8 website monitoring tools to improve the user experience

There are several tools that can make the website monitoring process much more efficient. Choose the right combination and you’ll gain thorough website data faster, freeing up a large chunk of your time.

We’ve broken down eight key website monitoring tools to add to your tech stack below, so let’s get going.

Why website monitoring is crucial for great customer experience

Website monitoring is the ongoing process of making sure your site is working as expected—and helping you know when it’s not.

There’s an important link between website monitoring and customer experience. Your site is one of your most important lines of communication with your customers, so website performance is vital to maintaining a high-quality connection.

If your website is down, filled with bugs and glitches, or delivers poor UX, customers will probably navigate away and take their business elsewhere. Poor website performance also damages your company's reputation and negatively impacts SEO rankings.

Put simply, the harder it is for customers to navigate your site, the more likely they’ll be to get frustrated and give up. That’s one of the main website monitoring advantages⁠—when customers can seamlessly and successfully interact with your site, they’re more likely to convert, which is the cornerstone of any online business.

8 excellent website monitoring tools to add to your tech stack

These eight website monitoring tools all have one thing in common—they excel at monitoring the metrics that impact customer experience the most. 

Use them strategically and you’ll have no trouble creating and maintaining a site that’s a breeze for your customers to navigate.

We’ve divided the tools into four categories:

• Site usability

• Site performance

• Site health

• Site downtime

Site usability

Site usability goes beyond just identifying whether your site works. Rather, it explores how easy it is for visitors to use and whether it serves their wants and needs.

Understanding how your customers experience your site is vital because they’re the people you want to satisfy and keep coming back for more.

1. Hotjar

How Hotjar’s features help with site usability

Hotjar gives you insight into exactly how users are experiencing your site. Rather than providing solely quantitative data, they give you qualitative information to round out your website monitoring and zero in on what elements your visitors enjoy as well as the issues they run into.

Hotjar’s two main products offer comprehensive product or website experience insights:

• Observe tools: Hotjar Heatmaps reveal which website elements attract attention on your site and which get ignored, while Session Recordings show playbacks of your users' entire sessions to pinpoint problems and bugs

• Ask tools: Hotjar has two different tools you can use to collect user feedback: Surveys and Feedback widgets. Surveys let you collect longer-form feedback to dive deeper into how your customers experience your site. With Feedback tools, you can gather quick insights from users as they experience your product to learn what’s working well and what needs improvement.

Hotjar tools measure metrics like session duration, page speed, and scroll depth. But where they really excel is in helping you tap into the human side of website monitoring. 

Because numbers often don’t tell the whole story, it’s a great idea to pair traditional analytics with user-centric software like Hotjar. This way, you can broaden your understanding of how your site is operating and make sure it’s seamless and intuitive for your users to navigate.

An example of Hotjar in action

Rage clicks are a strong indicator of poor UX caused by website problems like slow loading times, broken elements, and general confusion.

For instance, imagine you own an online sporting goods store, have just launched a product, and are promoting it on your homepage. If you see site users clicking on a product information button over and over again, your button link is probably broken. When a visitor clicks on something repeatedly during a short period of time, it’s often a sign that something isn’t working properly.

2. Loop11

How Loop11’s features help with site usability

Loop11 is all about making user testing easy. Their platform is ideal for teams who don’t have existing users to work with⁠: you can hire people to test out your site from within Loop11 itself.

They have several different kinds of tests you can run that are great for monitoring your site’s usability, including:

• Online usability testing: learn how and why users are interacting with your site by watching them perform real tasks

• Benchmarking: compare your website’s usability to past performance or competitors to make sure it’s always standing out and improving

• A/B usability testing: evaluate different site designs against each other to decide on the best option

• Mobile & tablet testing: discover how well your site works on different devices

All of these test types investigate user behavior, allowing you to spot trends and optimize accordingly. Remember, one of the most important aspects of website monitoring is ensuring your users can navigate your site and achieve their goals as seamlessly as possible. Conducting pre-launch user testing research and integrating your results into future iterations is a fantastic way to do that.

An example of Loop11 in action

Imagine you own a furniture shop and are planning to launch a shoppable mobile app. Unfortunately, many of your beta testers have complained that the pages take a long time to load and are difficult to navigate.

This would be a great opportunity to use Loop11’s mobile testing feature to pinpoint the exact problems customers are having with your app. Your chosen research participants will interact with your app, provide you with written, video, and audio feedback, and give you a well-rounded impression of what’s going wrong. Then, you can start improving specific website monitoring performance metrics like page loading times before sharing your app with a wider audience.

Site performance

Site performance investigates how well your site works from a technical viewpoint. It’s frequently linked to criteria like overall loading time, operational smoothness, and user interactivity.

If your site has performance issues, you’ll miss out on customers, sales, and conversions until you resolve them. That’s why diligently monitoring site performance is so essential.

3. Pingdom

How Pingdom’s features help with site performance

Pingdom dives deep into website performance metrics. They provide users with actionable insights so they can make sure their sites always run smoothly and their customers keep coming back.

Although Pingdom delivers technical information, their platform isn’t only for developers. The product’s reports present data clearly and concisely so team members working in departments like digital marketing and customer experience can understand it as well.

Pingdom’s tools help you keep an eye on website performance in two ways:

• Synthetic Monitoring: uptime monitoring, page speed, transaction monitoring, and alerting

• Real User Monitoring: livemaps, user experience monitoring, page load performance, and user behavior metrics

An example of Pingdom in action

Pingdom is a popular software for ecommerce website analysis. Retail brands know that first impressions are everything—when customers have problems the first time they visit your website, they might never come back. In fact, as many as 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after having a bad experience.

Ecommerce companies do business with customers from all over the world. It can be hard to make sure your site is performing well with so many geographic locations and time zones in the mix. 

Pingdom’s 'Real User Monitoring' tool pinpoints site performance trends across devices, regions, and time periods so you always know exactly who’s impacted by downtime or usability issues. This gives you the ability to resolve specific issues quickly, minimize downtime, and make sure you’re always delivering a high-quality experience to your users.

4. UpTrends

How UpTrends’ features help with site performance

UpTrends makes website performance metrics clear and accessible. Their goal is to help users explore and fix site issues quickly to minimize any impact on their bottom line.

They do so with the following synthetic monitoring products:

• Website monitoring: UpTrends has 229 checkpoints spread all around the world so you’ll always know when your customers run into problems, no matter where they’re located. Keep an eye on important metrics like uptime/downtime, element failures, and multi-step transaction performance.

• Web performance monitoring: Ensure that your website is always loading quickly and correctly⁠— and receive alerts the moment it isn’t. You can also optimize your site for different browsers and devices.

• Web app monitoring: Dive deeper into your site’s core functions to make sure they’re easy for customers to interact with. This product is especially popular for ecommerce sites because it focuses on interactive elements like shopping carts and payment screens. 

An example of UpTrends in action

Let’s talk about the importance of monitoring website performance in the hotel industry. When people have trouble making online bookings, hotels will lose business and revenue—it’s as simple as that.

UpTrends’ products are fantastic for hotels and rentals because of how well they monitor click paths and core functions like log-ins, reservations, check-ins/check-outs, and search results. They make sure guests consistently have quick, seamless experiences on your site. When problems do arise, you’ll know before anyone realizes anything is amiss and be equipped to resolve them quickly.

This kind of monitoring results in:

• Less abandoned reservations & lower permanent abandonment rates

• Great brand perception & loyalty

• Frictionless online transactions

• Better SEO rankings

• Knowing about site performance issues before customers complain

Site health

Just like people, websites need to be in good health to operate properly. 

Site health dives into your site’s vital functions and determines how healthy they are. An unhealthy website has many errors, issues, and warnings. Some of the most harmful include:

• Broken internal links or malformed links

• Slow page loading times

• Broken internal JavaScript and CSS files

• Issues with certificates (expired, near-expired, incorrectly named)

• Non-secure pages

These kinds of product problems put your website at a high risk of performing poorly and can make it vulnerable to hackers, so it’s vital they’re resolved quickly.

5. Intruder

How Intruder’s features help with site health

A healthy website is a secure website, and that’s exactly where Intruder’s platform comes in. Intruder is a vulnerability scanner that monitors site hygiene and detects weaknesses that hackers could take advantage of.

They’ve got three core features:

• Continuous vulnerability management: run government-grade security checks, proactively scan your systems, and receive automatic alerts so you can always stay ahead of any vulnerabilities on your site

• Attack surface monitoring: see your network from a potential hacker’s point of view and remove any open ports and services that don’t need to be there

• Effortless reporting & compliance: produce high-quality reports that will ensure you meet compliance requirements and pass security audits

An example of Intruder in action

Unfortunately, cyber attacks are becoming increasingly frequent and can put companies out of business. Approximately 43% of cyber crimes in the United States target small businesses, and most aren’t financially equipped to recover from these kinds of attacks.

For this reason, it’s a smart business decision for SMEs to invest in a vulnerability scanning platform like Intruder. This is especially the case if you have a remote team, which has been shown to increase the probability of data breaches.

Intruder’s tools will make sure that you don’t have any vulnerabilities anywhere in your tech stack, public or private. They cover everything from services to cloud storage to websites to endpoint devices, so you can rest assured your data is safe as your company’s online environment evolves.

6. StatusCake

How StatusCake’s features help with site health

StatusCake is a fantastic platform for monitoring overall site health. Their software is designed to facilitate team collaboration, and they’ve got a whole roster of website monitoring tools, such as:

• Uptime: automatically check your site’s uptime from 43 locations spread across 30 different countries and receive alerts as soon as something’s amiss

• Page speed: receive thorough page speed reports and zero-in on how your metrics can be improved. You can even break down loading times by region

• Domain: set up expiration notifications so you’re never at risk of losing your domain. StatusCake also monitors your website domain and identity to make sure it always stays secure.

• Server: make sure your service is in good health by checking its vitals on StatusCake’s dashboard. You’ll also receive notifications if any scheduled maintenance is necessary or if something seems off.

An example of StatusCake in action

Say you’re starting a brand new ecommerce business, and you're looking at the pricing of website monitoring tools, wondering how you’re going to fit them into your budget.

StatusCake understands that website monitoring tools can get expensive quickly. SMEs just getting started might not have the budget for an extensive roster of tools.

Both StatusCake’s paid plans can help your brand new business start monitoring your website without breaking the bank. 

At this point, you likely just want a website that runs well and doesn’t lose your business any customers. Your essentials include minimal downtime, quick loading speeds, a secure, up-to-date domain, and a healthy server. StatusCake can get you all that and more.

Site downtime

Website downtime happens when your site experiences some kind of outage. When users try to navigate to your site, they’re faced with an error page, are unable to complete any basic functions, or simply can’t find it at all.

Although website downtime often falls under the category of site performance, it deserves it’s own section because of how vital it is. Site downtime can seriously harm your website if it is not addressed immediately. The longer people can’t access your site, the more business you’ll lose immediately and in the long run.

If there’s one metric you should really pay attention to on your website monitoring checklist, it’s downtime.

7. Uptime Robot

How Uptime Robot’s features help with site downtime

While many different platforms monitor website downtime, Uptime Robot is exclusively focused on uptime and downtime checks. They’re one of the most popular uptime monitoring services on the market with a variety of tools that help avoid potential leads landing on a dreaded error page.

Let’s talk about their features:

• Website monitoring: receive alerts as soon as your website is down

• SSL monitoring: expired SSL certificates frequently cause downtime. Uptime Robot sends out notifications when yours are near-expiry so you’ll always have time to renew them before they wreak havoc. 

• Ping monitoring: ping networks, computer systems, and devices to make sure they’re available

• Port monitoring: monitor specific services that are running on ports

An example of Uptime Robot in action

Downtime leads to annoyed customers, lower website conversions, and lost revenue. 

In an ideal world, your dev team should find out about website downtime before your customers so they can work to resolve it as quickly as possible. Uptime Robot’s wide range of integrations means your team can receive alerts however they want. That way, notifications will not only get seen by the right people but can also fit into your existing workflows seamlessly.

Here are some of the ways you can receive downtime notifications with Uptime Robot:

• Email

• SMS

• Voice call

• Twitter

• Slack

• Discord

Slack is a great platform to use in the website monitoring process because it also integrates with other tools like Hotjar. That means you can receive messages as soon as downtime is on the horizon and whenever your customers are having usability problems.

8. Uptime

How Uptime’s features help with site downtime

While Uptime is best-known for monitoring downtime, they also have features that check other metrics like page speed and usability. Nevertheless, their simple yet detailed interface, minimal ‘false positive’ notifications, and top-rated support team make them one of the best solutions for downtime monitoring out there.

Here are some of the capabilities that make Uptime stand out:

• Uptime monitoring: conduct dozens of different kinds of site checks on both public or internal websites, apps, and services

• Website downtime alerts: get accurate, immediate alerts about issues and outages via call, text, email, or an integrated app like Slack. You can also set up escalation procedures based on problem severity and seniority.

• Real user monitoring: make sure your site is serving actual user needs—analyze real user data to optimize for speed, performance, and experience

• Status pages: when outages do happen, you can let people know from within Uptime’s platform. Simply create a customized status page or communicate via an integrated app.

An example of Uptime in action

It’s important to be diligent about monitoring downtime, but receiving lots of false alarms and notifications can be frustrating. 

Imagine your dev team complaining about getting bothered with urgent alerts that end up being inaccurate. Even worse, your business starts losing money because employees are unnecessarily investigating notifications at unsociable hours.

Uptime has a great reputation for reliability. When you receive an alert from them, you can be sure it’s for a good reason. That means you’ll be able to allocate your team’s time and resources effectively and focus on resolving downtime issues rather than sifting through notifications.

Uptime also takes things a step further in helping dev teams resolve downtime problems. Say you’re launching a new product tomorrow and your site has been plagued with issues you just can’t fix. Uptime has one of the best tech support teams in the industry and they’re available 24/7. So, you can count on their help if you find yourself in a sticky, last-minute situation.

Get your site in tip-top shape with monitoring tools

The best way to ensure that your customers consistently have satisfying, frictionless experiences with your site is by choosing the right website monitoring tools. They’ll provide you with key insights into your site problems, allow you to resolve them faster, and minimize any negative impact on users.

Whether you want to zero in on usability and make sure customers accomplish their goals on your site or investigate pesky performance issues like slow-loading pages and downtime, this list has a tool for you.