Your website is a cornerstone of your business in today’s technology-driven era. You can expect new customers to research you online – and assess your trustworthiness – through your website before approaching you. And if you operate an e-Commerce store or similar, then your website performance is responsible for a large chunk of your earnings, if not the entirety of them.
1. Safeguarding Against Cybersecurity Threats
The cost of a single data breach is staggering – up to $3.62 million according to Cybercrime Magazine. Needless to say, most businesses can’t afford to take such a hit. 60 percent of small companies shut shop within six months of falling victim to a large enough breach. Actively monitoring your site allows you to spot and quickly respond to threats. Some examples are site redirects, data theft, offensive content, and ransomware.
2. Getting Your Site Back Up and Running Quickly
Websites can and do go down, due to technical difficulties, human error, or external threats. This applies even if your site is backed up. When your site goes down, your business may be affected. Your customers may be directly or indirectly affected too. The fallout can range from a loss of reputation to a loss of revenue. For major companies, a single hour’s downtime translates to a financial loss of $1 million. Monitoring your site actively allows you to get it back up and running quickly.
3. Improving Search Engine Rankings
Your search engine ranking determines how prominently you feature in Google and other search engine results. You need a solid, long-term search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to climb up the charts, so to speak, and maintain your lead. Keeping tabs on your site’s performance allows you to also keep an eye on your SEO. You can make updates and changes, as necessary, based on current trends and your site’s strengths and weaknesses.
4. Maximizing Your Website’s Technical Performance
Last, we have your site’s technical performance – how quickly it loads up, its mobile-friendliness, its accessibility, availability, bug-free nature, and more. The technical performance correlates to your visitors’ user experience (UX). Nobody likes slow-loading websites, for instance, or 404 errors for pages that should be there but don’t exist. By keeping an eye on your site’s performance, you can ensure your site functions at an optimal level.
5. Better Aligning Your Website With Customers’ Needs with BPM
Your customers have needs. They may want to buy something, for instance, or be after a particular piece of information. They expect your website performance to serve their needs quickly. You should check and adapt your site to better fit your customers, based on how they use your site. You can use a business process management (BPM) framework for fine-tuning your site’s usability.
Business process management (BPM) identifies how people, systems, and data interact with each other. This insight is then used to improve a work process – in this case, your website. The goal is to provide a user-friendly experience, in line with what customers want. BPM is never ending, as it is constantly finding efficiencies in your business processes and then refining them further, based on gathered information.
6. Essential Performance Metrics You Should Measure
To be able to monitor your site’s performance, you must pinpoint and measure key metrics. Indeed.com offers a full list. For example, you should keep tabs on the number of unique visitors to your website, which shows the number of new leads your webpage is drawing in. You can also measure how long your unique visitors stay on your site, which indicates the quality of the content on your webpage. These data points offer critical insight into how well your website is doing. You can improve your online presence and also overall business with this information.
Conclusion
Rome wasn’t built in a day – and neither are high-performing websites that can drive business growth. Constantly monitoring your site’s performance – using business process management and keeping tabs on key metrics – will give you the insight you need to make it better over time. It’ll be a worthwhile investment, giving you a steady stream of leads, a heightened profile, and improved business growth.