Webmaster Tools | The Official Blog of Site24x7

One of the recent trends I have noticed over a period of time is that many websites and web-based applications have started obsessing about their website performance and uptime. In order to understand this obsession better, I think we need to look at two key factors:

Attention Span of the User
Google Effect

Attention Span of the User

Many theories and scientific studies have been conducted on how data is being delivered to us via Internet and how it has changed the way we search and assimilate information. To put this in simpler terms, Google has made us think differently. Due to this powerful search engine, data is made easy to find and simpler to deliver.

As a result, readers have started losing patience when information is not readily available or readable. This in-ability of readers/users to hold attention in a specific website/application has started to drive the need for quicker and cleaner websites.

Website designers and developers not only design it to get the aesthetic part correctly, but also try to ensure that it loads quickly and smoothly as a result. Gone are the days when the user would have to wait for the entire website to load. In today’s high speed network world, if a website does not respond within 5 seconds, it is considered as slow and users lose interest.

This is even truer when your website is an e-commerce one. If your web application loads slowly, then users who use the service will be discouraged to return back to your website. This translates to lesser traffic to the website which in turn means lower revenue. To put it simply, if your website is slow, you are out-of-business.

A lot of new programming techniques are also being developed around to ensure to create high performance websites. These techniques enable the developer to easily customize the website to required specifications without affecting its performance.

Google Effect

Google had announced a while back about a change in its search algorithm which indicated that it will now take website loading times into consideration while calculating page rank. This new initiative by Google seems to have spurred web designers and web application developers even more into speed-obsessed frenzy.

Since their announcement, website developers and designers have started testing their website for optimal performance (translated as optimum loading time). This has given rise to the need for a tool which allows them to analyze website performance, understand each component impact on website performance.

Although there are several tools which allows users to that, we understand the inherent need for a comprehensive tool which would help the user to understand how website performance affects uptime. Our Web Page Analyzer tool allows web developers to check the performance of his/her website he/she is developing and find out if their websites are slow. It provides information such the loading time of individual objects (CSS, images, sprite image, JavaScript, etc), page size and the total loading time.

Results of Web Page Analyzer for a web application: ZOHO Writer

So, if you are designing a website/application and would like to find out how well your website performs, go ahead and use our tool. If you have any feedback, please feel free to use the comment section to post them. Also, if you think there are other factors which contribute to the need for fast loading, high performance websites, do let us know.

When users search for a good website monitoring solution, one of the points in their checklist is whether the solution can monitor websites from multiple locations. This not only allows them to understand the availability and performance of their website, but also look at the end-user experience of their website from around the world. They enables them to fine tune the performance of their website based on availability and response time reports.

In this blog post, I will quickly run through the steps how to monitor a website and enable monitoring from multiple locations.

Adding multi-location monitoring for new websites :

Log into Site24x7 or if you do not have access, create an account now.

Click on 'New Monitor' pull-down menu, and select 'Website'.

Enter the label of the website, its address, whether you would like to associate this website with a monitor group. Select the frequency of the website you wish to monitor, the timeout, the default primary location. You can set the polling interval as low as 1 minute to as high as 60 minutes or more.

Now select the secondary location. These secondary locations will allow you to monitor the website from multiple locations. For this example, I have chosen Sao Paulo, Sweden and Japan. Site24x7 allows you to easily alert you when your website goes down from one of the locations, configured.

Site24x7 also allows you to alert you in case there is a change in content or when the response time of the website increases. In addition, you can also add a host of alerting options such as keyword monitoring, regular expression match, website content modification and response time.

Once every thing is configured, simply click 'Add' and Site24x7 starts monitoring them.

As you can see, Site24x7 starts monitoring not only from its default primary location, but also starts monitoring the website from the multiple locations I have chosen from. So interested in trying out our multi-location feature for monitoring your website? Go ahead and give Site24x7 a try.

Webmasters and website owners will know how important it is to ensure their web applications are performing as expected for end users. Site24x7’s web application monitor makes it easier for them to keep track of the availability and performance of web applications such as customer logins or shopping cart purchases. The monitor sends out notifications if it detects any problem with the transaction, such as an unwanted downtime or a slow response time.

An important use of web application monitor, which sometimes gets overlooked, is its ability to assist in fine-tuning the performance of applications. Since the monitor provides you with historical data of key performance metrics, you gather a substantial amount of useful information about your web application over the course of time. This information can be used to proactively improve your web application and make it an absolute joy for customers to interact with.

Scott Savage has explained this beautifully in his blog. In fact, he mentions Site24x7’s web application monitor as one of his top 3 tools for fine-tuning web applications.

Some excerpts:

Performance Monitoring – It is a great idea to do user testing and time how long it takes to follow a path through your application, for example logging into your web-based CRM application, searching with some set terms, returning a result and then displaying the details of this result. You can time it in a user session, providing you with valuable (but once off) time information about user scanning and data entry time. How does this time differ at 9am Monday versus 3am Thursday? A web application performance monitoring tool like site24×7 allows you to run this path automatically every 5 minutes, 24×7. This not only allows you to check your servers are serving your application at a consistent time, but even just serving it at all. It will email you immediately when your application stops responding, send you a weekly performance summary report, show you performance from multiple locations around the world and even help you independently track your SLA compliance (and even publish all this via an API or public page).

Don’t wait for your customers to call you and complain, these tools make feedback easy, even to the point where users are providing it instantly without even realising. The next step is using these tools to proactively improve your web application, which of course is easier said than done. Just remember you have to measure before you can manage.

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We came across a couple of articles on the internet which feature Site24x7. The first one is by Prem Godara in his Techno Mirror blog. He has an article about finding out what increases the loading time of a website. The article is titled "Does your website load slowly! Here's a solution" Prem mentions two tools - Site24x7 and Octagate Site Timer. Here are a few excerpts from the post:

Are you one of those users whose website takes lot of time to load but don't know what is the problem and which component of the website is taking too much time to load. Generally, several components of a web page (like Iframes, Flash, Javascript, Images, CSS,) can increase the page loading time but it is very hard to pinpoint the exact culprit that decreases the speed of the site. A normal HTML web page may have advertising scripts, YouTube videos, images and so on. I came across two online services which can help you by pinpointing as which component of your website is taking too much of time to load. One such service is Site24x7. Site24x7 is a hosted website monitoring service that helps webmasters ensure their websites are up and running at peak performance. The Site24x7 servers sends out HTTP or HTTPS request to your website at regular intervals of time and alerts you if it is down. This service is available both as free and premium version. In premium version, you get some advanced features such as monitoring DNS/email servers, online web applications and so on.

Thanks for writing about Site24x7, Prem! As Prem mentioned in his blog, there are 2 ways through which a user can find which component is increasing the site loading time. One is the Analyze Web page tool and the second is the Web Page Analyzer monitor. The second article which we want to bring to your attention today is one in the Free Pedia website titled 'Monitor your Site Up and Down Status'. This article provides brief information about Site24x7's website monitoring service. Few excerpts:

Site24×7 is a simple hosted web site monitoring service that works around the clock making sure that websites are performing flawlessly. You can set a threshold for a web page such that - if the page load time of that page is more than 3 seconds, you should be notified through EMail, SMS and RSS.

Thanks for writing about us, guys!

In an earlier post, we'd discussed the importance of website content monitoring and how Site24x7 can help with monitoring web page defacement. Continuing on the theme of website content, today we will take a look at some online tools that might be useful for website content writers/developers. These free tools might be useful when you are working on the content of a new website or if you want to improve the readability of your existing website content. First up, there is the readability index calculator tool. This tools calculates the readability index score for a passage in your website. Based on this score, you can get an idea of how visitors to your site might perceive the content on your site. Enter a passage of text in the field and select the language for which the readability is to be calculated. The tool will give you a reading ease score and a grade level. If you select English language, the score is calculated using the Flesch-Kincaid method. Mystery Matador is a similar tool, but it provides suggestions to improve your content along with the readability score which makes it slightly better than Readability index calculator. Writing quality content on your web pages is a sure way of attracting good traffic to your web site and these tools might be of help. Once you've finalized the content and posted them online, there is always Site24x7 for website content monitoring!

Author: Arun Have you tried tracking your keyword position across multiple search engines such as google, yahoo or msn? If you are one among those who go to these search engines one by one and search, you must have really found it a tiresome and repetitive process. Now here are 2 different services that can help you out. Jux2 is a search engine which claims to give you combined search results from google, yahoo and msn. When you search for any keyword, jux2 compares its position across these search engines and ranks sites accordingly. I searched for "website monitoring service" and Site24x7.com was in the 3th position (courtesy of #7 rank on Google, #4 on Yahoo and #4 on MSN) Combo Result Viewer from Rankquest works in a similar fashion, but has got more options and is flexible. You can either compare multiple keywords on a single search engine or compare a single keyword across multiple search engines. They also support a large number of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Hotbot, etc. We searched for website monitoring service keyword and found out that Site24x7 ranks #4 in Altavista and #7 in Netscape search. Handy tools to help you search better, aren't they? Saves you lot of time!!

Analyze and Improve Website Performance using Web Page Analyzer Tool

Attention Span of the User

Google Effect

How-To: Monitor website performance from Multiple Locations

Adding multi-location monitoring for new websites :

Improve Web Application Performance using Site24x7

Find out what increases your web site load time

Improving the readability of your website content

Comparing search results across search engines