When running an online store, you are constantly tuning your offer and advertising activities to get the most conversions out of the available budget. But are you sure that your store is technically optimized so that no money spent on advertising or SEO is wasted?
An online store is a complicated thing — in addition to the attractiveness of the offer, visuals, quality of content, intuitive customer journey and a ton of other details affecting the conversion, there are quite a lot of technical factors that are not visible, but when neglected they may reduce the effectiveness of your activities.
And even if you have also optimized your WooCommerce store in technical terms, you should constantly monitor this optimization, because it is very easy to ruin it completely.
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Availability
You probably surf your store’s website many times every day. You assume that you see what the users see and if it works for you, and then it works for them. Things are rarely so simple. A large part of your website is downloaded from the local cache memory to speed up page loading. This means that you see files (e.g., styles or graphics elements) downloaded from the server some time ago. If something changes, you can notice it after a long delay (or not at all).
The second issue is the scale of traffic. If at some point the popularity of your store starts to outgrow its performance, it does not mean that it will suddenly become unavailable to everyone. It may turn out that some of your users (including you) will be able to load your store and display it normally — and only some of them (above the capacity limit) will see an error message.
Regardless of whether your store becomes unavailable for some users or for everyone, you should be the first person to know about it. To be able to react before the user’s notice and start to “vote with their feet”, that is, go to the websites of your competition (standard reaction in the case of ecommerce). If you find out about a problem from a friendly user, then most likely it is already too late.
With the help of remote monitoring services that pretend to be real users 24 hours a day and seven days a week, you can test your store by checking its availability — but also other important features.
Speed
The speed of loading and functioning of websites has dual significance these days. First, it is about the best possible experience for the users who are growing less and less patient (especially mobile users). You want your store to load as quickly as possible so that the impatient client does not give up and go somewhere else.
Google has always indicated that one of its goals is to “improve” the Internet. It does this not only through a series of activities aimed at presenting the best search results. In addition, Google promotes security (HTTPS instead of HTTP) and user experience in terms of page speed and accessibility for people with disabilities. That is the second meaning of speed — SEO — i.e., its impact on the position in the search results and the volume of organic traffic from Google.
In practice, it looks like this: a page that loads no longer than two seconds is fine from the user’s point of view. However, below these two seconds mark, there is a struggle for every millisecond and every byte saved thanks to optimization. Users will not notice this anymore, but the optimization’s effect translates (as one of many factors) into the position in the search results.
No matter how good of a result you manage to achieve, you certainly do not want to lose it afterward. That is why you should monitor your store for the speed of loading — so that every slowdown can be detected and immediately communicated to you.
Features
Availability at 100%, the page loads in slightly over a second and yet, despite a large amount of traffic from the campaign there are no sales. Before you start researching how well your offer matches your target group, check whether the entire purchase process is working correctly.
You can do it manually, but even better to entrust it to an external monitoring application. One, which, apart from checking the availability of the site every minute and measuring the speed of its loading, will cyclically perform specific actions according to the scenario, you have defined. For example, search for a product, display the product’s card, enter parameters, add to cart, display cart, change the number of products, enter buyer’s data, and place the order.
Thanks to such monitoring, you will learn about every problem in the purchase process — regardless of the stage at which it appears.
Other Problems
In addition to the availability, speed, and functioning of the online store, you can monitor other features that are potential sources of problems. For example, the expiration of an Internet domain or SSL certificate or presence on blacklists — appearing in the Google SafeSearch list means that browsers will display a red warning card instead of your store. Monitoring can also detect whether you are blocking search engine robots (through robots.txt or the robots meta tag), which can be triggered by accident — or you may forget to disable it after the release of the new version of the site.
Monitoring Tools
There are around 150 website monitoring services on the market. To monitor your online store you need a service that effectively:
- checks the availability of the site at least once every minute
- can measure the time it takes to fully load a page (i.e., with all embedded graphics, styles and scripts)
- offers testing of features (processes) according to scenarios
- excludes false alarms, confirming any detected failure from several independent locations
When working with WooCommerce, it will be most convenient for you to use an application that offers a plugin for WordPress. This will allow you to configure tests and view reports within your CMS — without the need to log in to an external website each time.
Most monitoring providers allow you to test their services before you buy — by setting up a trial account, usually for 14 days. It is worth using this feature to get to know the service’s capabilities, the application’s interface, the appearance of alerts and various other specific factors.
Monitoring Service You Don’t Want
Forget about monitoring services provided by your WooCommerce hosting provider. They definitely do not care about informing you about every little failure. In addition, such a monitoring service usually focuses on checking the availability of the server and omits elements related to the website itself — its features and performance.
Also, ignore the plugins that monitor your website locally. They can test the store’s features quite well, but only when it works. If the website (or the entire server) fails, nobody will alert you. The speed of the website also cannot be tested locally, because the users connect to your server from a distance and the access links have a significant impact on the perceived speed. That is why you need external monitoring.
Free website monitoring services offered by many providers may seem like a very tempting option. Remember, however, that they offer them only to persuade you to pay. Thus, you can expect the free version to be incomplete or imperfect. Most often, free monitoring checks the site with a low frequency (every five or more minutes). This means that you can be informed about a failure with a long delay or not learn about it at all (if it lasts 4 minutes).
Other limitations of free monitoring are the lack of SMS alerts (very useful feature), the availability of only the basic features and the lack of support from the provider.
You can find consolation in the fact that paid monitoring is not expensive at all. The prices of packages that allow you to monitor your online store start at around $30 per month.
Summary
Monitoring will not help you with optimizing your store or ensure 100% availability of the website. However, it will give you confidence that your marketing budget does not go to waste, for example, due to insufficient server performance or a failure of one of the important features of the store. And that you will never miss an unplanned drop in your website’s speed or the expiration of your domain or SSL certificate.
It is one of the additional expenses in the ecommerce industry, but rather necessary if you are serious about this business.
Disclaimer: This is a guest post by Konrad Caban from Super Monitoring. The opinions and ideas expressed herein are author’s own, and in no way reflect Cloudways position.
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Saud Razzak
Saud is the WordPress Community Manager at Cloudways - A Managed WooCommerce Hosting Platform. Saud is responsible for creating buzz, spread knowledge, and educate the people about WordPress in the Community around the globe. In his free time, he likes to play cricket and learn new things on the Internet. You can email him at m.saud@cloudways.com
