Shopware Monitoring: Why Monitor the Performance of Your e-Commerce Store?
Launching a new e-commerce website is only half the battle. If you want your online store to effectively carry out its main function — sales, there is still much work to be done.
At times of a highly competitive e-commerce nature, web-store owners should do their best to achieve smooth website performance and maintain it at the proper level. Customer attention is the only hard currency on the Internet, and it’s not an easy task to keep it.
Even the slightest error or a little downtime may lead to significant revenue losses. Customers are likely to move the focus on your “just a click-away” competitors, if your web-store is not accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
To prevent that from happening or detect a problem earlier than your online buyers and minimize the response time to a failure, it’s necessary to monitor your website performance on a regular basis.
Website monitoring is the process of testing a website or a web application performance to ascertain its availability and seamless functioning of all processes. It can be conducted with the help of various website monitoring services and tools.
Essential website performance metrics to monitor
Availability
It’s a basic monitoring category. If a user is unable to access your e-commerce site, obviously, your sales success is at risk. Availability monitoring lies in testing the server’s response and the time it takes to respond.
Page load time
This is almost a key metric in website performance monitoring. As the saying goes, “page loading speed can make or break a website”. According to the statistics, 1 in 4 visitors abandons a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. This metric defines the period of time required for loading content on a web page.
Content monitoring
It implies checking if a specific text can be displayed at a given URL.
Error rate
This metric shows the percentage of request issues your web-store has in proportion to the total quantity of requests.
Security
This is the metric that should never be neglected, otherwise, you can jeopardize not only your business welfare, but also the sensitive online data of your customers. Constant security monitoring helps reduce the probability of hacking attacks.
Tools used to monitor Shopware-based websites performance
Shopware 6 is an e-commerce platform, widely-used for developing progressive e-commerce businesses of international levels. Its powerful potential already guarantees websites’ reliability. And Shopware monitoring will only contribute to better effect.
There are many Shopware monitoring solutions available, and here is a couple of them:
Koality.io. It is a website monitoring service that has recently released the first plugin for Shopware 6.
Due to its open-source nature, anyone is able to make changes in code and add specific monitoring metrics that are important exactly for their businesses. Such an approach enriches the plugin’s ecosystem and makes its use even more efficient.
MND Monitoring plugin notifies store owners about various issues, like suspicious activity on their websites, outdated plugins, unfilled or empty feeds, etc.
This plugin can function independently from a Shopware web-store, which means it can still operate even if a website doesn’t respond.
Final say
If your online store doesn’t operate properly, you will lose orders that could have been placed during downtime; your investments in advertising will be in vain — potential visitors won’t be able to access your web-store anyway; besides, downtimes affect the website’s ranking in a negative way, etc.
Regular website monitoring facilitates reducing risks of malfunctions and avoiding customer dissatisfaction and loss of profit.
With a variety of web monitoring tools and services, it’s possible to easily identify potential issues and forestall much greater problems in the future.
Since Shopware performance is already on a high level, Shopware monitoring can neutralize risks of malfunctions and help you enjoy the fruits of your efforts in full force.