When monitoring the volume of visitors to a website, you will notice certain patterns to it and identify a range you consider normal or usual. However, it is likely that there are significant or noticeable changes to this range every now and then. These traffic spikes can indicate several things and if you are not prepared for them, you may fail to support this influx of customers.
If your website is not prepared for the spike in traffic, it may slow down or crash. While an IT consulting company studies the issue and finds solutions, your visitors will be left frustrated and dissatisfied. Poor user experience of this nature has the ability to make customers opt for similar products and companies in the market instead of your products.
In addition to customers thinking you are unprofessional and unable to handle business operations properly, a website that is slow can also result in a higher bounce rate and customer churn rate. It can also result in a drop in SEO rankings and affect web performance data.
The impact of a company not being prepared for traffic spikes will adversely affect sales and growth and undo years of marketing strategies used to build the company’s online presence. A business may have, for instance, increased SEO rankings over time with the use of high quality, timely, and informative content, but may experience a drop in their SEO rankings due to the website slowing down or crashing whenever there is an influx of visitors.
In order to avoid this, a business should look into application monitoring, where the performance of an application is studied, measured, and analysed in order to identify changes in performance, especially if they impact user experience and the business in a negative manner.
There are several tools and programmes that monitor application performance, but a business can also inquire with their IT service management team if they carry out application performance management. By having a reputed IT consulting company carry out application monitoring services for you, you can be assured that the best software and tools are being used to monitor the performance of your website and that reports will be prepared on a regular basis.
Whether you access tools yourself or work with an IT service management company, it is vital that you monitor your traffic spikes and application performance in general.
One of the main reasons for this is that you can gain insight on spikes and what causes them, thus making you more prepared for future changes in web traffic. By studying the behaviour of your visitors and pinpointing patterns in web traffic, you will be able to have a better understanding of the factors that cause a spike in traffic. While spikes are often unpredictable, data on visitor behaviour will give you the resources and time you need to prepare for sudden changes in website traffic.
An application monitoring tool will also identify a spike as soon as it begins and study it. This allows you to respond quickly to the spike in traffic, instead of having to detect traffic spikes and issues in a time-consuming, manual way.
If you make use of application monitoring services by an IT consulting company, you may also be able to access services like web stress testing, website uptime monitoring, synthetic transaction monitoring, and full page load monitoring. These services will allow you to further improve user experience, especially during traffic spikes.
Businesses are constantly looking for ways to increase their customers and thus sales. While there are different ways of doing this, you can learn a lot about how to expand your normal range of visitors by looking at the factors that cause the traffic spikes. Identifying causes for the traffic spike may highlight areas you had not considered before and may give you the necessary data to attract more quality traffic to your website.
While doing this, you may also discover new traffic sources and an IT service management company will help you access these sources and benefit from them. This is another reason why it is important to track and monitor traffic spikes and website performance.
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