Most businesses today have a large digital footprint, and some depend heavily on their web applications to provide value to customers and make money.
In this digitally competitive world, making sure your website is up and running 24/7 isn’t enough. You should always be optimizing your web pages to make the experience better.
Web monitoring tools are used to keep an eye on the current state of a system so that problems, bugs, or failures can be found and fixed as soon as possible.
There are web monitoring tools for servers, networks, databases, security, performance, website and internet use, and applications.
In this article, we will discuss the top 7 web monitoring tools and how and when to use them.
Top 7 Web Monitoring Tools
1- Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that allows for marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) by giving stats and basic analytical tools.
Google Analytics tracks how well a website performs and learns more about its visitors.
It can help organizations find out where most of their users come from, how successful their marketing activities and campaigns are, how many goals are met (like purchases or adding items to shopping carts), and what patterns and trends there are in how users interact with the site and other visitor information like demographics.
With the help of page tags, Google Analytics gets information about each website visitor. Each page’s code has a JavaScript page tag added to it. This tag runs in each visitor’s web browser and sends data to one of Google’s servers that collect data.
Google Analytics can then make reports that can be changed to track and show information like the number of users, bounce rates, average session lengths, sessions by channel, page views, completed goals, and more.
Google Analytics has features that can help users find patterns and trends in how people use their websites. It allows data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting, and connecting to other applications.
2- Google Mobile Friendliness Test
The Mobile-Friendly Test is a free web monitoring tool used to see how well your website works on different devices.
With Mobile-Friendly Test, you can determine your website’s score based on how Google search works. This is a list of things that Google gives you to help you figure out how user-friendly the mobile version of your site is.
There are only a few websites that can be used on mobile devices without any problems. Most likely, your website has some issue that makes it hard to use on a mobile device.
After you start a free trial with us, we will start an audit not just for the URL you checked but for your whole website.
So, you can see a list of all the URLs that have problems with mobile friendliness and speed, along with our suggestions for how to fix those problems.
3- Google Page Speed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that can help you find problems with your web application that are slowing it down and fix them.
It can also help you keep an eye on how well your website is doing. However, it’s mostly preferred by teams focusing on search engine optimization (SEO). As you run a test, it gives you a quick summary of the different parameters and options to learn more about the things that interest you.
You can look at different on-page and back-end parts of your web application to see how they affect how quickly it loads and responds. The tool lets you keep track of the grades of different primary components and gives suggestions for improving different parts.
The tool can be great for marketing teams that know much about technology. It can also help developers get up to speed on Google’s web guidelines and suggestions.
4- Google XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is a free map of your website that Google can use to find all the important pages. XML sitemaps can help with SEO because they make it easy for Google to find your most important website pages, even if your internal linking isn’t perfect.
With a sitemap like this, it’s much easier for crawlers to see how your site is set up and get the information they need.
The plugin works with all of the pages that WordPress makes, as well as custom URLs. Also, whenever you post, it tells all the major search engines about the new content.
It has been supported for over 9 years and is rated the best WordPress plugin. It will do exactly what it is supposed to, giving search engines a full XML sitemap.
5- Pingdom
Pingdom is a paid tool starting at $10/ month.
Pingdom is one of the best web monitoring services because it has a user-friendly interface and a low price compared to more expensive tools.
It also has a wide range of features, such as SSL certificate monitoring and website performance monitoring, which you can learn more about in our review of the best SSL certificate monitoring tools.
Pingdom has both real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring solutions that track real-time visits to your site and let you use the data from real people to improve your site’s performance.
Geographic performance is also being tracked to ensure that your site works well regardless of where people access it.
You can keep an eye on many endpoints, but performance seems slow, especially when you look at individual items and when a service or third-party resource goes down, Pingdom will send you an alert.
Their plans start at $10/month, and for that price, you get 10 uptime monitors and 1 advanced monitor that uses tests from more than 100 check locations worldwide.
Even though they don’t have a free plan, you can try everything they have to offer for 14 days.
6- Browserling
Browserling has a free & paid option. A single-user license starts at $19/ month.
Browserling is an online cross-browser testing site that provides testing tools for PHP, XML, HTML, CSS code encodings, debugging, and much more.
Most of the web monitoring tools that Browserling gives you are easy to use and ready to go. You won’t have to look for another tool to check if your website works on different browsers.
From what we’ve seen, whenever you look for these kinds of tools online, you end up on a page full of ads and other annoying stuff. So besides the reason you came here, you’ll get everything else.
Here are some of the best things about Browserling that developers seem to need.
● Live interactive sessions
● No Flash
● Java or plugins required
● Bug Hunter
● API live
● A browser extension for quicker testing
● Responsive testing
7- Akismet
Akismet has a free & paid option. The paid version starts at $8.33/ month.
An Akismet Anti-Spam plugin is a cloud-based tool that removes spam from a WordPress website.
Akismet uses anti-spam algorithms to find spam comments on different websites. It checks a user’s comment against its database every time they post one. If the algorithms decide that a comment is spam, it will be taken down from your website.
If you don’t want to use an anti-spam plugin, you can stop spam comments on your WordPress site by manually moderating comments. Still, it takes a lot of time and mistakes are easy.
Because of this, it would be better to install a plugin instead. The tool can quickly find spam in hundreds of comments, forms, and messages and get rid of them.
Our recommendation
We recommend Akismet Anti-Spam above all other plugins that stop spam. This is why:
– Reliable – More than 500 million spam comments have been stopped by the plugin so far. Since the database is so extensive, it’s easier to tell which comments are spam.
– Jetpack and Contact Form 7 integration – Using these two platforms together, the Akismet service can make your site safer and stop spam from coming in through contact forms.
– Statistics monitor – This feature gives you information about spam on your site. It shows both monthly and yearly charts of spam.
– Simple to use – The plugin is built into WordPress sites by default. This makes it easy to set it up and turn it on.
Akismet Anti-Spam also has a “freemium” pricing model, which means that users can buy extra features to make it work better. Starting at $8.33/month, there are separate plans for both personal and business use.
How to Choose the Best Website Performance Monitoring Tool?
There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing the best website performance monitoring tool.
● URL Monitoring Frequency
● Synthetic and Real User Monitoring
● Integrated server and log monitoring
● Support for multiple browsers
● Solid alerting capabilities
● Testing locations
● Price
Bottom Line
Web monitoring tools can help you keep an eye on your website’s performance by tracking different metrics and performance indicators. Still, it can be hard to figure out which tool will best meet your needs. This article will help you find the best solution while choosing the right web monitoring tool.