At any given moment, more than 3 billion people are surfing the web.
If you have a website that you’re trying to drive traffic to, every second that it’s down or lagging, you could be missing out on countless potential visitors.
Monitoring your website is a great way to figure out when a lag or downtime is occurring so that you can fix it fast. While a free up time service is a great resource, it may not be enough.
Keep reading to learn about 9 clues that it could be time for you to upgrade to a paid monitoring package for your website.
1. You’re Too Busy to Constantly Check Your Results
While free up time monitoring services can help you figure out when your site is lagging or down, you won’t get instant results.
Instead, most free up time monitoring services require you to log in to their platform in order to check the results of their monitoring. Some free services do alert you via email. But this still requires you to log into your email to check and see if there are any problems.
If you travel often, are away from your computer, or just don’t want to be glued to your email 24/7, this can be a major inconvenience.
Up time monitoring is supposed to make your life easier, by letting you know when there is a problem on your site so that you don’t have to spend time monitoring it yourself.
By upgrading to a paid up time monitoring service, you can opt-in for SMS or call alerts, that way you’ll know right away when there is a problem, no matter how busy you are.
2. Traffic to Your Site Is Increasing
A free up time monitoring service is a great choice for new websites or those with low levels of traffic.
If your site does go down or begin to lag, it may not be necessary for you to immediately tend to it, because you’re unlikely to lose out on that many visitors right away anyway.
But as soon as your traffic numbers start to rise, it’s time to upgrade to a paid service. A small investment in better, faster monitoring can help you avoid losing out on tons of potential profits and leads.
3. Your Site Has Crashed
If your site has crashed in the past, it either means that you have high amounts of traffic or an issue with your site. Either way, it’s a sign that it’s time to take action to prevent another crash.
Free up time monitoring may not be offering the tools you need to prevent another crash, or to immediately fix the issue if another does occur.
4. Your Site is Constantly Lagging
A lagging website could drastically reduce your web traffic.
Statistics show that 80 percent of web surfers won’t wait longer than 20 seconds for a webpage to load. Only 65 percent are willing to wait 15 seconds. The longer the lag, the more traffic you’ll lose.
If your site has been the victim of lagging in the past, it’s time to start investing in up time monitoring to start taking care of your lagging problems. That way you can start fixing your lagging as soon as it starts, and stop losing out on valuable traffic.
5. You Aren’t Sure Why Your Site Is Lagging
Knowing when your website is lagging and actually fixing the problem are two very different tasks.
You might be able to use a free up time monitoring service to figure out when your site is lagging -though it won’t include real-time alerts- you also won’t get much info about why the lag is occurring.
Figuring out exactly why your site is lagging can be tough. But paid up time monitoring services provide a comprehensive report anytime a problem arises, so that you can get to the root of the issue.
6. You’re Running a Site and a Business
If you’re trying to run a website and a business at the same time, you know how precious every moment is. Even when your website and business are one and the same, the tasks that you need to complete to keep each running are very different.
When you’re busy trying to run your business and update your website, you have no time for distractions like a lagging site or downtime.
Let a paid up time service take care of the monitoring and analysis, so that you’ll have more time to do everything else on your list.
7. You Built Your Own Website
With so many tutorials and DIY kits available, building your own website no longer requires extensive web design skills.
But if you do choose to build your own website, it’s a good idea to give it the best chance at success by investing in some help to keep it running.
An up time monitoring service is a great way to check to make sure that your homemade site is operating well, and stays that way through any changes or updates that you run.
8. You’re Upgrading Your Website
Another benefit that sets paid up time monitoring apart from free services is the ability to schedule a blackout.
If you’re shutting down your site temporarily in order to update or change it, the ability to put your monitoring on hold means avoiding tons of annoying alerts about your site’s blackout.
9. You’re Running More Than One Site
Running more than one website, much like running a site and a business, is stressful. Constantly monitoring each on your own would be overwhelming. Most free monitoring services only allow you to check one site.
This means using multiple services or accounts, or not monitoring one of your websites.
With a paid monitoring service, you can monitor all of your websites from one simple platform.
Upgrade from Free Up Time Monitoring Today
No matter your reasons to upgrade, choosing a paid up time monitoring service is a great way to reduce your own workload and start monitoring your site more effectively.
If you’re ready to see the difference that a paid service can make for your site and business, check out our paid monitoring options today.