows:

• The duration of each phase/step in the process.
• Whether each process was successful or unsuccessful.
• A waterfall chart capturing a breakdown of everything that loads on each individual page (e.g. request times, file transfers, etc.).
• Raw browser request data that reveals anything that is not working, or that could be contributing to a degraded user experience (e.g. loading large files or images that cause slowdowns).

Tests can be run at anytime to verify that problems are fixed and improvements are made. It’s remarkably easy. And yes, it’s essential.

Learn More

Discover the benefits of multi-step monitoring. Start a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. 

The 3-Step Communication Game Plan for a Site Outage (One of Our LEAST Favorite Things)

If those von Trapp Family singers from The Sound of Music collectively woke up in a really, really bad mood and decided to write a song about their least favorite things, then it’s a safe bet that not being able to connect to a website would make the list (alongside airline passengers who tilt their seat back, and clam shell plastic packaging).

Indeed, the level of rage that many people experience when their browser presents them with a “cannot connect to that website” message is enough to trigger a blood pressure monitoring app alarm on a smartwatch. It’s the equivalent of going to a store, only to find out that the door is locked. Actually, it may be worse than that, because at least there could be some therapeutic comfort in commiserating with other disappointed customers. But in the virtual world, the journey is usually solo — and so is the misery.

The bad news is that there is no way to absolutely, completely, and ultimately prevent site outages from happening. However, the good news is that companies can — actually, scratch that: they must — be proactive to mitigate the pain and suffering; both across their site visitors, and for themselves. To that end, here is a three-step communication game plan:

Step 1: Tell the story.

Without delay (not even for lunch), companies should leap into their operational digital properties — e.g. social media, email, SMS, chat, widget, etc. — and clearly describe:

• What’s going on and why the site is down.
• When the outage started.
• What is being done.
• When the outage is likely to end based on all available information and best estimates.
• Options and workarounds (if they exist).
• Relevant policy or process changes (e.g. “due to this unforeseen event we are extending our normal 30-day return window, to ensure that customers who are affected can return items without any inconvenience”).

Step 2: Update the status page.

All of the information shared through social media and other channels should be published to a dedicated status page, which — as the name suggests — exists for one purpose only: to highlight and describe the status of a website (or possibly multiple websites that are part of the same brand or portfolio). It is vital to keep the status page updated to reflect the current phase: investigating, fixing, resolving, and resolved.

In addition, the status page should invite visitors to subscribe, so that they can receive real-time notifications when things change — and ultimately, when they get back to normal.

Step 3: Conduct a postmortem and share the findings.

Once the outage is history, companies should figure out precisely what went wrong. Using a top-rated site uptime monitoring tool, like AlertBot, can provide helpful clues, and just as valuably, ensure that there isn’t a repeat performance. This information should be shared with the customer community and all other stakeholders, such as suppliers and strategic partners.

Typically, this information is shared through a blog post, which all social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (etc.) point to. Even if the company is not technically at fault (after all, nobody wants to be assailed by a DDoS attack), the fact remains that visitors were inconvenienced. An authentic apology goes a long way to easing frayed nerves and restoring trust.

The Bottom Line

Site outages are dreadful. Yet, they happen, and companies need to have a communication game plan to minimize the frustration for visitors, and the adverse impact on their reputation. The von Trapp Family singers would approve (and probably turn it into a song that you can’t get out of your head, no matter how hard you try).

Why Website UX “Edge Cases” Lead to Visitor Frustration — and What to Do About It

The year was 1993. Beanie Babies invaded the planet. Dinosaurs dominated cinemas worldwide when they escaped from Jurassic Park. Seinfeld won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series (you might say that Jerry & co. were masters of their domain). And righteous rockers Aerosmith extolled the virtues of “living on the edge.”

A lot — and we are talking A LOT — has changed since 1993; especially that advice about living on the edge. Frankly, the last thing that companies want is for their website visitors to go anywhere near the edge, because they may fall off.

Edge Cases
What we are talking about here are “edge cases,” which refer to website UX pitfalls that are unlikely — but nevertheless possible. And when visitors experience one of these edge cases, it is not a matter of whether they will get mad: it is a question of how enraged they will become. Hell hath no fury like visitors thrust into a nasty edge case. Here are some examples:

• A visitor incorrectly inputs their credit card data into a form, which causes the form to crash.
• A visitor clicks or taps the search function, but without putting anything in the search field, which causes the website to hang.
• A new website is launched and everything seems fine (there are a lot of fist bumps and “WE DID IT!” cheers among the development team), but there are sections of bad core that manifest hours, days, weeks, or even months down the road.

As a result of these negative experiences, visitors cannot move forward as both they and the company desire — or to use a term from the UX world, their momentum on “The Happy Path” — is thwarted.  Fortunately, that is where synthetic monitoring enters the picture.

The Role of Synthetic Monitoring
Synthetic monitoring (sometimes referred to as journey monitoring) is a method of simulating and evaluating the various journeys that visitors take on a website: where they go, what they do, what buttons they press, what forms they fill out, and so on.

With synthetic monitoring, companies can proactively identify and address edge case scenarios, but without having to rely on excessive manual testing or live user monitoring. This is not only more efficient, but it exposes edge cases that would otherwise go undetected.

Ideally, addressing edge case scenarios means eliminating them entirely — such as fixing bad code. But at the very least, companies can put up signposts that point visitors in the right direction. For example, since there is no way to 100% guarantee that every visitor will correctly input their credit card number, a form can be modified to tell visitors when an input error has occurred.

AlertBot: Avoiding the Edge
AlertBot supports advanced and easy-to-use synthetic monitoring that helps companies run and evaluate various UX scenarios before their visitors do — and ultimately reduce edge cases. Hey, Aerosmith is welcome to live on the edge (who are we to criticize the group that brought us Guitar Hero?). But companies that want to drive visitor engagement — and prevent frustration — should live as far away from the edge as possible.

Start a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. 

We all know the pleasure we feel when we dig into an old pair of jeans and pull out a crumpled $5 bill, or when we finally get around to vacuuming our car (“Hey, I don’t remember eating onion rings in here”) and find a few bucks in loose change. It’s as if the universe has taken a moment to smile on us.

Now imagine that, instead of finding enough money to buy some more onion rings (“Oh yeah, I remember when I ate onion rings in here — wow, that was a long time ago”), you get your hands on a cool $1.85 million. Pleasure isn’t the word for that. Euphoria is.

Well, in a sense, that is what owners, investors, and anyone else who has a financial stake in your organization could feel if you choose a superior site uptime monitoring solution. Why? Because new research has revealed that $1.85 million is the average price tag that organizations pay to recover from a ransomware attack — a figure that has more than doubled in the last year. Let’s unpack this by taking a look at ransomware, and then explaining the link to site uptime monitoring.

What is Ransomware?

Essentially, ransomware is a type of malware that infects a computer, and blocks access to it unless victims pay a fee (a.k.a. a ransom). And if that was not nefarious enough, there are two other things about ransomware that need to be part of the story.

The first is that victims are given a very limited amount of time to pay up. If they fail to do so, then the threat — which is often carried out — is they will permanently lose access to their data, or their data will end up being disclosed on the dark web or elsewhere. The second is that even after they pay the ransom in full, only 8% of victims get 100% of their data back, and 29% get up to 50% of their data back. In the legitimate business world, this kind of chronic non-fulfilment would lead to excessive customer loss, and probably lawsuits and investigations. But on the cybercrime landscape, it’s standard operating procedure. There is no complaints department or review site (“We were very disappointed in this hacker who failed to return all of our data, but we are adding a star because communication was prompt”).

Where a Site Uptime Monitoring Solution Enters the Picture

A superior site uptime monitoring solution cannot block ransomware attacks. For strategies and tactics on that front, we recommend this helpful article at eSecurityPlanet.com, and this site by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

However, a superior site monitoring solutions CAN do something that hackers earnestly hope that potential victims do not realize: immediately alert them to a ransomware attack — even if it’s at 3:00am — so they can rapidly roll-out an uncorrupted back-up and carry on without disruption or (and here is the euphoric part) having to pay $1.85 million or more in ransom/recovery costs.

Then, the organization can move to fortify cybersecurity defenses and reduce the size of the attack surface (probably by deploying many of the recommendations highlighted by the sources listed above), ultimately reducing the likelihood of future ransomware attacks.

The Bottom Line

Ransomware is on the rise, with the number of reported incidents surging 183% between the first two quarters of 2021. A superior site uptime monitoring solution won’t stop these attacks or frankly even slow them down. Hackers are notorious for doing things over and over again until they stop working — and unfortunately, ransomware is quite profitable. But it can give organizations the warning and time they need to strengthen their defenses, and in the process potentially save an average of $1.85 million.

Launch a free trial of AlertBot’s superior site uptime monitoring solution. No credit card. Nothing to download. Setup in minutes.  

“Frodo, We Aren’t in the Shire Anymore”: The Importance of a Customer Journey & How to Avoid Wrecking It

by Louis Kingston

Fans of Lord of the Rings — otherwise known as “Ringers” — never grow weary of reading or watching Frodo and his fellow Hobbits journey through Middle Earth on an epic quest to Mordor (where rumor has it there now exists a very stylish Starbucks at the base of Mount Doom).

Well, customers who visit a website are on an important journey as well. Granted, it doesn’t involve saving the world from evil entities that never sleep.  But it does involve achieving objectives that, ultimately, culminate in a sale — whether that happens on the same visit (e-commerce) or weeks down the road (B2B). And that brings us to the customer journey map.

The customer journey map is a visual tool that enables businesses to identify where, when and how customers engage their brand — and make the trek from curious prospects to enthusiastic brand ambassadors. There are five phases on the journey:

1. Awareness: customers in this phase know that they have a problem (although they may not yet know the full scope or severity of the problem), and they are in the process of conducting research. It is possible for visitors to go straight into a conversation via phone, video or chat. However, research has found that, on average, customers access 3-5 pieces of content before speaking (or texting) with a sales rep. This content can include videos, articles, ebooks, white papers, checklists, and so on.
2. Evaluation: customers in this phase are aware of their problem and are comparing different options. Content such as case studies, testimonials and demos are highly influential here. However, nothing beats a free trial.
3. Decision: customers in this phase have put together a shortlist (in a formal manner as is usually the case with B2B sales, or more casually as is often the case with B2C/e-commerce sales) and are ready to make a decision.

4. Retention: customers in this phase have made a purchase, and now the goal is to keep them on the roster. The importance of retention cannot be overestimated. It costs 5x more to acquire a new customer than it does to nurture an existing customer, and increasing retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25-95%. Tactics that can help foster a strong, loyal relationship include special offers, follow-up outreach (via email, app, phone, video, or in-person for B2B), customer satisfaction surveys, etc.

5. Advocacy: customers in this phase are happy and willing to recommend a company to their professional and personal network, as well as members of their various social media communities (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn groups, etc.). Research has found that 83% of B2C customers and 99% of B2B customers are influenced by various types of word-of-mouth marketing.

In theory, the customer journey is straightforward. However, in practice — and just as Frodo & Co. discovered — the quest can have many twists and turns. No, there aren’t any orcs, hobgoblins or balrogs along the way, but there are some dangerous foes that include:

• Crashed pages/websites
• HTTPS errors
• Broken links
• API problems
• Dysfunctional scripts and forms
• Browser incompatibility issues
• S-l-o-w page loading

The bad news? Any one of these is enough to send customers heading straight for the exit, never to return. The good news? AlertBot’s leading solution continuously monitors for ALL of these from multiple locations around the world — and proactively notifies key individuals (e.g. CIOs, CTOs, SysAdmins, etc.) when a problem occurs.

You could say that AlertBot is leading-edge technology worthy of Gandalf, and yet so intuitive and easy-to-use that Pippin Took could manage everything (even after having a few pints at the Prancing Pony).

See for yourself by starting your free trial of AlertBot now.   

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

Debunking 3 Website Availability Monitoring Myths

by Louis Kingston

Some myths in life are harmless, or even helpful. For example, Santa Claus has come in very, very handy for parents who want to nudge their kids from the naughty list to the nice one. And let’s give a round of applause to the Tooth Fairy, whose promise of nominal financial compensation has turned the prospect of losing a tooth from a meltdown trigger into a motivational factor.

However, other myths are on the opposite end of the spectrum: they lead to stress and costs. The bad news is that there are some rather notorious website availability monitoring myths out there. But the good news is that debunking them is simple. Here we go:

Myth #1: Free website monitoring tools are just as good as paid versions.

The Truth: So-called free website monitoring tools are riddled with gaps and vulnerabilities — simply because they’re free, and the folks who make them aren’t trying to provide a public service or earn some good karma. They’re in business, and that means there’s always (always!) a hook. Here are some of the drawbacks: zero technical support, excessive false positives, reduced test frequencies, limited testing locations, and s-l-o-w product updates. For a deeper dive into these pitfalls, read our article here.

Myth #2: Buying website availability monitoring from your host is a smart idea.

The Truth: Your web host probably offers website availability monitoring, and keeps pestering you to buy it. What’s the harm? Well, here’s the harm: your web host is a web host. That’s their jam. They don’t specialize in website monitoring, which means that customers like you are going to pay for their lack of competence and capacity. And on top of this, your web host has an inherent conflict of interest when it comes to giving you the full picture — because your hosting agreement includes uptime standards. As such, they may be less inclined to be fully transparent if they fall below this standard. Or to put it bluntly: they might lie, and you’ll have a really hard (if not impossible) time trying to detect and prove it. For more insights on why it’s a bad idea to buy website monitoring from your host, read our article here.

Myth #3: Website availability monitoring is just about website availability monitoring.

The Truth: This last myth is especially tricky. Yes, website availability monitoring is about website availability monitoring. But that’s not where it ends. Comprehensive (i.e. the kind your business needs) website monitoring also analyzes key aspects such as website usability, speed and performance — because there are situations where a website can be available, but not accessible or optimized. To learn more about why comprehensive website availability is not just a technical necessity but also a customer experience requirement, read our article here.

The Bottom Line 

Does your kid have a toothache, threatening to go to DEFCON 1? Do a myth tag team of the Tooth Fairy + Santa to avert a meltdown (and hey, you might even enjoy some extras out of the deal like getting them to clear the dishes after dinner or clean out the cat litter — kids are tough negotiators, but see what you can get).

But if you want to keep your business safe and strong, then steer clear of all myths, and equip yourself with the clarifying truths revealed above.

And speaking of clarifying truths: AlertBot TRULY offers world-class, surprisingly affordable and end-to-end comprehensive website availability monitoring — which is why it’s trusted by some of the world’s biggest companies. See for yourself by starting your free trial now.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

How to Solve 6 Common Browser Incompatibility Issues

by Louis Kingston

You have spent a small — or perhaps a large — fortune on your website, and now you’re ready to reap the rewards. You can picture it now: delighted visitors gushing about speed, performance, features, and functions.

Except…that’s not happening. Instead, visitors are running into browser compatibility issues — which means instead of moving forward on the buyer’s journey, they are heading straight to a competitor. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that you can (and frankly, you must) fix browser compatibility issues ASAP. Here are six of the most common problems, along with their associated solutions:

Problem: Various browsers render CSS styles differently.
Solution: Force all browsers to reset to the same basics by using CSS reset style sheets, such as Normalize.css (which is Github-based), HTML5Reset, or Eric Meyers CSS Reset. 

Problem: Browsers automatically default to “Quirks Mode,” which results in unresponsive tags and flawed rendering.
Solution: Add this magical line (without the quotation marks) “!DOCTYPE html” at the beginning of the codebase, which forces browsers to operate in Strict Mode vs. Quirks Mode.

Problem: Outdated Javascript fails to automatically detect older browsers.
Solution: Eliminate browser detection and replace it with Modernizr, which rapidly runs various tests to detail all applicable browser functions.

Problem: Unvalidated HTML/CSS leads to coding errors that some browsers do not auto-correct.
Solution: Use tools like W3C HTML validator and Jigsaw CSS validator to catch and fix errors, including the really tiny ones that can lead to major incompatibility headaches.

Problem: Certain functions designed to run on specific browsers are instead running on multiple browsers that cannot handle the request.
Solution: Add common vendor prefixes to the code, such as -webkit- (Chrome, Safari, newer versions of Opera, most iOS browsers, and any other WebKit- based browser), -moz- (Firefox), -o- (pre-WebKit versions of Opera), and -ms- (Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge).

Problem: Third party libraries aren’t loading and working properly.
Solution:  Use trusted frameworks that are cross-browser friendly, such as Angular JS and React JS (web application development framework), Bootstrap and Animate (CSS libraries), and JQuery (scripting library).

How AlertBot Can Help
AlertBot monitors your website with real web browsers — not simulations! — to capture the most authentic end-user experience, and identify problems that others miss. Your development team can use this reliable information to solve problems, and ensure that all visitors enjoy a flawless experience.

Start your FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. Click here.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

4 Essential Failure Analysis Reports for Monitoring Website Performance & Uptime

by Louis Kingston

It would be nice if the same commandment held for websites. However, even an infinity of buzz cuts cannot change the fact that, alas, sometimes websites fail. And so, the question then becomes: how do you minimize the likelihood, duration and severity of website failure?

The answer probably isn’t enough to inspire a movie. But it’s more than enough to help businesses detect and remedy underlying problems with their website before they become full-blown catastrophes: use failure analysis reports.

There are four types of failure analysis reports that every business should be generating on a regular basis: Waterfall Reports, Web Page Failure Reports, Downtime Tracking, and Failure Events.

• Waterfall Reports

Waterfall Reports enable businesses to analyze the performance of every object that loads on their web pages (e.g. scripts, stylesheets, images, etc.), in order to identify common sources of bottlenecks, errors and failures. Waterfall Reports also display HTTP response headers, which help track down the source of slowdowns and breakdowns.

• Web Page Failure Reports

Many business websites have dozens of pages, and e-commerce websites can easily have more than 50, 100, or even 1000. Manually hunting for problems can be tedious and futile. That’s where Web Page Failure Reports come to the rescue. They often contain a screenshot of data a page might display during a failure event log. This information can then be used to fix issues before they trigger visitor/ customer rage.

• Downtime Tracking

No, Downtime Tracking isn’t the name of one of those bands that never smile when they sing. Rather, it’s a type of report that contains statistics on website and server downtime. Understanding the size, scope and source of downtime issues is critical to resolving them.  

• Failure Event Logs

Knowing that a web page — or element(s) within a web page — are failing is important, but it’s not the full story. Failure Event Logs fill in the gaps by providing detailed information about what tests were performed, the geographical locations affected, and the errors identified.

The Bottom Line

Are failure analysis reports as gripping and captivating as Apollo 13? No. Are they vital to website performance and business success? Yes. Because while website failure is unfortunately an occasional option, it absolutely cannot become a regular habit.

At AlertBot, we provide our customers with all of these failure analysis reports (and more) so they can get ahead of problems and avoid catastrophes. Start a free trial today.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

Why Your Website Host’s “100% Guaranteed Uptime” Promise is Bogus — and What to Do About It

by Louis Kingston

It’s been said that the devil is in the details. Well, along the same lines — and as we all know from miserable experience — when it comes to guarantees, the devil is in the small print. And there’s no better (or worse) example of this than with respect to the gleaming, confidence-inspiring claim by web hosts that they deliver 100% guaranteed uptime. Except, well, they don’t.

Here’s the thing: what you, everyone you know, and even random strangers in the street define as uptime — i.e. a website being online, operational and accessible — is not how web hosts define uptime. Confused? Of course, you are. To make sense of this, you need to think like a web host.

Multiple Pieces of the Uptime Puzzle

There are multiple pieces of the uptime puzzle: the server on which your website lives, the data center that physically houses multiple servers, the ISP that connects to the internet, and the carrier that links traffic between multiple ISPs. The uptime guarantee offered by web hosts begins and ends with the server and, if they own it, the data center. It does not include issues or problems with the ISP or carrier. As such, if there are points of failure in either of those components, then when your website does go down, your host will technically be meeting its promise. You’ve heard of a non-apology apology? Well, this is a non-guarantee guarantee — and it’s just as lousy.

Less than 100% Uptime = the Same Story

Now, you may have a website host that doesn’t sing from the 100% uptime/zero downtime songbook. It may, for example, promise 99.99% guaranteed uptime, or pledge some other Ivory soap-inspired technical cleanliness standard. Yet again, the same murky logic described above applies: as long as the host’s servers and (if owned) data center are humming along, then it’s an uptime guarantee party and everyone’s invited.

The Real Guarantee

At this point, you may be wondering — and not in a curious, childlike way, but in an agitated “what on earth is going on here!?” way — about what recourse you have available if and when your host does, indeed, bear responsibility for your website going down. That’s where the Service Level Agreement (SLA) kicks in.

Basically, in most cases, the SLA between you and your web host will entitle you to a prorated rebate based on downtime that meets two conditions: 1) the downtime is the responsibility or fault of the web host, and not the ISP, the carrier, the power company, hackers, natural disasters, wizard spells, alien invasion (or just alien visitation), or any other factor that is beyond its control; 2) the downtime can be proven.

So for example, if your business pays $100/month for managed web hosting and your site goes down for half a day— and both of these conditions are met — then you’ll either get around $3.33; most likely as a credit that will be applied to your next bill. Quite the luxurious guarantee, isn’t it?

What You Can Do About It

The bad news is that you can’t demand that your website host’s 100% uptime guarantee is, in fact, a 100% uptime guarantee as you, and pretty much everyone else, would define it. Unless the FCC and FTC decide that this is false advertising (and they haven’t done that… yet), then the splashy promise will remain– and so will the legalese fine print.

But the good news is that you can equip yourself with a globally trusted advanced website monitoring solution like AlertBot, so that you instantly know exactly when your site goes down, why it went down and for how long. You can then use this data to pinpoint problems and fix issues immediately. AlertBot’s popular health map reports deliver crucial performance metrics direct to your inbox to assure you stay on top of your sites. This will also determine whether you should change hosts to one that is relatively better at keeping their promises.

Give AlertBot’s FREE trial a try today. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. Click here.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

7 Tips to Help Remote Workers Secure Their Home Wi-Fi

by Louis Kingston

Do you remember that old song called “Dem Bones” that goes: “ankle bone is connected to the shin bone, shin bone is connected to the knee bone, knee bone is connected to the thigh bone…” and so on? (It’s in your head now, isn’t it?)

Well, legend has it that hackers sing a similar song to their kids that goes: “remote worker’s wi-fi connected to the corporate network, corporate network connected to the privileged accounts, privileged accounts connected to the confidential data.”

True, it’s not as catchy, but hackers have never been about style points. They’ve been about doing what works over and over again until it stops working. And unfortunately, they’re having a ridiculously easy time these days hacking remote worker wi-fi setups, and establishing a foothold from which they launch into corporate networks — often with the goal of deploying malware to harvest confidential data (e.g. customer credit card numbers). 

The solution to this problem? Ensure that remote workers fortify their home wi-fi setup, because it is definitely not in full security mode out-of-the-box. The problem with this solution? Maybe remote workers — especially non-technical types — don’t know what to do, and are afraid if they tinker with their router then they won’t just be banished from the land of Zoom conferences and Slack chats with colleagues, but they won’t be able to surf bizarre Reddit subs at 3:00am or watch Minecraft videos on YouTube. What kind of existence is that?

Fortunately, going from Wi-Fi security zero to hero doesn’t require a PhD in Geekology. Here are seven things that remote workers can and should do right now (if they haven’t wisely done so already) to protect themselves and their organization:

1. Toggle WPA2-Personal (Wi-Fi Protected Access 2) instead of WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy).

• Change the default pre-shared key (PSK) to something that is: 100% unique; at least 15 characters in length; uses a mix of numbers, letters and symbols; does not use memorable key paths (e.g. “asdfg”); does not use common substitutions (e.g. passw0rd); does not use any dictionary words; and does not use any personally identifying information (e.g. pet’s name).

• Change the Wi-Fi router’s default administrative credentials. To change it, remote workers simply head to an online platform that is usually located at http://192.168.1.1 or http://192.168.0.1, enter the details password (typically “admin”), and change the password accordingly. The new password should check all the boxes listed in #2.

• Disable Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS). This was designed to make life easier by allowing people to connect devices to their home network (e.g. laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc.) simply by pressing a button on their router. No password verification is needed. However, while this is convenient, the protocol between the router and devices could be vulnerable to brute-force hacking techniques.

• Keep the router’s firmware updated. For instructions on how to do this for a variety of router types, check out this handy step-by-step guide (including screenshots).

• Change the default network name. This is used by the router’s encryption algorithm (along with the password) to secure communications. However, widely available password cracking dictionaries (a.k.a. rainbow tables) include common network names. The best advice is to pick something short and boring — e.g. “QT24L” and not “Can’t Hack This.”

• Turn off network name broadcasting. Yes, it’s convenient to see the network name when connecting devices. But it’s also convenient for hackers, and for neighbors who may not necessarily want to steal data, but have no qualms about stealing bandwidth to torrent files, stream movies, and so on.

The Bottom Line

Will implementing all seven of these recommendations make a home Wi-Fi network impenetrable? No. As long as there is going to be Wi-Fi, there is going to be risk. However, doing all of the above will certainly make it tougher for hackers, and like home burglars, most of them target low hanging fruit. If a Wi-Fi connection puts up a fight, they’ll usually just move on to the next victim until they find one who hasn’t followed the advice in this article.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

6 Tips to Prepare Your E-Commerce Site for the Biggest Holiday Traffic Surge Ever

by Louis Kingston

So it begins.

No, we are not talking about the school year, the football season, or a dizzying array of television shows about zombies, detectives, and of course: zombie detectives (seriously, it’s a thing).

Rather, we are talking about the beginning of what for most ecommerce businesses is the make-or-break race to the end of the year called “gift buying season.” Except this year, things are going to be different.

To understand why, let’s zoom in on what, for most ecommerce businesses, is the most critical period of the gift buying season — Cyber Week — which starts on Thanksgiving, and runs through to Cyber Monday. According to research by BigCommerce.com, during Cyber Week 2019 same-store sales across all verticals increased by a whopping 21% compared to Cyber Week 2018, and the average order value jumped by 10%.

And now, we come to 2020, a year in which billions of people are either obligated or advised to stay at home. These folks aren’t going to even consider hopping into their car to navigate the mall jungle. Instead, they’re going to pause Fortnite, minimize Reddit, crack their knuckles, replace the battery in their mouse, and BUY all kinds of stuff online: from toaster ovens to 60” 4K TVs to luxury sneakers to mounted singing bass fish (remember those?).

Simply put: 2020 is not just going to break e-commerce sales records, but it is going to obliterate them. In fact, in terms of how many people buy stuff online and how much they buy, there may never be another year quite like it in terms of year-over-year surges in volume and value.

For e-commerce businesses, this makes the 2020 gift buying season absolutely critical — which in turn means that crashed or slow websites are NOT OK. In fact, the mere idea of their possible existence is horrifying and just plain unacceptable, like a floating island of fire ants (which, unfortunately, is also a thing).

To prevent a catastrophe worse than anything the Griswold Family might experience, here are six essential things do to:

1. Anticipate how much traffic is likely to arrive — keeping in mind that it’s probably going to be much higher than in past years during Cyber Week and throughout the remainder of 2020 — and proactively ensure that the host can handle the load. For more insight and advice, read our article on how to prevent traffic spikes from crashing your website.

2. Assess site speed, and if necessary dial up the velocity (and then dial it up some more). If you have any doubts about this, read our article on the 3 reasons why website speed is more important than ever.

3. Eliminate the 4 common causes of cart abandonment: unexpected costs, forcing customers to create an account, a long and winding checkout process, and bugs.

4. Optimize the mobile shopping and purchasing experience. During Cyber Week in 2019, mobile orders were responsible for 49% of all online sales.

5. Analyze and address security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, shoppers aren’t the only people who love e-commerce sites — hackers do too, and they demonstrate their affection by deploying malware and launching DDoS attacks.

6. Use a reputable and proven site uptime and availability monitoring solution like AlertBot, which will instantly notify authorized individuals (e.g. webmasters, sysadmins, etc.) if something goes wrong.

The Bottom Line

There aren’t many things that can be said with certainty about 2020. However, two things make the list: we will hear the phrase “new normal” at least a thousand more times before the year is up, and the gift buying season for e-commerce businesses is going to be colossal.

Whether that is colossal good (think Avengers) or colossal bad (think the Death Star) will largely be determined by the six essential factors described above. Which epic story do you want your e-commerce business to tell in the months ahead?

Try AlertBot today and see why it’s trusted and recommended by some of the world’s biggest enterprises. There’s no billing information to provide, nothing to download, and you’ll be completely set up in minutes — click here.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

3 Reasons Why It’s a Bad Idea to Buy Site Monitoring from Your Web Host

by Louis Kingston

For baseball pitchers, the two most glorious words in the English language are “perfect game.” For actors, it’s “Oscar win” (forget all that nonsense about how “it’s an honor just to be nominated.”). For school-aged kids, it’s “snow day.” And for businesses, of course, it’s “captive audience.”

Indeed, it doesn’t matter how compelling or clever a marketing and advertising campaign might be. If audiences don’t take notice and pay attention, it may as well not exist. And if you doubt this, think of the last time you sat through 20 minutes of movie trailers — not because you wanted to, but because there was nowhere else to go (at least, not without saying “excuse me…” 10 times as you painfully twisted and squirmed your way past annoyed fellow moviegoers).

Why does this matter? It’s because your web host is singing from the captive audience songbook when it repeatedly urges you to add site monitoring to your existing hosting package. At first glance, this may seem like a good idea. After all, you know that site monitoring is important. Why not just grab it from your web host, the same way you grab a side order of fries from a fast food restaurant? Well here’s why not:

1. Lack of Specialization

Your web host doesn’t specialize in site monitoring, which means they aren’t using the latest technology or hiring the most qualified professionals. Just as you wouldn’t want your doctor to sell you a timeshare during an exam (“You know what might help that bronchitis? Two weeks a year in a sunny and warm Florida condo, as you can see from this lovely brochure”), you don’t want your site monitoring company to do anything but site monitoring. It’s not something anyone should be dabbling in.

2. Lack of Service Offering

When web hosts offer site monitoring, they typically focus on uptime. But site monitoring isn’t just about letting you know when your site goes dark. It’s also about making sure that your site is performing the way it’s supposed to — which means that all elements are functional (e.g. buttons, forms, multi-step processes, etc.), and all pages are loading rapidly. Without this critical information, you may believe that everything with your site is fine and all lights are green; that is, until you begin hearing from irate customers and start losing sales.

3. Potential Conflict of Interest

Last but not least, your site host is supposed to meet an uptime standard as part of their service commitment. But if that same host is also monitoring your site performance, they may be less inclined to be completely transparent if they fall below this standard. And if they did fudge some of the numbers, how would you even know? With this in mind, are we saying that all hosts that offer site monitoring are unethical? Absolutely not. Are we saying that there is an inherent conflict of interest that should be at least concerning and troubling? You bet.

The Simple, Smart Solution

The best (and really, the only) way to solve this problem is to avoid it completely — which means not site monitoring from your host, and instead getting it from a proven, reputable vendor that:

• Specializes in site monitoring — it’s all they do 24/7/365.
• Offers both uptime monitoring and comprehensive performance monitoring — not just the former.
• Has zero conflict of interest telling you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth regarding how your site is doing.

Ready to safeguard and strengthen your business with world-class, surprisingly affordable site monitoring? Then you’re ready for AlertBot! We check all of these boxes, and are trusted by some of the world’s biggest companies. Start your free trial now.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

The Basics of DNS Monitoring: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It’s Essential for Your Business

by Louis Kingston

On Star Trek, there’s an incredibly useful device called the universal translator. As you’d expect, it allows everyone to understand each other. For example, if Captain Jean Luc Picard bumped into a race of aliens that bore a striking resemblance to Commander Riker’s beard, then they could set a date for some Earl Grey tea (hot) thanks to the universal translator. Without it, there might be grave misunderstandings and the firing of photon torpedoes.

DNS: The Next Generation

Well, the internet has its own kind of universal translator, which is somewhat less gloriously called a Domain Name System, or DNS for short. Essentially, DNS is a protocol that establishes the standards for how computers exchange data on the internet, as well as private networks. The purpose is to convert domain names into an Internet Protocol (IP) address, so that computers can identify and communicate with each other. Without the universal language of DNS, surfing the web wouldn’t be surfing at all. It would be more like wading through quicksand because we’d all have to keep track of hundreds, if not thousands, of IP addresses.

How DNS Works

Let’s say that you type “Google.com” into your web browser. Behind the scenes, your browser sends out a request to a recursive name server in order to get the IP address for Google.com (if the recursive name server comes up empty, then the back-up plan is to check with an authoritative name server, which has information on every domain). Ultimately, provided that the website in question exists, the browser is provided with an IP address that tells it precisely where to go.

Now, does this mean that you could type in the IP address and cut out the middleman? Yes. For example, if you really wanted to, then you could type 172.217.10.14 — which is Google’s IP address — into your browser and head straight to Google.com without passing a DNS (or collecting $200). But why would you want to!? A DNS allows you to remember simple names instead of complex 10-digit numbers.

Why DNS Monitoring is Essential: Part 1

The first reason why your business needs DNS monitoring should be self-evident: if for any reason your site name isn’t resolving, then visitors won’t be able to reach it. For all intents and purposes, it will be down. Constant and automated monitoring checks to see that everything is working and there is no need for anyone to scream “RED ALERT!”

Why DNS Monitoring is Essential: Part 2

DNS monitoring also checks to see that the name resolution process is swift vs slow. Why is this so important? Consider this:

• A study by Kissmetrics found that a one second delay in load time can send conversion rates plunging by seven percent.
• Google — a company notorious for never confirming or denying anything to do with its ultra-secret search engine algorithm, has bucked tradition and formally verified that page speed is a significant SEO ranking factor for mobile and desktop searches (now please hold still for memory wipe procedure).
• Thanks (or make that “no thanks”) to a phenomenon that psychologists dub the perception of speed, visitors don’t just dislike slow websites: they hate them with a passion that borders on — and often surpasses — blinding hatred. With apologies to Shakespeare: Hell hath no fury like a visitor delayed.

Why DNS Monitoring is Essential: Part 3

Hackers frequently target DNS servers to redirect visitors to sites that deliver malware. Even scarier, hackers can obtain SSL encryption certificates that allow them to intercept and decrypt email and virtual private network (VPN) credentials.

The Bottom Line

DNS Monitoring lets you know three things that are more important than not plugging in a hair dryer  when the U.S.S. Enterprise goes to warp speed: that your site is up, that your DNS server has not been hijacked by hackers, and that it’s resolving quickly. Without this information, the only way you will know that something is wrong is when angry customers or panicked colleagues start calling.

Boldly Go with AlertBot!

AlertBot automatically and continuously monitors your DNS servers (regardless of where they are located) to ensure that everything checks out, including A records (IPv4), AAAA records (IPv6), aliases (CNAME), SMTP mail server mappings (MX records), DNS zone delegates (NS records), SOA serial numbers, and more. And if an issue is suspected or detected, your team is immediately alerted so they can take action and solve the problem.

Start a free trial now and boldly go with AlertBot!

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

10 Reasons for Site Crashes

by Louis Kingston

In the classic movie The Sound of Music, the whimsical governess Maria and the Von Trapp children sing about their favorite things — like raindrops and roses and whiskers on kittens. It’s joyful, it’s inspiring, and it’s in perfect harmony backed by a full orchestra. Isn’t Austria lovely?

Well, if Maria and co. were running a website (perhaps something to do with selling lederhosen or offering hiking tours in the hills), here are 10 things that absolutely wouldn’t be among their favorite things since they cause sites to crash:

1. Coding errors, usually after a maintenance or an upgrade.
2. Bugs in the programming that, alas, should have been spotted and destroyed long ago.
3. Incompatible plugins and extensions. This is a BIG problem with WordPress sites!
4. Traffic surges, which may require upgrading the hosting package to get more disk space and/or implementing a content delivery network (CDN).
5. Malware attacks, which not only lead to site crashes, but can land businesses on blacklists that block legitimate emails from getting through.
6. Hacker attacks, such as DDoS. Sometimes businesses are targeted directly by bad actors or unhappy ex-customers, and sometimes businesses are caught up in the net as part of a large scale campaign.
7. Service provider and host errors, which are probably the most frustrating of all reasons for site crashes. There is virtually nothing that a business can do but wait for a third party to get their act together.
8. Domain expiry. Yes, sometimes sites crash simply because the domain wasn’t renewed.
9. Google blacklists, which happen when Google decides that a site is deceptive (note: this technically doesn’t cause a site to crash, but it effectively does the same thing since it blocks traffic).
10. Data center shutdowns, which happens during an emergency such as a fire or flood, or sometimes even by accident. For example, back in 2017 Amazon’s web host crashed due to an employee taking more servers offline than he intended (wonder what that guy’s next performance review was like?).

First, the Bad News…

AlertBot’s acclaimed technology cannot prevent these dreadful things from crashing your site — although now that you know what you’re up against, you can be proactive. For example, you should test all plugins/extensions before adding them to your site; make sure that you have the right hosting package, and so on.

…now, the Good News!

AlertBot’s acclaimed technology CAN make sure that your team is immediately notified whenever your site crashes, so that you can take switch action and resolve the problem before your visitors get frustrated and head to the competition.

Try AlertBot free and discover why it will quickly become one of your business’s favorite things. Heck, you might even start singing about it in the halls.  

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

How To Keep Traffic Spikes from Crashing Your Website

by Louis Kingston

At first glance — and probably second and third as well — having too much traffic seems like a really nice problem to have; like when billionaires struggle to decide which yacht to buy (“I say Thurston, the one with the tennis courts is quite lovely, but the one with the outdoor cinema is so charming”).

However, too much traffic really is a problem, because it causes websites to either dramatically s-l-o-w down (which is terrible) or crash (which is worse than terrible). And right now, as hundreds of millions of people are advised or obliged to stay at home, there are a bunch of e-commerce businesses around the world that are experiencing this harsh, costly reality.

The good news is that your business can — and should — take proactive steps to keep traffic spikes from impaling your website, and causing revenue losses and reputation damage.  Here is the to-do list:

1. Use a content delivery network (CDN), which is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and data centers. A CDN helps ensure that visitors — regardless of where they’re located — enjoy fast-loading pages, images, videos and other content, and it also leverages a network of servers to manage traffic spikes. Instead of a single server struggling to handle the load, multiple servers share the burden.

2. Check, double-check, and while you’re at it, triple-check whether your current server is capable of handling a traffic surge (pay particular attention to any data caps). This assessment is especially important if your business’s website has expanded over the years, but your server capacity has remained the same since day one.

3. Make sure that all of your software is up-to-date. In addition to patching vulnerabilities, updates can help lower the risk of a virtual traffic jam.

4. Run a daily backup. No, this won’t prevent traffic-induced website crashes. But yes, it’s a lifeline back to normalcy if a crash is on the horizon.

5. Use a reliable 24/7 website uptime monitoring solution like AlertBot, which proactively and immediately informs designated individuals (e.g. system administrators, CTO, CSO, etc.) if your website goes down, and can also check to make sure specific scripts and pages are working correctly. What’s more, if required you can use AlertBot’s logs as evidence to inform your host that they need to do a much better job of keeping your website online — or else you’ll head elsewhere.

The Bottom Line
More potential customers than ever before are using the web to find products and services — everything from digital gadgets to financial advisors to home repairs, and the list goes on. When the surge reaches your virtual address, you want to definitively know — and not just hope — that your website is ready, willing and able to handle the traffic.

Give AlertBot a try for FREE. There’s no billing information, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. Click here

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

Beware These 5 Possible Dangers Lurking in Free Website Monitoring Tools

by Louis Kingston

We’ve been told by the poets that the best things in life are free: A sunrise in spring, the scent of a flower, the coo of a baby, having a buddy who can get his hands on football tickets. It’s all so beautiful and uplifting (especially the football tickets).

But at the same time, the economists remind us that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And of course, we know from experience that this is often the case. How many times have we taken advantage of a so-called free offer, only to end up disappointed instead of delighted? A handful? Dozens? Hundreds? (And we haven’t even brought up that notorious gym membership yet…)

And that brings us to website monitoring. You know that this is important — or make that vital — to your business’s success. Indeed, going off-the-grid for even a minute can lead to lost sales and lasting reputation damage, and ongoing downtime issues can negatively impact search engine rankings. Hell hath no fury like Google and Bing scorned.

But what you may not know, is that the throng of free site monitoring tools out there may be part of the problem — not the solution. Here are five potential dangers lurking in these tools:

1. No Technical Support

Many free site monitoring tools offer no technical support to help you pinpoint issues and identify potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Instead, they provide you with a FAQ (or some other similar resource), and expect you to solve your own problems. You can’t even complain about this, because there’s nobody to complain to.

2. Excessive False Positives

 When is a downtime alert not a downtime alert? When it’s a false positive. These are truly (not falsely) frustrating and terrifying, and they’re a common problem among some free site monitoring tools.

3. Reduced Test Frequencies

In their marketing, all free site monitoring tools promise to “constantly scan your site.” That sounds comforting. But some of these tools define “constantly” differently than you would— and not in a good way. Several minutes can pass between test frequencies, which means that if something goes wrong, you’ll be left in the dark for quite a while.

4. Limited Testing Locations

Many free site monitoring tools test from one or two locations (which is a worst practice) instead of from multiple locations around the world (which is a best practice).

5. Slow, Limited Product Updates

Many free site monitoring tools don’t get the latest, greatest and safest product updates — because the companies that make them can’t afford to do so. After all, someone has to pay for that stuff.

Why Free in the First Place?

In light of the above, you may be asking a very sensible question: with so many fundamental drawbacks and limitations, why do some companies offer free site monitoring tools in the first place?

In two words: loss leader.

In more than two words: these companies use a free site monitoring tool to get customers onto their roster, after which the upsell parade starts — and it never, ever ends. Eventually, some of these customers end up buying a premium (license/subscription) site monitoring solution at a hefty price tag. The company does a happy dance, rings a bell, updates a giant telethon-like tote board, and smokes a bunch of cigars.

OK, they don’t do any of those things (at least, we hope they don’t), but the fact remains that the free site monitoring tool was never a legitimate, functional business-grade solution in the first place. Economists 1, poets 0.

And Then, There’s AlertBot!

AlertBot isn’t free, for the simple reason that we:

• Provide exceptional technical support
• Filter out and prevent false positives
• Conduct frequent testing
• Test from multiple locations around the world
• Regularly update our technology

At the same time, AlertBot is refreshingly affordable and makes CEOs and CFOs as happy as it makes CTOs and CSOs. So yes, the best things in life are free. But second best is getting a GREAT deal on a solution that over-delivers. That’s AlertBot. Try it now and see for yourself.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

Word (and Warning) to the Wise: Site Downtime isn’t Just a Technical Issue — it’s a Customer Experience Problem

by Louis Kingston

Businesses of all sizes — from small startups to large enterprises — are spending an enormous amount of money and time to deliver outstanding customer experience (CX). For example, they’re deploying contact centers, implementing customer-friendly return and warranty policies, training their workforce to be customer-centric, and the list goes on. And now, according to research by Walker Insights, CX is poised to overtake price and product as the most influential brand differentiator. To put this another way: customers are happily willing to pay a higher price, and for a more limited selection, if they’re getting the attention, performance, respect and results they expect — and frankly, demand.

The CX Gap that is Swallowing Customers

However, despite the fact that the CX party has been going on for a while and there’s no slowdown in sight, there’s a gap that many businesses are overlooking — one that is swallowing up their current and future customers, and transporting them directly to the competition: site downtime.

Here’s the thing: traditionally, site downtime has been primarily, if not exclusively, viewed through a technical lens, similar to a car breaking down or a roof springing a leak. And there is obviously truth in this perception. But it’s not the whole story, because customers out there on the virtual landscape equate site experience with customer experience. As such, when a site goes dark, they don’t think: “This customer-centric business has a technical problem with their website, and are surely going to fix it ASAP.” Instead, they think: “Wow, if this is what their website is like, then the rest of the business must be just as dysfunctional.”

Now, is this perception fair? Frankly, no. The vast majority of businesses — let’s say 99% of them — with site downtime truly care about delivering good (if not great) CX. These are the same businesses that, as noted above, are spending plenty of money and time on CX-related investments and training. They seriously and urgently want to get CX right.

But when their website breaks down or blows a virtual tire, this legitimate, longstanding investment and CX commitment is undermined — and customers react accordingly. Here are some of the grizzly numbers:

• 50% of customers say they have abandoned a transaction or purchase due to poor customer service.
• 51% of customers say they will never do business with a company again after one instance of poor customer service.
• 74% of customers say they are likely to switch brands if the purchasing process is too difficult.
• 95% of customers tell others about poor customer service.

The Bottom Line 

The takeaway here isn’t that businesses need to care more about CX — because they know this already, and (hopefully) are acting on this understanding. Rather, it’s that businesses need to see the direct, immediate link between poor CX and site downtime. It’s not just a technical issue. For current and future customers, it’s the difference between whether they move forward on the buyer’s journey and serve as a profitable brand advisor, or whether they head for the exit and never look back.

Protect Your Reputation + Impress Your Customers 

AlertBot delivers world-class, surprisingly affordable monitoring that immediately notifies you when your site is not operational. You can then take rapid, focused action and solve the problem before your customers form the wrong impression — and never give you a second chance to make it right. Launch your free trial of AlertBot today.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

The (Not-So-Magnificent) 7 HTTPS Errors that Infuriate Customers and Ruin Reputations

by Louis Kingston

In the classic flick The Magnificent Seven, a pack of essentially decent but “don’t you dare park your horse in my spot or else you’ll get your spurs blasted” gunslingers come together to rid a village of some nasty bandits. There’s action. There’s drama. There’s tragedy. There’s humor. There’s romance. There’s Steve freakin’ McQueen. What’s not to love?

Well, on the dusty and dangerous internet landscape, instead of a magnificent seven to save the day, there exists seven not-so-magnificent HTTPS errors that are impossible to like, let alone love. Why? Because their purpose is to block visitors from reaching websites — which leads to lost customers and wrecked reputations.

Here’s a look at the reprehensible HTTPS errors that have their picture on Most Wanted Lists in every post office from Tombstone to Dodge City:

403 Forbidden: The 403 Forbidden error means that the server is absolutely refusing — no ifs, ands or buts — to grant permission to access a resource, despite the fact that a request is valid. Common causes include missing index files, and incorrect .htaccess configuration.

404 Not Found: The 404 Not Found error means that a web page or other resource can’t be found because they simply don’t exist. Common reasons for this include a broken link, mistyped URL, or that someone moved or deleted a page and didn’t update the server (which happens a lot).

408 Request Time Out: The 408 Request Time Out error means that the server can’t find the target or resource that it’s searching for, and after a while, just throws in the towel. Often, this is because the server is overloaded.

410 Gone: Whereas (as noted above) a 404 error implies that there might be some hope — i.e. the target file might be somewhere, just not where it’s supposed to be — the 410 Gone error snuffs out any possible optimism. It’s totally, completely and permanently gone.

500 Internal Server Error: The 500 Internal Server Error means that the server cannot process a request for any number of reasons, such as missing packages, misconfiguration, and overload.

503 Service Unavailable: The 503 Service Unavailable error means that the server is either down because of maintenance, or because it’s overloaded. Either way, the server is conjuring up its inner Gandalf and screaming: “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”

504 Gateway Time-Out: The 504 Gateway Time-Out error means that a higher-level upstream server isn’t working and playing well with a lower-level downstream server. After a while, the downstream server gets the message that it’s not wanted, and says “Oh yeah? Well, I don’t need you either!”

Calling in the Marshall
The bad news is that these reprehensible HTTPS errors, if left unchecked, can cause a lot of damage. Indeed, few things irk and offend website visitors more than seeing an error code. But the good news is that you can call in the Marshall— a.k.a. AlertBot — to restore law and order.

AlertBot constantly scans your site’s pages to watch out for these and other HTTP errors. If and when they are detected, authorized employees (e.g. webmasters, sysadmins, etc.) are proactively notified so they can take swift action and fix the problem.

It’s lightening fast, always reliable, and as smooth as Steve McQueen. Dastardly, good-fer-nuthin’ HTTPS errors don’t stand a chance!

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

4 Common Causes of Cart Abandonment — and How to Solve Them

by Louis Kingston

It’s a sad story that has become so common, that it just kind of blends into the background — like that awful elevator jazz that some coffee shops play (Thelonious Monk would NOT approve), or economy class in-flight meals (there’s less sodium on a salt lick, and you don’t get rammed in the ankle by a cabin trolley). Alas, we’re talking about the cart abandonment epidemic.

And epidemic is indeed the right word, because this problem is not local or limited. Forrester Research pegs the number of customers who bid adios to their cart at 87%, with 70% of them choosing to do so just before checkout. Overall, $18 billion worth of products each year are left to languish in digital trolleys.

Here are four common and costly cart-based reasons why customers flee the sales funnel, rather than triumphantly complete the buyer’s journey:

1. Unexpected costs.

Customers don’t merely dislike unexpected costs like shipping, or nebulous “handling” fees (what, are people buying plutonium or something?). They absolutely hate them. There might even be a clinical psychological aversion to this called “unexpectedcostphobia.”

The solution: be transparent about all automatic or potential costs by advertising a clear and realistic estimate, providing a delivery calculator on the home page (not buried at the end of the checkout process), and if possible, offering free shipping for a minimum purchase.

2. Obliging customers to create an account.

A decade or two ago, customers didn’t mind creating an account to purchase something online, simply because they didn’t know there was any other way. It was part of the deal, like the turning of the earth or standing in line for longer than you should at the post office. It’s going to happen.

But now, customers have enjoyed a taste of the guest checkout experience — and many of them love it; especially if they’re suffering from security fatigue and wince at the idea of remembering more login credentials. Naturally, e-commerce sites that fail to cater to this preference set themselves up for plenty of cart abandonment.

The solution: if creating an account is mandatory, make the process as simple and fast as possible (and then make it even simpler and faster). In addition, give customers an incentive to create an account such as a discount offer, special gift, or anything else that has value and isn’t going to lead to a bankruptcy filing.

3. Long and winding checkout process.

In 1970, The Beatles sang about the “Long and Winding Road” and scored yet another U.S. Billboard #1 hit. However, e-commerce sites that have a long and winding checkout process aren’t going to be certified platinum. They’re going to be certified terrified, because cart abandonment rates will be far higher than their competition.

The solution: ruthlessly streamline down the checkout process to the bare minimum, and use as few fields as possible. Yes, getting as much glorious customer data is important — but it’s not as important as getting customers on the roster in the first place.

4. Bugs, bugs and more bugs.

Even entomologists don’t like website bugs and other completely preventable technical errors that make online shopping irritating instead of enjoyable. Even one of these bugs is enough to trigger cart (and brand) abandonment — let alone a bunch of them.

The solution: use a reputable third-party platform to constantly monitor all important web pages and multi-step processes — such as login, signup, checkout and so on — to proactively detect and destroy bugs, or anything else that makes customers miserable like slow page loading. Learn more about this here.

The Bottom Line
Completely eliminating cart abandonment isn’t possible, because there will always be customers who pause or stop the purchase process. But solving all of the problems described above significantly increases the chances that both carts and customers will get to the finish line, and be inspired to come back for more. And isn’t that the whole point?

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

If You Build It, They Won’t Come: 5 Big, Scary and Costly e-Commerce Site Mistakes

by Louis Kingston

In the 1989 flick Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner turns his Iowa cornfield into a baseball field because a voice tells him: if you build it, he will come. The “he” in question is his late father, and the movie has a magical, uplifting ending that makes us want to dream again (and possibly, play baseball or eat some corn).

Well, many folks who launch e-commerce sites also believe that: if I build it, they will come. This time, “they” means throngs of happy, profitable customers. Except…they don’t. And before long, the site is forced to scale down or shut down. Even writing to Kevin Costner doesn’t help — even if you promise to watch a double feature of The Postman and Waterworld (not recommended without a physician’s approval).

The bad news is that this kind of misery happens all the time. The good news — actually, make that the amazing, glorious, Field-of-Dreams-ending-like news — is that preventing this doom and gloom is largely a matter of avoiding these five big, scary and costly e-commerce site mistakes:

1. Lousy UX

Tiny buttons that are impossible to click on a mobile device without a magnifying glass and hands the size of a Ken doll. Search functions that neither search nor function. Elusive top level categories. Gigantic banners that pop open and chase customers around from page to page, like a kind of online shopping Terminator (“I’ll be baaaaaack!”). These are just some of the many ways that lousy UX destroys e-commerce sites.

The remedy? Monitor all pages and multi-step processes (e.g. login areas, signups, checkout, etc.), to identify bottlenecks where customers routinely encounter errors or unresponsive behavior, and fix any gaps and leaks right away. Learn more about doing this here.

2. S…l…o…w…n…e…s…s

Just how vital is speed? Behold these grizzly statistics:

• A one-second delay in load time can send conversion rates plunging by seven percent. (Source: Kissmetrics)
• 70% of customers say that a website’s loading time affects their willingness to purchase. (Source: Unbounce)
• As page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds the probability of bounce increases by 32%; from 1 second to 5 seconds the probability of bounce increases by 90%; and from 1 second to 10 seconds the probability of bounce increases by 123% (source: Google)

The remedy? Be ruthless about making your e-commerce site as fast as possible (and then make it even faster). Here are the usual suspects: bloated HTML, ad network code, images not optimized, and using public networks to transmit private data. There are other culprits, but look here first — you’ll be amazed at how much speed you unleash.

3. Not Focusing on SEO — or Focusing too Much on SEO

Let’s talk about health. Some people have poor health because they don’t exercise at all. Their daily calisthenic routine involves digging in the couch for the remote. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are people who work out too much — like, we’re talking to extremely, unhealthy levels. You know the type.

The same phenomenon occurs in the e-commerce world when it comes to SEO. Some sites don’t focus on SEO, which means they aren’t going to get found by the 35% of customers who start their buyer’s journey from Google. And some focus too much on SEO, that they neglect other channels and tactics — including good, old fashioned pure promotion.

The remedy? Definitely make SEO part of the visibility strategy. But don’t make it the end-all-and-be-all of online existence. It’s important, but it’s not everything.

4. Bad Customer Service

 Customer service is as important in the online world as the brick-and-mortar world, and in some cases it’s even more important, because exiting the buyer’s journey is so simple — as is writing a scathing zero-star review that would have made Roger Ebert wince. Unfortunately, many e-commerce sites treat customer service as an afterthought or a necessary evil, rather than an asset that should be leveraged to optimize customer experience and generate loyalty.

The remedy? Make customer service — characterized by the ease, speed, and quality of responsiveness and resolution — a big part of the plan. It’s not an expense, but an investment.

5. Lack of Original, Compelling Content

E-commerce sites aren’t vending machines, yet many of them seem to take their inspiration from these handy contraptions that dispense candy and soda in exchange for money and the push of a button (be careful you don’t press the wrong one — you might end up with that oatmeal cookie that has been there since 2007, and not the Snickers bar that you’re craving).

However, most customers — even those who are very focused on getting a specific item, like a pair of sneakers, a smartphone, or a hotel room — want and expect to access relevant information to help them make a safer, smarter purchase decision. This could be videos, infographics, social proof (e.g. testimonials, reviews, case studies, etc.), articles, blog posts, and downloadable assets like ebooks,  checklists, and so on.

The remedy? Don’t skimp on creating original, compelling content. As a bonus, this will help with SEO and can connect you with profitable customers who are not in your primary target market.

The Bottom Line

Competition on the e-commerce landscape for the hearts, minds, and indeed, wallets of customers is ferocious. Avoiding these mistakes will go a long, long way to helping your e-commerce site survive and thrive.

You may even make enough profit to retire early, buy a cornfield in Iowa, and then turn it into a baseball field that inspires the feel-good movie of the year. Hey, it worked once before, right?

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and their German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

Choosing a Website Monitoring Firm? Ask These 5 Questions Before You Buy — not After

by Louis Kingston

Hey brother, can you spare $5 million?

That’s about what Amazon estimates it lost in sales back in 2013, when its website went down for around 40 minutes. For the math junkies out there, that’s $125,000 a minute, or $2,083.33 a second.

Granted, most businesses won’t suffer this kind of hefty financial setback if their website goes down. Sometimes, it pays not to be a unicorn. However, it’s enough to say that there will be a significant and wholly unwelcome cost — either due to lost sales (as in the case of Amazon), or lasting reputation damage. There can also be compliance issues that lead to fines and sanctions. Fortunately, that’s where website monitoring firms ride to the rescue and avert disaster, right? Well, yes and no.

Here is why: just like any other marketplace, there are good website monitoring firms out there, and there are bad website monitoring firms.  Obviously, your mission is to make sure that you choose the former and avoid the latter. But how? All firms promise to offer “comprehensive and robust” web monitoring services. And based on this, you may believe that the only real difference between them is price — which is utterly not the case. There are major categorical differences. And you do not want to discover after you sign (or affix your e-sig) on the dotted line that you’re on the wrong end of an over-promise and under-deliver arrangement.

To avoid that fate and help you filter website monitoring firms worth exploring from firms best avoided, here are seven questions to ask before you buy — not after:

1. Is your platform fully integrated?

Ensure that you get a fully integrated monitoring platform that covers all of your digital properties —- including your websites, mobile websites, web apps, and cloud services (SaaS) — so that you can access all of the real-time information you need in one place. Juggling multiple tools isn’t just tedious and complicated, but it can lead to errors, oversights and disasters.

2. How deep do you dive?

Don’t settle for just monitoring the basic availability of your URL. That’s like taking your car into the mechanic for a tune up, and as long as it starts then everything is perfect (and you get a bill for $150). You want to dive deep and monitor full page functionality within real web browsers, verify all elements, scripts, and interactive features (like real clicks and keyboard interactions), and scan for errors to proactively detect problems. You also want the option to monitor any port on any server or device, and track load times since, as we’ve written about, businesses with s-l-o-w websites are hanging out a virtual “Going Out of Business” sign.

3. Is there anything to install?

Steer clear of (usually empty) promises that installation and setup is fast, easy, breezy, exciting, or any other adjective that you’d expect to hear in a shampoo commercial. You shouldn’t have to install anything whatsoever, and setup should take a matter of minutes — not hours or days.

4. Do we have to maintain anything?

That groan you hear is the echo of countless IT professionals who have valiantly fought — but lost — the battle to maintain website monitoring tools. End the suffering and be the hero that your IT team needs by choosing a firm that handles all maintenance, including ongoing updates and innovations.

5. Do you offer a free trial?

There may be “no such thing as a free lunch,” but there is indeed such a thing as a free trial. The firms on your shortlist should offer you a full two-week trial vs. a few days, so that you can put everything to the test in your environment. After all, you wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive, right? Except in this case, there is no salesperson sitting beside you saying, “what’s it going to take to get you to drive home in this baby?”

The Bottom Line

Choosing the right website monitoring firm — and avoiding the wrong ones — is a critically important decision that, sooner or later, will impact your bottom line: for better or for worse. Asking prospective vendors all of the above questions is a smart and practical way to ensure that your selection is rewarding vs. regrettable.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and their German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

3 Reasons Why Website Speed is More Important than Ever

by Louis Kingston

Today’s business environment is relentlessly fast-paced. Today’s startups blast into tomorrow’s enterprises. And just as rapidly, today’s unicorns take a one-way journey into “hey, whatever happened to…” country. However, there’s another critical piece of the velocity puzzle that many businesses are missing, and it’s costing them customers and profits: the speed of their website.

Speed Kills Lives 

Nearly 50 years ago, the government introduced the phrase “speed kills” to warn drivers that going too fast from point A to point B could result in a detour to point C (the police station), point D (the hospital) or point E (the morgue). It was good advice then, and it’s still good advice now.

But when the scene shifts from the asphalt freeway to the information superhighway, speed doesn’t kill anything. On the contrary, it keeps websites alive as far as visitors are concerned. Here are the 3 reasons why:

1. Speed Makes Websites Sticky

The word “bouncy” has a happy and positive feel to it, while the word “sticky”…well, it doesn’t. Nobody shows up to a birthday party excited to jump around in the sticky castle, and swimming pool diving boards wouldn’t be doing their job if people stuck to them (although it would be kind of hilarious).

But when it comes to websites, sticky is glorious and bouncy is dreadful — and that’s where speed makes a massive difference. A study by Kissmetrics found that a one second delay in load time can send conversion rates plunging by seven percent! Think about that. Actually, don’t think about that. Just read this sentence. That took a whopping two (!) seconds.

2. Speed is SEO Rocket Fuel

An old joke in the SEO world goes like this: “Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? Page two of Google.” (And in related news, an old conversation among psychologists is: “Why do SEO people make jokes about hiding dead bodies?”)

Macabre humor aside, the point is simple to understand: for most (if not all) of their keywords, businesses either need to be on page one of Google — and preferably in the top three positions — or they might as well be advertising in the Yellow Pages (ask your grandparents).

Once again, speed is a big part of the SEO story. Google — which is obsessively secretive about how its algorithm works (the first rule of Google Search Club is that you don’t talk about Google Search Club) —has actually gone ahead and formally confirmed that page speed is a significant SEO ranking factor for mobile and desktop searches.

The moral to this story? All else being equal, a website that loads faster will rank higher than a website that loads relatively slower. And in the long-run that could mean the difference between surviving or shutting down.

3. Speed Influences Perception

Einstein revealed that time, quite literally, is relative. But you don’t have to become a physicist or get yourself on a million memes to experience the deep truth of this in your bones. Here’s a fun little experiment:

Imagine that your favorite football team is losing a very important game. It’s late in the fourth quarter, and your beloved team is behind by six points. Although the clock is ticking down one second at a time, in your view the time is racing by. Surely, the clock must be rigged!

Now, imagine that your team is ahead vs. behind. The clock is still ticking down one second a time, but to you it’s not racing — it’s grinding slowly and painfully. Yet again: the clock must be rigged!

What this simple example demonstrates is what psychologists dub the perception of speed. Essentially, this means that our emotions influence how we grasp the velocity of passing time. Just a few seconds can seem like the “blink of an eye,” or a tedious wait — as we all know from toiling at the (not-so) express line in the grocery store.

The direct link to website speed here is unmistakable: visitors dislike waiting for websites to load. Actually, they hate it. Each extra second exponentially adds to their unhappiness, and makes it more likely that they’ll exact revenge by smacking the back button on their browser — never to return.

No, this doesn’t mean that websites must load instantaneously, like flipping channels on a TV. Technology isn’t there yet, and visitors aren’t unreasonable or unrealistic. But yes, it does mean that speed is connected UX, and ultimately, with brand: fast loading times creative a positive experience and emotions that are associated with the brand, while slow loading times do the opposite.

The Bottom Line

Website speed has always been important. But these days, it’s crucial — and in many cases, it’s THE MOST IMPORTANT factor. After all, it really doesn’t matter how amazing a website is and what it offers, if visitors never get there in the first place.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and their German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

How To Reduce HTTP Requests To Speed Up Your Site

by Louis Kingston

Most of us are blissfully unaware of the technical feats happening in the background when we browse to a webpage. We typically only notice that there is some technical failure when the site we’re visiting takes such a long time to load that we get impatient and click refresh or the site outright displays an error message.  In actuality, there’s a lot that goes on between your web browser and the web page you’re visiting.

For digital marketers, it might seem that their expertise only needs to be focused on Search Engine Optimization, content marketing, and Pay Per Click. But, their hard work is never going to see the page one light of day on the Search Engine Results pages if the page’s load speed is extremely slow. Visitors will just click away to a site that loads quickly and without any errors.

In Pursuit of a Better User Experience

One of the main reasons for a slow site speed is a high number of HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) requests.

In a nutshell, an HTTP request entails the following procedure when you decide to visit a website:

1. Your web browser communicates with the web server that hosts the relevant site that you are trying to visit.
2. The web browser asks the host servers to send it all the files that make up the page you’re visiting. This includes all of the text, images, and multimedia.
3. The host then acknowledges your web browser’s request, sending over the files that make up the webpage, which are rendered as they’re received within your web browser.

Are You Taking Too Long to Respond?

Imagine it is your website that is being visited. Before the files can display on the visitor’s browser, a separate HTTP request will be made for every file that makes up that pages (images, javascripts, style sheets, etc). There can be many large files that can take an extremely long time to download. Most great sites these days have data that carry high definition images and can result in slow load times. This makes the Google Algorithm unhappy, and you get penalized. This can cause you to lose your top spot on the search engine results page.  On top of losing position in search results, it’s shown that your potential visitors will not stick around to wait for a slow page to load, and you can say goodbye to conversions. In fact, 47% of visitors to a site want to see a load speed of fewer than 2 seconds! (KISSmetrics report). After three seconds, you can expect 40% of people to hightail it out of there to find a faster solution.

The ideal number of files that make up a single web page is 10-30 files, but these days we see the number of HTTP requests balloon to over 100 per page on some sites!

How Can You Lower Your HTTP Requests?

1. Check your website’s current HTTP request number to see what is taking the longest to load. This can be done via AlertBot’s detailed and easy-to-read waterfall chart.
2. Eliminate all large, unnecessary images that aren’t contributing any value.
3. Optimize your remaining images by reducing the file size. Many servers automatically compress images for you, but you must double check.
4. Video and other social media integration tools could be adding seconds to your load speed, and then you will need to decide whether they are essential to your site.
5. Remove JavaScript, or at the very least make it asynchronous. A browser will always load an entire JavaScript file before loading the rest of the page. This can take up a significant amount of the load speed lag.
6. Ask your developer to combine CSS files to increase load speed. You can also use CSS Sprites to put all your image requests into just one.

Sounds technical, right?

AlertBot can provide you with the tools you need to pinpoint performance issues and help set you on the right path to better website performance. AlertBot offers a Free 14-day trial (without collecting any billing info).  Give us a try!

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and their German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

Synthetic Monitoring for SaaS

Congratulations, you have just leveraged an awesome Software as a Solution (SaaS) service for your organization. Perhaps you have implemented a popular application – like Office 365, SalesForce or Dropbox – to support your staff and enhance collaboration between teams. Now you need to ensure that your employees and / or customers are happy too.

At this point, a common misconception often arises: the belief that a SaaS application relieves businesses of all responsibility for monitoring the application. It is just a matter of time before your business is rudely awakened to reality when customers start complaining about outages or poor performance on social media, and overloading the support desk with calls.

A negative customer experience when utilizing one of your SaaS applications can affect your bottom line. Unfortunately, you cannot totally rely on your provider to keep the system ticking; even the big guys experience outages and cyber attacks. Synthetic monitoring provides a solution, a way for you to keep your finger on the pulse of your cloud services.

Taking responsibility for SaaS applications

Effective SaaS monitoring is measured by how positive the end-user experience is. For instance, if a user cannot log in to an application to retrieve a file you sent them, they will not be happy. Can you leave it up to a SaaS provider to keep you up-to-date when they have a problem? No. In fact, it is not unusual for SaaS providers to delay making press statements when they experience problems or not announce them at all. Organizations are fast realizing the importance of taking the responsibility of proactively monitoring the performance of the SaaS applications they use themselves.

In addition, in 2016 Gartner predicted that by 2018 50 percent of enterprises with more than 1,000 users would use cloud products to monitor and manage their use of SaaS and other forms of public cloud. This reflects the growing recognition that, although clouds are usually stable, monitoring applications requires explicit effort on the part of the cloud customer.

Why do you need to monitor your SaaS applications yourself?

• Whatever your Service Level Agreement (SLA) says, if customers cannot access your application, they are more likely to call you than your service provider, so you need to know exactly how your service is doing, rather than wait for irate customers to notify you.
• Again, whatever your SLA says, if you are not monitoring your SaaS application, you cannot know the conditions of your SLA are actually being met.
• A SaaS provider gathers generic data about all of its customers that may not be explicitly relevant to you, or sufficient to generate a meaningful performance analysis and take advantage of all the benefits a synthetic monitoring solution can, as we shall see, provide.

Monitoring the customer experience (CX)

Synthetic monitoring has immense benefits for monitoring SaaS applications. It can help you keep a finger on the pulse of your SaaS application by addressing the following core issues that affect the customer experience and can affect your bottom line:

• Identified bottlenecks in the UX: Is your application functioning as predicted? How is it performing?
  When customer functions like logging in, using shopping carts or search fail, visitors may defect to one of your competitors. Synthetic transaction tests easily simulate these types of transactions, enabling you to be certain everything is working as it should and that recent software updates have not broken existing functionality. It is much easier to measure performance when you have a baseline. Synthetic monitoring applications, like AlertBot, have user-friendly portals that provide charts, graphs and reports to highlight deviations from the baseline. They make it that much easier to keep your finger on the pulse.
• Error sources and reporting: If there is a problem, where is it?
  Synthetic monitoring is a powerful predictive tool. According to one leading industry professional, “Synthetic monitoring doesn’t rely on complex predictive algorithms, it doesn’t take a data scientist with a Ph.D to interpret the results, and it doesn’t require additional spending on IT infrastructure. What it does is predict, to a fair degree of accuracy, how your application will perform in which geographies and isolate the root cause of any detected bottlenecks.”
• Downtime and outages: Is your application online and accessible?
  While synthetic monitoring is traditionally associated with customer-facing websites, it is platform-agnostic and works just as well monitoring SaaS applications. For instance, it can identify what is competing for resources on your network. Resource hogging applications can degrade the overall performance of your service.

5 top advantages of using synthetic monitoring for SaaS applications

1. Quickly assess the overall impact and performance of new features on your system
2. Monitor multiple cloud centers simultaneously as well as performance in scenarios where traffic is ramping up aggressively
3. Validate base-line performance prior to signing off on an SLA with your provider and objectively monitor it after
4. Utilize automatically generated diagnostics and reports that enable you to share information and collaborate with your SaaS provider
5. Determine if a cloud service is down and exactly who is affected in what geographical locations

Synthetic monitoring for SaaS is growing in leaps and bounds

According to a MarketsandMarkets.com report, “Synthetic Monitoring Market by Monitoring Type (paywall),” the enterprise synthetic application monitoring market size is expected to grow $919.2 million in 2016 to $2,109.7 million by 2021, at a CAGR of 18.1 percent from 2016 to 2021. The report predicts that “SaaS application monitoring is expected to gain maximum traction during the forecast period.” Don’t get left behind.

Conclusion

A 451 Research study found that the rapid growth of public cloud services and network virtualization has often outstripped management and monitoring capabilities, creating “blind spots” in network operations’ ability to maintain internal uptime and performance benchmarks. If you only recently climbed on the SaaS bandwagon, it is likely that your existing system monitoring tools are not cloud-friendly.

You may need some help from the experts to help you keep your finger on the pulse of your new SaaS application. Mosey along to AlertBot for more information about a holistic synthetic monitoring solution.

10 Ways to Optimize Images to Improve Your Website Performance

by Louis Kingston

“Visuals express ideas in a snackable manner.” – Kim Garst, CEO of Boom Social

Visual imagery on websites is a powerful tool to grab the user’s attention keeping them curious, engaged and interacting on your webpage. Humans are a visual species. Our brains can process an image within 13 milliseconds with over half of the brain devoted to processing the visual information it receives. We show excellent memory capability for remembering pictures that is much higher than retaining text. Over 65% of the population are visual learners. What this means is that our websites must contain a healthy dose of visual images to keep a visitor engaged. Whether it’s on our homepage, service pages, in our blog articles, on our e-commerce sites –images are essential to driving sales, conversions and ultimately company growth.

Are Images Slowing Down Your Load Speed?

However, the images used must be optimized so that they don’t hamper your website’s performance. If they are too large, they are going to slow down your website’s loading speed. The Google algorithm doesn’t like that. More than seven seconds to load and Google’s going to ignore you, and you won’t make it to page one of SERP’s (search engine results page). The search engine’s focus is on organically profiling businesses that offer a great user experience; slow load speed will just have potential visitors clicking away.

Google loves text, and when it crawls your site, it can’t ‘read’ your images unless you have created file names, alt tags, and captions to describe the image. You are losing out on a perfect SEO opportunity if you don’t optimize your images.

Let’s investigate ten ways you can achieve image optimization for your website…

1. Use keywords in the image file name. The file name affords a perfect opportunity to include your primary keywords as well as giving Google enough text, so it knows what it is “looking’ at on your webpage. But make sure you never keyword stuff these descriptions. You don’t have to use descriptions for decorative images (that would be overkill and Google might penalize you).

2. Images must be scaled to fit the size it will be displayed on the site. The mistake many people make is that they think that once they take a large image and put it into a small size display area, it will then not take up so much ‘space.’ But the file size is still enormous and will continue to take a long time to load. The image should first be scaled to the size you want it to be displayed. You can also choose to remove any pictures that are no longer serving your website which will also improve the overall load speed.

3. Always reduce the image file to the lowest possible size without compromising too much quality. Many online tools can assist you to reduce your file size, like JpegMini, io, ImageOptim etc. Aim to keep your image file size below 70kb (if possible).

4. Use responsive Images for a better mobile experience. When you use responsive images plugins that apply the srcset attribute, it allows your pictures to display differently for each device screen width. If you are using WordPress, this function is automated.

5. Add Customer-Centric Captions. According to KissMetric, the captions under images are read 300% more than the body content. Visitors to web pages are scanning information, and a well-captioned image can provide them with a wealth of info at a glance. Remember that the images should always be relevant to the content.

6. Always be visible with alt tags. Proving alt tag text ensures that your images can always be ‘seen.’ If a user is unable to download images or if they are using a screen reader due to being visually impaired, the alt tag will describe the image.

7. Make sure to add image tags to your XML image sitemaps. This helps Google with indexing the images on your site. If you are making use of JavaScript galleries or other flashy pop-ups, let Google know what they are and where they are located on your sitemap so they can crawl these images on the web pages’ source code.

8. Remove metadata from raster images. If you are using raster images, there is often unnecessary info attached to it like geo-location and other information regarding the camera used which only takes up space. You will make the overall file size much smaller when you can get rid of this extra metadata.

9. Where possible use vector images. This format is ideal for multi-device use with high-resolution. Raster should only be used when there are complex scenes with loads of detail and irregular shapes. Then using GIF, PNG, JPEG, JPEG-XR, and WebP will be the right choice. Experiment with the raster settings to reduce the quality to free up more bytes.

10. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) should be minified and compressed. Minifying SVG files will reduce their size and GZIP can be used to compress them.

How is Your Website Performing at the Moment?

Of course, these are just ten basic image optimization pointers. You can drill down even further on image optimization to enhance your website performance. If you would like to find out more about your website’s performance, AlertBot can show you what elements are slowing down your site or what bottlenecks are causing user traffic to click away. We also offer a Free 14-day trial (without collecting any billing info). Give us a try!

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and their German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

Tortoise, Dinosaur or Ostrich?
Proactive vs Reactive Web Monitoring – 3 Metaphors From the Animal Kingdom
by Penny Hoelscher

In February 2017, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) S3 web-based storage service suffered an outage that led to half of the internet “melting down” and costing businesses millions. It was caused by an operator’s typing error when issuing a routine command to take a few S3 servers offline.

What has this got to do with you?

Despite the fact that the entire outage lasted 4 hours and 17 minutes, Amazon came under attack from experts and customers in toe-curling global headline news. AppleInsider reported that even Apple was affected, with a variety of cloud services experiencing outages and slowdowns. Apple relies on Amazon for portions of its cloud infrastructure. Albeit not as a result of the meltdown, rumor has it the company is thought to be gradually shifting away from its dependence on Amazon.

Perhaps you’re not an Amazon or an Apple, but you too may be vulnerable. It all boils down to reliability which has a direct affect on your revenue stream. If your web application or site delivers poor performance, your customers will go to your faster, more modern, more customer-centric competitors where they experience less downtime, fewer outages and faster page loading times, and better service. The result: you will lose sales, money and even your reputation.

How can you tell that it’s time to upgrade your website monitoring tool and get expert assistance? Well, you’ve already dropped the ball when you start noticing a decline in visitors; when once a waterfall, the stream of traffic to your website has slowed to a trickle. An external website monitoring tool like AlertBot can alert you to potential signs of trouble, like:

• Degraded performance, e.g. due to page bloating, inefficient scripts, backend services.
• Cyber attacks, e.g. website defacing and file changes.
• Incompatible website and addons, e.g. by loading and testing site scripts.
• Software and database issues, e.g. overloaded application servers and database bottlenecks.
• Server failures, e.g. SSL, DNS, HTTP, and Ping.

In a nutshell, if your website persona resembles one of the following – tortoise, dinosaur or ostrich – you’re in trouble:

TORTOISE: Outages, high down-times and slow loading times

The internet is not like your local shopping mall which is a convenient one-stop shop for all your household needs. These days, “I want it and I want it now” customers have far more options and if you’re closed for business, they’re not going to go and have a cup of coffee and wait for your door to open again; they’re simply going to mosey over to your competitors. Only one thing hasn’t changed in the digital sphere: some old adages hold true. Thing is, customer loyalty is a fair weather friend in an online environment, and when it comes to affiliate loyalty, frankly, for them, time is money.

Website monitoring tools not only report on outages and high down-times, they help you to identify where (e.g. a particular geographic location), when (e.g. peak hours) and why (e.g. network issues) these are occurring. You may find it is your business model that is at fault, not slow servers or bloated software; for instance, perhaps you’re doing maintenance and performing upgrades at the wrong time in a different time zone to that of your head office.

In addition, page loading speed is one of the ways Google ranks your web pages. This matters because when searching for products and services, customers will click on the matching businesses Google serves first.

DINOSAUR – Being behind the times

Google lowers mobile page rankings for companies who do not have a mobile responsive web design. New website design trends have changed the face of online businesses and today’s tech-savvy generation can spot an old-fashioned, un-cool design in a heartbeat. But, keeping up with new design technologies can have an impact on your website’s performance. Page bloat is much like a beer belly; extraneous code, affiliate advertising and toxic data (storage of unnecessary and dated information) creeps up sneakily but has a huge impact.

One of the main benefits of a professional website monitoring service is that it provides you with an automated artificial intelligence that can manage big data and learn from the information it receives. You don’t have to wait for users to complain or continuously test the site yourself, and, because your business is constantly evolving, it is able to update its algorithm in tandem. These sophisticated technologies not only gather and analyze the data you need to make an informed decision about performance, they provide you with the solutions.

Cyber attacks are a 21^st century bane to which all online businesses – big and small – are vulnerable. Of increasing concern is that at many companies, it can take months before a data breach is detected, giving cyber criminals plenty of time to ravage their victims’ systems. AlertBot can’t prevent a data breach but it can alert you when you’re attacked, e.g. by notifying you that files have been changed or your site has inexplicably gone down.

OSTRICH – Customer complaints

Negative social media posts can be harsh on a business’s reputation. Often, it may appear unfair, especially when the trolls join the battle to bring you down. Sure, you need a team to monitor social media channels and publicly appease customers (including the trolls) who have issues, but that’s not enough. An external website monitoring service can give you advance warning of problems with your system.

Customer Experience (CX) is not just about the latest trends – mobile first, conversational brands, emotional engagement, predictive analytics and personalization, etc.; CX is about serving customer needs and wants (read: demands) BEFORE they start complaining. Once your website starts exhibiting dinosaur or tortoise characteristics because you’ve been acting like an ostrich with its head in the sand, it is too late; all you will have is reminders of your ex-customers’ public vents still floating around on complaints forums and social media channels.

Conclusion

The Amazon debacle should be a wake-up call for businesses to be more proactive with regard to monitoring the uptime and infrastructure of their systems. Imagine how red your company’s face would be if you don’t notice a crisis before your users do and you have to be informed by irate calls and emails from them.

A monitoring tool like AlertBot simulates actual user behaviors and interactions, and runs tests using popular web browsers like Chrome and Firefox in real-time. It’s easy to set up (no installation necessary) and allows you to create scripts for different user experiences across multiple devices, using multiple features and functions, enabling you to be proactive at the best of times, and timeously reactive at the worst (after all, accidents do happen.)

The Most Important Pages and Processes to Monitor on a Website

Most companies take advantage of third party website monitoring services to monitor their websites 24/7 for performance issues and downtime. These services alert them immediately when problems arise, equipping them with the necessary knowledge to pinpoint the problem so their team can resolve it.

Companies rely on their website for many things.  Whether their website is used to generate leads, drive business, or keep customers engaged, essential processes and pages on their website are often the lifeblood of their business and online presence.

In the same way that a routine doctor or dentist appointment evaluates your health and checks for any potential impairments or issues that need improvement or fixing, using website monitoring to routinely check your site’s performance is crucial to the success of your company’s online presence.

Here are some important processes and webpages to evaluate and monitor on your website:

The Landing Page

Your landing page is the page that is supposed to hook your visitor, draw them in and get them interested in your product or service.  Making sure these pages are always reachable by potential new customers is of utmost importance.  It may seem like a no-brainer to monitor this vital page, but a lot of people who own small businesses do not think to apply website monitoring to their landing pages.

Page Loading Speed

Once the user gets past your landing page, they become keenly aware of your website’s speed; particularly if it’s sluggish.  With the competition being fierce, one of the major website processes to monitor is each of your page’s loading speed. You cannot afford to have a home page that takes 10 seconds or more to load. The new generation of internet users is not patient enough to sit through a sluggish download or stare at a spinning “loading” icon. If you have a page that takes time to load, you may need to make some design alterations, incorporating minimalistic design that is both attractive and loads faster. A lot of web designers have taken this into account and have adopted new techniques to make the webpages load faster while retaining a fresh and respectable look.  Website monitoring can help you identify if your page load time is negatively affecting your bottom line.

Geographic Performance

Monitoring your website traffic and performance from different countries is extremely important. Knowing where most of your customers come from and enhancing the performance from that geographic area the most can make all the difference for your business. If you cater to a certain state or province, then monitoring the specific geographical location or district that fuels your business is recommended.

Your Shopping Carts

E-commerce driven websites must monitor their shopping carts very closely. For example, if a customer placed products in a cart but did not buy them, it could mean that there are issues with the checkout process. However, if you were not monitoring your cart, you would never know about it and might just assume they lost interest. Poor shopping cart performance will directly affect your company’s sales, which makes monitoring your shopping cart processes that much more important.

Your Signup Pages

Any page on your website that prompts a customer to sign up or register for a service needs to be up and running 24/7. Statistics show that in cases where the signup pages of a website are not working optimally, visitors often abandon the signup process due to a loss in confidence.  Since these pages are directly involved with registering new customers or providing new service to existing customers, they are some of the most crucial to monitor on your website.

Login Pages

Customer frustrations over not being able to access members-only areas of your website can cost you not only customers, but also support hours dealing with the problem. Getting ahead of the problem by monitoring these areas can save your company a lot of time and money.

These are just some of the top areas of your website to ensure are running smoothly 24/7. Start monitoring your most crucial pages today with a no-risk, 14-day FREE trial of AlertBot and start saving your company time, money and unnecessary headaches.

When Does Most Website Downtime Occur?

To become competitive in the global market, it’s crucial for your business to have a strong online presence. One of the best ways to ensure this is to have a user-friendly business website that is accessible ’round the clock. And if your customers rely heavily on your website, you know that any amount of time your site is down could be rather costly.

Frankly, website downtime is inevitable. Even the big online giants like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Amazon and CNN have experienced website downtime at some point.  However, the good news is that you can mitigate the risk and lower the length of time your site remains inactive if you are familiar with some of the likely causes of website downtime.

Let’s dig a little deeper to find out the common causes of site downtime:

§  Server Overload

Server overloads occur when a big wave of online traffic overwhelms a server. Now, there are two situations when this happens. First, it happens if your site is being hosted on a shared server. Resources on shared servers are limited and they have to be stretched to support high volumes of traffic and site-processing needs, which can cause server overload. As a result, your site may be inaccessible to users for hours.

Second, server overloads may also happen on major online shopping days, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or any other occasion for that matter, when you have significant discount deals and special sales running on your website. Such deals draw in heavy traffic, thus increasing the chances of server overload and site downtime.

§  Hardware Failures

Server and network failures can bring a website to a screeching halt in no time flat. This could be caused by things like hard drive failures, power supply failures, circuit board failures, or cabling failures. It can also be caused by more troubling failures like data center infrastructure failures or network peering failures.

§  Webmaster Errors

Your business may experience downtime because of errors caused by the site’s webmaster. For example, your site may not be accessible to your audience if your webmaster forgets to renew the site’s hosting contract or domain name.

§  Coding Errors

Some common coding errors are incorrect syntax, infinite loops and typos. All of these errors can exhaust the resources of the server and yield 500 (Internal Server) error codes, resulting in website downtime.

§  Cyber Attack

With the surge in cyber crime, you need to make sure that your website is well-protected from cybercriminals, hackers and viral infections. Cybercriminals know how to hijack websites and redirect your site visitors to other websites or expose them to malicious content.

All of this can result in lengthy website downtime, which can be detrimental to your business sales, profits and reputation. And that is definitely something that no business owner wants! One way to help prevent cyber attacks is to keep your IT team, and those directly responsible for the health of your website and server, in the know about the latest cyber threats.

§  Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS)

Also known as DDoS, Distributed Denial of Service Attacks can also bring your online business to a standstill. DDoS are planned attacks. In these instances, heavy traffic is deliberately directed from different sources to cause servers to overload and, in some cases, crash entirely.

§  Natural Disasters

Website downtime may also occur when your data center is hit by a natural disaster like floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, etc.

§  Planned Downtime or Server Maintenance

Lastly, if you have a dedicated server, you may need to go offline for server maintenance. This usually involves upgrading hardware components, drivers, operating systems, firmware, and even software applications. With these planned occurrences, you can alert customers ahead of time to the planned outage, which can help combat and minimize the effect it may have on your business.

Knowing the reasons for, and causes of, website downtime is crucial as it will help you devise and implement the right mix of strategies to overcome and avoid it.

AlertBot’s external website monitoring service exists to help businesses like yours to identify and fix website errors when they happen and hopefully prevent future downtime. Visit www.AlertBot.com for more information and to signup for a free, no-risk trial.

How Much Impact Does an Hour of Website Downtime Have on a Business?

So, your business website is offline again and your IT team has sprung into action, trying to pinpoint the issue and fix it as soon as possible. Sure, it’s good that your IT experts are handling the problem responsibly, but do you know how much money your business may have lost during your website’s downtime? Well, if you are a major player in the ecommerce industry, chances are you could have lost millions of dollars by now. And that is not an overstatement.

Like it or not, even an hour of downtime can do a great deal of damage to your online business. Did you know that in 2014, Google experienced downtime which was caused by a virus and all Gmail, Google+ and Google Drive were affected by it? This downtime lasted for an hour, which decreased Google stocks by 2.4 percent.

But that’s not all! Amazon, the e-shopping giant, experienced 2 hours of downtime, presenting site visitors with cryptic HTTP messages. In just 2 hours, Amazon lost an estimated total of $3.48 million. That’s huge!

So, if you wish to estimate the true cost of an hour of website downtime has to your business, then you’ve come to the right place. Here are some of the more important variables you must consider when calculating this cost:

§  Impact on Business Sales

To figure out exactly how much an episode of website downtime costs in terms of sales lost, you’d need to determine what your average profits per minute are during the time period the downtime occurred. You can then multiply that average profit per minute times the number of downtime minutes to determine your total lost sales profits. If the downtime occurs at 2 in the afternoon, for example, it is most likely going to cost your business more sales than if the outage had happened at, say, 2 in the morning, when web traffic is typically much lighter.

§  Damage Done to Your Business Reputation

Downtime (especially if it’s frequent or at a crucial time) can scar your business’s reputation, losing the trust and loyalty of customers in your brand. Just like many businesses, you too have invested good money and a great deal of time in brand building. Your time and money can go to waste if you experience downtime—even if it is for just an hour. When considering the true cost of your site’s downtime, it is important that you keep in mind the resources you’ll need to spend to repair your tainted brand image going forward.

§  Money Wasted in Marketing Campaigns

Another factor to consider when determining the cost is the money you have invested in your marketing efforts, like PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. You need to figure out the amount of money that was spent on marketing while your site was experiencing downtime. This is important to calculate, because let’s face it – you literally didn’t reap any benefits from the invested money, because your site was inaccessible when prospects clicked on the PPC link or advertisement.

Prevention is Always Best!

Calculating the cost you might have incurred due to an hour of website downtime is essential, but there are precautions you can take to avoid unplanned downtime and keep your business up and running ’round the clock (and be a hero!). AlertBot is an intuitive web-based website monitoring service that can alert your team about website errors and slowness within seconds, and also help you keep track of your site performance. All of this is much needed to mitigate downtime issues significantly. Start the AlertBot 14-day free trial today!

Given the fact that we live in a highly-digitized world today, websites, blogs and web-stores are now an essential component of any business and brand. While waiting for a site’s content to load can be annoying for a user, it can also be potentially disastrous for business.

That, however, is only one reason to monitor the performance of your website. Here are four more:

1.     Loss of Sales and Web-Traffic

First and foremost, businesses maintain websites and have web-stores to promote commercial growth. Now, imagine a situation where you’ve gone to a store and the service is impossibly slow. The salesmen and women are hardly making an effort to engage or help you and you just decide to take your business elsewhere. The same happens to a shopper when they visit a website that takes ages to load. Instead of making a sale, you lose web-traffic and potential customers. You can prevent this by monitoring how your website is performing.

2.     Potential Damage to Brand Image

Customers talk, and they are interested in what others like them have to say. While most brands depend on marketing ploys to promote sales, the importance of word-of-mouth advertisement cannot be discounted. If you leave a bad impression on one customer, chances are that word will spread about it, tainting- if not tarnishing- your hard earned reputation and brand image. Who wants that?

3.     Error Detection

Website performance monitoring is the best way to prevent errors. It’s all too common for ecommerce sites to hit a snag and run into trouble.  If your site is regularly maintained and monitored, you’ll not only be able to fix a problem sooner; you might even be able to detect it beforehand and prevent it completely.

4.     Quality Maintenance

Just as quality assurance is essential for a physical store, it’s equally important for a website and web store. By using a performance testing and maintenance tool, software or application, you will be able to standardize and retain the quality of your website. Not only will that help preserve the website’s ranking on Google, it will also contribute to drive online traffic.  As it is, Google ranking is affected by the minutest change in website speed and downtime. This is the whole reason why websites are search engine optimized in the first place.

So, if you’re even partially convinced that your website needs performance monitoring, why not start the AlertBot 14-day free trial, today?

If you’re not quite sure what that is, third party code is usually any code provided by another company or website to plug in / embed a service on your website. For example, you may have a web stats tracking code, a banner ad rotator, or a couple lines of code that drops your Twitter or Instagram feed onto your website. These pieces of code are considered third party code since they’re provided by another source.

Some of the problems that this kind of code can cause may be:

• Slow page load times
• SSL errors (there could be a non-secure component in the code)
• Unexpected javascript errors of various kinds
• Failure to load some of your website content
• Inaccurate stats tracking

The case of causing inaccurate stats is a particularly interesting one that most people don’t consider. Problems with third party code could render your website’s stats unreliable if the stats code is not fully loading. When this happens, you may only be getting partial information about your visitors or no information at all.  If you make business decisions based on those stats, you may be making the wrong decisions based on misinformation.

In the case of third-party code causing slow page load times or loading errors, it affects your visitors’ experiences on your website.  Unhappy visitors may choose not to buy from you and often times won’t ever return to your website.

So what can you do in this situation? First off, you’ll want to diagnose the problem to make sure it is indeed the third party code causing the problems. AlertBot is an excellent service to use for finding out what is causing a bottleneck in your load time.

Once you know for sure that it is the third party code creating the issue, here are a few things you can do to resolve problems with third-party code:

1. Ask the Third-party provider to resolve the problem – The solution may be as simple as contacting the third party, informing them of the issue(s) you’re having and asking them to fix it. It’s possible that they’re not even aware there’s a problem.
2. Remove the third party code altogether – This may be the quickest and easiest solution, but obviously it doesn’t solve the problem if you really need the code on your site.
3. Look for other third party code providers – This may be your best course of action. While it can be time consuming to search for viable solutions, if you need the code, trying something else out could be the most sensible option. And if you can find reviews on the solution from other users who have tried it out, that’s even better.
4. Move to a purchasable / installable application – Free third-party code is great, and just dropping in a piece of third-party code is a nice time saver, but sometimes taking the high road and paying for an installable solution (with support) could be the best option for your business, especially when your own customers or clients are involved.
5. Ask a web developer to look at it – This might not be possible for every site owner, but it’s an especially good option if your company has a programming department. There’s a good chance that just moving the code to a different location in your page’s HTML (or onto a different page altogether) could drastically improve the situation.

So, as you can see, third party code can greatly impact your website. And if you’re experiencing some web performance issues and you’re utilizing third party code, there’s a pretty good chance that code may be the catalyst for those problems.

Sign up for a risk-free trial of AlertBot today and start down the path to better performance for your website.  AlertBot can track the performance of all your third-party code and lets you know when it’s causing problems.

Running an AlertBot waterfall chart is just one example of something IT and website managers can do to see how the site is performing with load times. Before you release your site’s new design, complete overhaul or its grand debut, it’s wise to give your site a thorough testing first. A simple test with AlertBot’s waterfall chart can reveal images or third party code that might be clogging up your load time — or many other possible hang-ups. Your site might look fine and dandy, but if the page is taking too long to load in this fickle web-browsing age we’re living in, it could be very costly for your business.

(Above is a real, abbreviated example of AlertBot’s waterfall charts)

In the end, it’s really like a visit to the dentist; they often give you tips and guides on how to prevent cavities and other oral problems, while helping you maintain good oral hygiene. Maybe using mouthwash or flossing daily will help keep your gums healthy and your teeth strong. Likewise, with the right web performance tools and tests, you can ensure quality conversions and hopefully prevent any possible decay in your site’s performance.

See for yourself with AlertBot’s completely free 14 day trial!

The report examined several sites that had experienced minor to substantial down times over the course of Friday thru Sunday, including NeimanMarcus.com and Staples.com. Our report, however, did not take into account Cyber Monday or the sales-heavy weeks that have followed.

On Cyber Monday, Neiman Marcus seemed to right the ship, while only a few sites appeared to experience no more than about 10-minute failures–including NewEgg.com and Staples–with Gap’s site registering 19 minutes of being unresponsive.

Throughout this month of December, Staples has continued to struggle with short outages; Walmart experienced some brief HTTP errors; while Footlocker, PC Mall, Crate & Barrel and Peapod all experienced just a couple few-minute hiccups (which in some cases could simply just be sluggish load times).

With online sales outperforming brick and mortar sales this Black Friday for the first time, it’s imperative now more than ever to make sure your site stays up and working, error-free. Sign up for a free 14-day trial with AlertBot.com today and start working towards a more successful ecommerce site!

While websites like Walmart, Fanatics and QVC experienced a couple several-minute outages on Thanksgiving Day, one of the sites that seemed to struggle the most on Black Friday this year was the online destination for department store Neiman Marcus. The site even experienced a downtime of two hours in the morning.

Second only to NeimanMarcus.com, however, is online tech retailer Newegg.com, who experienced some slow page load times no doubt due to the heightened traffic. Finally, Staples.com also experienced some short outages, but nothing more than a few minutes each.

Through Saturday and Sunday, it was much of the same with Neiman Marcus, Staples and Newegg, with Walmart seeing a few hiccups and Shutterfly.com experiencing a 45-minute outage due to the server being overloaded with traffic. Sony’s Playstation Network also experienced some significant downtime on Saturday, which also affected their online store.

Downtime of any length can be costly for any online retailer. According to this article by Evolven.com, “The average cost of data center downtime across industries was $5,600 per minute.” Clearly, that would add up real quick – especially on a major shopping day.

With AlertBot’s monitoring services, not only can you be alerted the moment your site experiences an outage or slow load times, but you’ll be able to use the AlertBot charts and reports to find potential hang-ups and future problems that will result in unnecessary downtime.

Give AlertBot a try with our totally free trial period and start seeing how AlertBot can look out for your business to help you prevent serious financial loss and online disasters.

Get Your Website Ready For Holiday Traffic

It’s that time of year again. As we say farewell to summer and prepare for the coming of autumn next week, online retailers are faced with one harsh reality: Black Friday is a mere two months away. And while that may seem like a long time from now to some, now is really the time for preparation. And just like any brick and mortar retailer needs to have their store ready to go with employees on hand to wrangle the shopping masses, websites need to make sure their site is tuned up and ready for an influx of traffic.

If you’re feeling pretty confident that you’re ready and that this warning may seem premature or unnecessary altogether, let’s take a moment to spotlight last year’s Black Friday festivities and pitfalls.

The biggest name to have experienced major website failures last November was electronics retail chain Best Buy. Issues were recorded and reported on throughout the day on Black Friday and it sent social media abuzz with chatter and complaints about the site’s performance—or lack thereof.

Best Buy wasn’t the only one affected, however. Computer company HP’s webstore also experienced failure, while in the UK, online stores Currys (electronics), Argos (department store) and Tesco (groceries) all went down as well.

So what can we glean from this?

If you’re an online retailer, you’re probably already thinking about the holidays and getting prepared, but now is the most crucial time to not only make sure you have reliable website monitoring, but to evaluate your website’s performance so you can make improvements before the big online sale days. And you’re in luck – AlertBot can assist with your performance evaluation and help you rest assured that your site will perform better in time for the holidays. Try it out for free with our 14-day trial.