The complete website monitoring checklist

Monitoring your website can be time-consuming and taxing if you don’t have the right processes in place. Without routine controls, undetected website glitches or server errors could impede customer satisfaction, cause cart abandonment, and lead your conversion rate to plummet overnight.

A website monitoring checklist helps you safeguard your site and catch damaging changes before they compromise your reputation, frustrate users, and stress out your team. We’ve compiled a complete checklist your team can use to spot website performance changes before you lose sales, money, and user trust. Let’s dive in. 

Why use a website monitoring checklist?

Whether you’re an ecommerce team, marketer, or product manager, website monitoring helps you maintain and improve your site's performance. But without a checklist to guide you, steps get missed and monitoring can quickly get overwhelming. 

Here’s why a website monitoring checklist is important:

• Having processes in place keeps you organized whether you’re a team of 5 or 50

• Staying on top of the slightest metric change helps you prevent a negative user experience (UX) and loss of visitors, customers, and sales

• A clear process enables you and your teams to react quickly and alert users in case of unplanned downtime

• A strategic checklist lets you prioritize your most important metrics instead of performing random checks without clear goals

Maintaining the quality of your website will benefit your sales results…and having a monitoring checklist offers a step-by-step method to go about it. Think of checklists as a governance framework—they ensure we know our limits and help us prepare to stay within them. — Anirudh Murali, Co-founder and CEO, Economize

The definitive 5-step website monitoring checklist

The key to effective website monitoring is balancing quantitative analytics metrics with qualitative user experience insights.

Monitoring quantitative data gives you a bias-free and straightforward view of your website's health. Precision statistics allow you to see if there are abnormal spikes or drops in the data and alert you to trouble. 

On the other hand, monitoring qualitative data contextualizes your numbers and suggests ways to improve them. Insights into your user experience (UX) help you discover and fix barriers, enhance the customer journey, and turn users into customers.

Monitor your website across 5 levels:

• Accessibility: is your website available and can users reach every page? 

• Performance: is everything working correctly?

• Safety: is company and user data secure?

• Agility: is your site fast enough?

• Usability: can users navigate your site smoothly?

An effective process doesn’t stop at website monitoring performance metrics. Before you establish your checklist, get your team organized. Decide if you’ll focus on cross-functional collaboration where different roles and departments all participate in monitoring or hand over complete monitoring to one team. 

You should also consider whether you need to outsource any of the more technical aspects of the set-up. Whichever option you choose, everyone involved needs to have clear responsibilities for a monitoring checklist to be successful.

Before you start monitoring, define standards for each metric so your team can spot red flags quickly. Year-on-year data can help you settle on your 'normal' rates. If you don’t have the data to draw your own baseline yet, use a tool like Contentsquare Benchmarks to see how your numbers compare to averages in your industry.

Now, here’s your checklist:

1. Monitor downtime

It’s critical to monitor your outages and set up alerts so you can react quickly. If customers can’t find you, they won’t hesitate to turn to your competitors. Downtime not only affects traffic and conversion—your search engine ranking can also take a hit. Every minute of lost accessibility means a loss of customers, money, and visibility. 

Metrics to monitor 

• URL: your URL is the only way to monitor if your site is available. However, checking your URL manually isn’t feasible as you’ll need to monitor it frequently and from different locations to be the first to know when your site is down.

Tools to use 

• Uptime Robot 

• Uptime

Both tools allow you to set up frequent monitoring, email and text message updates, and customer alerts. Check out our comprehensive article on website monitoring tools for a full guide on tools that can help. 

How often 

Set up automated 5-minute monitoring with real-time updates to ensure you know about downtime as soon as it happens. Activate both text and email alerts in case an outage affects your main server and email delivery.  

See downtime monitoring in action

Imagine you’ve just launched a new product page for running sneakers on your ecommerce website. Emails communicated the new release to subscribers with a special discounted offer for same-day purchases. Then, your page crashes. Maybe you don’t see your email but, because you’ve established a robust monitoring system, within minutes, a text message alerts you to the downtime. You alert the teams involved and notify your users. 

Automated downtime monitoring helps you identify the issue and solve it—maybe by getting your site up and running, then quickly crafting an email to your subscribers apologizing for the downtime and offering free shipping to the affected users to keep them loyal.   

2. Monitor conversions

A healthy bottom line depends on healthy website performance so make sure you set up conversion monitoring using both qualitative and quantitative metrics. 

Metrics to monitor

• Traffic sources: you want to ensure your traffic sources remain diversified and users can arrive on your site from each one. For example, if you’re relying on organic traffic and Google changes its algorithm overnight, your lead capture will crash and affect micro-conversions like filled-out contact forms, category page views, and cart additions.

• Conversion rate: monitor the conversion rate of each traffic source. Is one source converting while another has dropped off completely? 

• Macro-conversion rate: if you’re an ecommerce site, monitor if your sales rate is stable. If it suddenly falls, you’ll need to investigate.

• UX performance: though not a numerical metric, it’s important to study your user experience when investigating your conversion rate. If users are getting stuck on your site or unable to find the information they need, your conversion rate will suffer. 

Tools to use

• Use Contentsquare to easily build a dashboard to track your website acquisition data, including conversions. The Headlines feature will give you weekly updates on the most important changes to your KPIs. What’s more, you can easily click through from these quantitative data points to session replays and heatmaps that show you how your users click and scroll through your pages.

• Use Google Analytics to monitor traffic sources and micro-conversions, conversion rate per traffic source, and pre-defined goals (macro-conversion)

• Uptrends helps you track your customer’s path from traffic source to your website to show you if there are connection problems on specific devices, platforms, or browsers. For example, if you spot drops in mobile device use, Uptrends will show you if there are API issues or if it’s a question of a broken click-through link. 

How often

Website conversion is your most important metric so you want to monitor it bi-weekly if not daily to catch any sudden drops to protect your bottom line.  

Conversion monitoring in action

If a macro-conversion like sales rates drop, yet your APIs and traffic-source clickthrough links are working, you can use Contentsquare Session Replays to watch customers’ behavior once they’re on your site. You may discover users are abandoning their carts because of a glitch in the check-out button. By filtering for rage clicks, you can pinpoint whether users are frustrated with the check-out link on certain pages versus others.

💡 Pro tip: to truly understand your conversion rate, you should monitor not just the metric itself, but the context around it. Contentsquare’s tools help you connect the dots between user behavior and your conversion rate. 

For example, Journey Analysis turns your conversion funnel metrics into a data visualization. If there’s a high drop-off page that seems to be affecting your conversion rate, you can click through to watch session replays to find out what happened to shape the users’ behavior in this way.

3. Monitor site health 

Speed is paramount to a website’s success and health. A slow site can frustrate customers, lower conversions, and impact SEO ranking. Like downtime, if potential customers have to wait before they can view pages, load images, or check out, they’ll abandon your site for a competitor’s. 

Metrics to monitor

• Page speed: to keep users on your site, monitor the speed of your landing, product, and category pages, especially for ecommerce. The optimal page load speed is between one and two seconds—three seconds or more is considered slow.

• Bounce rate: monitor how many users leave your site after viewing a single page. The average ecommerce bounce rate is 47% percent. You want users to browse your site just as they would a brick-and-mortar store. The deeper they dive into your site, the more likely they are to convert. 

• Core web vitals: check your image and video load time, button and link click-through functionality, and layout stability. Poor performance on any of these elements can interfere with UX and cause your customer abandonment rate to soar.

Tools to use

• Google Analytics: covers core web vitals and bounce rate

• StatusCake: in addition to core web vitals and page speed, StatusCake also monitors domain expiration notifications and website uptime

• Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis: analyzes your site speed as it appears to users, live in different locations. If your website’s performance is lacking, it provides suggestions to help you improve it. 

How often

Monitor your site health daily.

Site health monitoring in action

Glasses retailer, Specsavers, decided to implement Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis on their site, to monitor this key health metric. It quickly became apparent that site speed had a big impact on conversion. According to Specsavers Global Head of Digital Analytics and Technical SEO, James Saukinsey, “Contentsquare shows us that users who experience faster site speed are more likely to click on CTAs, convert better and follow a more linear journey.”

Analysis in Contentsquare enabled the Specsavers team to quantify the impact of speed-increasing updates on their revenue, and justify allocating resources to making their site as fast as possible. Since doing so, they’ve seen a 33% increase in the conversion rate of optics bookings, and a 25% drop in their bounce rate. 

4. Monitor security

A healthy site is also a protected site. Users need to feel confident that their browsing experience and personal data are safe.

If you’re a larger company, you’ll likely delegate cybersecurity monitoring to your devs department, though you’ll want to understand how any security issues could affect your user experience. For smaller teams, there are many ways to keep an eye out and protect your site from hackers and attacks. If you use platforms like Shopify, you’ll already have a layer of protection in place. If not, use a complete cybersecurity monitoring tool to measure technical metrics.  

Metrics to monitor

• Homepage security: check your homepage to see if there are any changes, like a new pop-up color, links you never added, or an unplanned redirect. These are tell-tale hacker signs. 

• Collaborator access: whether you have multiple employees or collaborators, monitor how they access your site and which devices they use. In the 2021 Egress Data Breach Survey, 94% of data breaches came from within the organization with human error as the underlying cause. To mitigate the risks, provide limited access to your collaborators, remove anyone who’s no longer part of your team promptly, and give new users restricted access. Then make sure they use secure passwords or VPNs.

Tools to use

• Intruder: this complete vulnerability monitoring tool protects your entire tech stack. It includes continuous security checks, compliance issues, weakness identification, and surface monitoring. 

• StatusCake: this versatile tool monitors your site's uptime, page speed, domain expiration notification, SSL, and server

• Contentsquare’s Session Replays: session recordings help you spot any potential security issues

How often

Check your homepage daily, your collaborator access monthly, and run a complete vulnerability check with Intruder or StatusCake in continuous monitoring mode.

Security monitoring in action

Ecommerce sites are especially vulnerable to attacks because they’re dealing with sensitive customer data like personal identification and credit card information. Let’s say you run a daily internal vulnerability scan with Intruder and find a new employee is using a weak password to access your site. You can address the situation immediately, explain how to create a strong, unique password, and save your website from data breaches and cyber-attacks. 

5. Monitor usability 

Usability should be at the heart of any monitoring website checklist. By prioritizing a smooth UX, you can empathize with your users, find the best solutions to their barriers, and keep delighting them so they’ll return and refer your site to others. 

Metrics to monitor 

• Page views: monitor how many users land on specific pages. For a fashion ecommerce site, high product page views with low interaction rates for things like product descriptions can signal a problem. 

• Scroll depth: measure how users consume your page content vertically and horizontally. If users remain at the top of your page, while your most important content is located below the fold, evaluate whether the design is optimal or if there’s an error.

• Session duration: check how long a user stays on your website. An average ecommerce session duration is 2-3 minutes. Shorter time frames can signal usability issues. 

Tools to use

• Google Analytics: to monitor page views

• Contentsquare Dashboards, Heatmaps and Session Replays: use Dashboards to keep track of page views, Heatmaps to monitor scroll depth and Replays for session duration. You can also complement your initial findings with on-site and external Surveys to better understand why users limit their scrolling to a certain page section or why someone spends less than one minute on a product page.

How often

Monitor page views daily. You can monitor usability metrics weekly or monthly depending on your data and how many website changes you implement. 

Usability monitoring in action

Luxury department store, Harrods, saw the importance of usability testing when they realized their cart abandonment rate was suspiciously high. They watched session replays of users who dropped off at the checkout page, and noticed something: when users entered their card details incorrectly, the automatic error message wasn’t visible. It was hidden above the fold, where customers couldn’t see it. Therefore, users weren’t aware that they’d entered details incorrectly, and assumed the form was just broken. 

Simply moving the error message down to a part of the page where it was visible gained Harrods about 1,000 extra conversions every month. 

When it comes to monitoring website performance, too often people will fall into the trap of relying on quantitative insights alone. This can be a problem because numbers in isolation can be deceiving, and they also don't enable you to build a comprehensive enough picture of how your website is performing. —Sean Potter, Organic Content and SEO Lead, Contentsquare 

Know when and how to perform a pulse check with our website monitoring checklist

Monitoring your website doesn’t have to be overwhelming when you have the right framework in place. 

A website monitoring checklist ensures you and your teams are aligned with the right metrics, use the most effective tools, and have systems in place to catch any threatening errors, bugs, or design glitches in time to ensure healthy performance, keep your bottom line intact, and improve your UX. 

Remember to combine numerical data with qualitative UX insights: that way, you’ll get a 360-degree view of your site’s performance and how to improve it. 

FAQs about using a website monitoring checklist