Evaluating site performance is essential to improve the level of customer satisfaction. Very often customers move away to another site if they find that your site takes hours to download. You can't blame them because the onus of hosting a good website rests solely on you.
The slow downloads can be on account of the web server's low processing speed, low bandwidth connection, website's poor database structure or overloading of web pages with images and graphics. They can be on account of any one of these factors or all the factors. It is for you to find out why your site is slow and fix the problem.
Research has shown that slow website performance can cause huge losses in retail sales. Fortunately, several performance monitoring tools are now reachable, both offline and online. You can use these tools to evaluate your website's performance.
You can subscribe to a remote monitoring service and get a comprehensive analysis done. This analysis will look into content mix, web server speed, bandwidth availability, server downtime, page performance, etc. It will help you to identify the key problems and help you fix them, before your customers start complaining. Most performance monitoring services will notify you immediately about a problem by phone, e-mail, pager, or any other means available.
They will also provide you with real-time and historical reports about site performance and site availability. A big advantage is that they can be set up instantly and produce immediate results. They don't require any special training at your end as the entire report is generated by specialized software or the web analytics team. There are also no issues regarding integration or technology risks. It is a simple and straightforward operation, and will keep you posted day after day about your site's performance.
An important feature of these services is the load stress test. Most sites work normally when the traffic is low. However, once the traffic picks up the sites start slowing down. You therefore need an agency to evaluate your site's speed when it has 50 visitors and the speed when it has 500 visitors. This will help you scale up your operations accordingly, and be ready for bigger goals.
These services are especially important for small businesses located on a shared server, and desperately trying to build traffic loyalty. They can use these reports to correct aberrations in their hosting strategies.