When it comes to security, close monitoring is a must. According to WhiteHat Security annual report, a substantial number of all web applications are vulnerable always. Monitis offers a new product - fully-featured Website security monitoring and protection.

Dramatic changes are revolutionizing how we build and use technology. Every company is automating, digitizing, and modernizing operations. We need a better, more connected way to work together as teams so we can harness the insights from our systems and drive effective collaboration.

Just a few years ago, we were all looking around and asking each other the same question. Fortunately, some people are figuring it out and providing some guidance on how DevOps processes can improve all areas of business, from development and operations to monitoring and incident management.

Here are a few examples from our customers.

Pacific Life has transitioned its monitoring from a human-operated system to an automated one. Leaders had to overcome employee anxiety over losing jobs and providing direct access to customers.

Intermountain Healthcare, Utah’s largest nonprofit healthcare provider, has connected systems to provide telehealth first-response technology and major incident management processes.

Dealertrack is the leading provider of on-demand, integrated digital solutions designed to enhance the efficiency and profitability for all major segments of the automotive retail industry. Thanks to a combination of monitoring, management, and communication tools, Dealertrack has improved their time to resolve issues and product development speed.

So we know that dramatic changes are needed in how we build and use technology. And yet, a 2017 survey of DevOps maturity shows that only 36% of organizations have good knowledge sharing between development and operations.

The DevOps experts who know

Where can you go to hear how experts are solving these complex problems?

We're bring the Agility 2017 Tour to a city near you, where you can hear from experts and pick their brains regarding how they’re improving business and trends you should be preparing for. It's a great opportunity to hear from more than just talking heads.

Agility 2017 starts in San Francisco on June 13, then moves to New York on June 20, Chicago on June 22, and London on June 29. Besides the customers listed above, we'll be including New York City Health + Hospitals, Forrester, The Telegraph, O2, Tesco, Moogsoft, Cherwell, Praecipio, and others.

You'll also hear from our own experts, including CEO Troy McAlpin and CTO Abbas Haider Ali. They will be discussing:

• The need for a better, more connected way to work together as teams
• How to harness the insights from systems to drive collaboration
• And in doing so, naturally preventing incidents within the normal flow of work

Reserve your seat at a free Agility 2017 event near you before they all disappear!

Australian government abolished Visa 457 earlier this April and this article describes how this decision might affect Australian IT scene and IT experts.

Read the original post on Monitis Blog.

Believe it or not, the most important thing about the website of your business is not what’s on it but how fast it loads. Yes, that’s right! 

 

As you can see on this infographic (an oldie but goodie!), there is a clear relationship between web load speed and customer conversions. And unless you have money to burn, the assumption is that you’re in business to earn revenue (rather than just having a fancy looking website!).

 

Let’s say this another way. The faster a page loads the more likely customers will be to visit and do business on your site. The inverse is also true. The slower a page the less likely customers will be willing to wait around and engage with your brand.

 

While this seems fairly straightforward, it’s surprising how few business owners really get the importance of website performance and the role it plays in their overall strategy. It might be nice to have a trendy looking website, but if it takes 10 seconds to load visitors won’t hang around long enough to appreciate all the bells and whistles anyway.

 

It’s important that small businesses leverage the latest web performance insights to ensure that things are running as optimally as possible and that your customers are happy. At the end of the day, this is really all that matters!

 

In order to help keep your business in check, we list out below the top 10 things you should know about website performance today.

Website Speed Impacts Conversions & Sales 

There’s a direct connection between web load speed and sales conversions. Consider this metric: 1 in 4 visitors would abandon the website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. And this one: A 2-second delay during a transaction results in shopping cart abandonment rates of up to 87%.

 

A few years ago e-commerce giant Amazon calculated that a webpage load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Any questions?

“Start Render Time” is a Key Metric 

Start Render Time has emerged as a key metric in web performance and is the first visual cue that something is happening on a website. The following statement gives some words of wisdom on this topic:

The median for Time to Start Render across the web is 2.5 seconds. Shoot for better.  The top 10% of sites on the web start render in less than 900 milliseconds — fast enough that the visitor doesn’t have time to think about the fact that he or she is waiting to see content.  That should be the goal.

Design Best Practices Can Become Your Worst Enemy

Increasing the size of your website’s size, images, third-party scripts, and style sheets come with a heavy price and can adversely affect performance. This is especially true in the world of mobile. Over 50% of all time consumers spend on retails site is on mobile devices, and more than 50% of consumers multiscreen during the purchasing.

 

Some of the worst design practices are evident when web pages are initially blank and then populate, the CTA is the last thing to render, popups block the rest of the page, or when you fail to adopt user experience into your design strategy.

  

Performance Impacts Shopping Behavior 

We get the importance of website speed on customer conversions and sales. But this impact is more systemic than you might think. Kissmetrics shows that 44% of online shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience online. And 79% of shoppers dissatisfied with a website performance are less likely to buy from that site again.

  

Mobile Unfriendly Sites Drive Customers the Other Way 

M-commerce is huge, which is why having a “mobile first” website is critical to success. Mobile commerce transactions in the United States are expected to total $123 billion in 2016. $76 billion will be from tablets, while the remainder will be from smartphones. These same numbers are replicating themselves globally.

 

A study from Google several years ago showed that mobile-friendliness was a key factor in purchase decisions, with 67% indicating that a mobile-friendly website made them more likely to buy a product or use a service. In addition, 61% indicated that a bad mobile experience made them more likely to leave.

  

You Can Win with Website Analytics 

Web analytics can make all the difference in how you relate to your customers. The ability to track a single customer across your site and across multiple devices will ensure that you can tailor your brand to their needs.

 

For instance, you want to learn more about when and where they’re visiting from, what devices they’re using, what are their online activities, and other key demographics such as age. Gaining these insights will help your organization better understand what’s important to your visitors and how to personalize their experience.

  

Speed Increases SEO 

In April 2010 Google started using page speed as a ranking factor, meaning that faster pages would earn higher SEO rankings than slow ones. More recently, Google also announced that it’s moving in this same direction for mobile web pages. The point here is that you get rewarded for offering your customers a better overall experience; faster load time means higher SEO rankings.

  

Mediocre Web Hosting Can Increase Downtime 

When reviewing web performance, it’s important not to forget your web hosting service. Even though your provider may offer you unlimited bandwidth, does that mean shared service with other sites that ends up affecting your own web performance?

 

Are you experiencing downtime or bandwidth issues? If so, it’s worthwhile to review your hosting options to ensure you’re getting the most efficient service. Don’t be afraid to insist on 99.99% uptime.

 

Too Many Affiliate Codes & Ads Drain Performance 

Becoming an affiliate reseller and pushing ads to bring folks in is great, but too much of a good thing can also become bad . . . especially for performance. When you go overboard on ads and affiliate code, this can lead to high bounce rates and, in turn, can adversely impact your overall website performance.

  

Website Monitoring Is Key! 

There are significant advantages to adopting website monitoring – cost, scalability, efficiency, to name a few. Not to mention, this frees you up to focus on growing your business, which matters the most anyway.

 

When it comes to monitoring your website, you don’t want to shortchange yourself. Get the peace of mind you deserve by entrusting your business to a proven industry leader.

Sign up for Monitis FREE 15-day full-featured trial! Premium plan starting from $12/month only!

Read the original post on Monitis Blog.

Hi.  My name is Erik Dietrich, and this is the first time I’ve posted on the Monitis blog.  By way of introduction, I thought it would make sense to talk about my initial experience with Monitis.

 

Before I do that, though, I need to explain a bit about myself.   Don’t worry.  It’s relevant, I promise.

 

I’m a techie by trade.  Specifically, I have historically made a living as a software developer, architect, dev manager, CIO, and, these days, IT management and strategy consultant.  On top of that, I write and present frequently, including routine publishing to my own, tech-centric blog.

 

Because of this, I know a certain tension to which you can, no doubt, relate. I’m talking about the tension between not having time to build and look after your own website and thinking, “what kind of developer am I if I don’t build and look after my own site?”  I feel awkward about it, but over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s better to leave my site’s development to WordPress and the folks that make themes for it.  I just don’t have time to take care of it myself.

 

But this delegation can lead to embarrassing lapses.  I write about software professionalism, IT strategy and the delivery of high quality solutions.  So when someone that follows me on Twitter sends a tweet informing me that my website has gone down, I can’t help but feel silly.  Anyone looking at the situation obviously knows that it’s my hosting company or, perhaps, something with WordPress.  But that doesn’t stop me from feeling the ironic sting of being the last to know about my own outage.

Mitigating Outages for Professionals

When I ran an IT department as the CIO, I had responsibility for some public facing web applications.  I understood acutely the embarrassment of an outage, and I understood how it could be mitigated.  If you become aware of it first and inform your users, you lose far less credibility in their eyes than if they find out and inform you instead.  The outage is still unfortunate for everyone, but you being on top of it makes it seem almost planned to the users that hear of it.

 

To make sure my group had this advantage, I oversaw the instrumentation of monitoring tools within our network.  This was some years ago now, so I don’t recall the particulars, but I do remember having a dashboard to peruse and getting emails and text notifications to alert me immediately of any problems.  This was powerful stuff.

  

Mitigating Outages for the Rest of Us

 

When it comes to my own blog and site, however, this sort of instrumentation never occurred to me.  I had sound reasoning.  An outage on my site is not critical to anyone.  Nobody logs in and interacts with the site in a high-touch way – it’s just content that I publish for people to read.  I don’t lose money when my site was down.

 

Because of all of these considerations, it made no sense to me to invest in monitoring.  I had a preconceived notion of the cost of such things, since I had, in the past, allocated budget for them.  Had I really gotten serious about it, I would have reasoned that I could probably do better in price a few years later and with different needs, but it never really bubbled up near the top of my own personal priority list.

 

This changed, however, when I encountered the Monitis product offering.  I’ll fast forward a bit and say that today, I have effective monitoring for my site that gives me exactly the data I want and costs me almost nothing.

  

Getting Started

I would offer a “how to” at this point, but you’ll have such an easy time it’s honestly not worth the bother.  Go to the main site, click “start monitoring now” and fill out the requested information.  That’s it.  Really.

 

I did this, and true to what they say, I had monitoring of my site set up within 3 minutes.  At the time I performed the setup, I recall being in something of a hurry, so I just kind of did a fire and forget.  I setup monitoring HTTP for my site, and didn’t think anything more of it for the rest of the day.

 

The next day, I got the email shown below.  I saw that they had hit my site with HTTP requests from 3 different locations.  Cumulative uptime of 100%, too.  I won’t lie — I was a bit relieved to see that “all good” seemed to be the default state of affairs.

For a few more days, I continued to receive this daily summary.  I had an even larger sample size of things being alright, and, about a week in, I found myself with a bit more time to dig into the monitoring itself.  I logged into my newly-created Monitis account and poked around in my dashboard.

 

The default monitoring that I had setup involved 3 locations making HTTP requests all day to my site.  If any 2 locations failed simultaneously, I would receive an email alert that my site was down.  At the time, I had signed up for a trial account, so my next bit of curiosity was “what will this cost me.”  When I went to the pricing page and punched up what this would cost on an ongoing basis, I found the result quite reasonable: $1.20 per month.

 

Wow.

 

My Takeaway: The Value Proposition

 

I could kick myself for not doing research earlier. I keep my finger on the pulse of many different trends and technologies.  And, if you would have asked me whether or not some kind of affordable site monitoring technology existed, I imagine I would have said, “gosh, probably.”

And yet, I never went out and did the research.

 

The obvious lesson here is that affordable and effective monitoring for your site exists.  Even if your site is simply you posting a food recipe or two per month, and a couple of your relatives reading it every now and then, it’s probably worth about a dollar per month to make sure it runs smoothly.  Call it peace of mind or call it professional pride.  Either way, if you have a site, you might as well keep an automated eye on it.

 

But the deeper lesson here is one of cost and specialization.  Cloud technology and its ramifications extend beyond, “it’s easy to provision a server.”  All facets of traditional IT are becoming commoditized and offered affordably and with good quality to people with budgets of all sizes.  If it’s been achievable for the enterprise for years, keep your eyes open, because, quite probably, a version is achievable for you as well.

Sign up for Monitis FREE 15-day full-featured trial! Premium plan starting from $12/month only! 

Originally, this post was published on Monitis Blog, you can check it here.

Websites are getting bigger and more complicated by the day. Video, images and custom fonts are all great for showcasing your product or service. But the price to pay in terms of reduced page load times and ultimately, decreased sales, could lead to some difficult decisions about what to cut.

 

Web loads speeds are integral factors in determining your SEO and how long customers will stay at your site. But web design, as important as it is for driving traffic, can also get in the way of your ultimate goal of bringing customers and revenue. In other words, you must avoid page bloat at all costs!

 

This is why businesses today, more than ever, must develop a clearly defined web performance optimization strategy. In fact, web monitoring should be an integral part of your web design best practices. To be clear, web performance optimization (or WPO) is the science of making your website perform better so it increases visitor retention, improves SEO, and drives more sales.

To give a great case study of how WPO works, consider what 37signals (now Basecamp) did with their Highrise marketing website. Using A/B testing, the company did multiple tests to determine the best plan for their landing page. In one case, the original background was white and cluttered with information. A dramatic change was made by replacing this white background with a picture of a person smiling.

 

The new landing page led to an increase in signups at the Highrise site by 102.5%!

 

This list provides another 99 great case studies of how WPO made a huge difference in website conversions.

 

In what follows, we take things further by providing you a brief checklist of the key steps to ensuring your website performance optimization strategy is on track.

Keep Things Fast! 

Website conversions are integrally tied to the speed of the site. One second saved in download time can make all the difference between a sale or a bounce.

  

Check Your Web Hosting 

Your web hosting may offer “unlimited bandwidth” but if it involves shared services with other websites that impacts overall performance, then is it really worth it? It’s always a good idea to periodically review your hosting plan to ensure you’re getting the best value for your dollar.

  

Make Your Site Mobile First

Having a “mobile first” website is critical to success in today’s digital marketplace. If you don’t believe it, just consider that mobile commerce transactions in the United States alone are expected to total $123 billion in 2016

  

Image Optimization 

“Page bloat” – or the practice of cramming websites with high density images – has gotten out of hand and is the number one culprit for long page loading times. Don’t bloat your website! One of the best ways to ensure proper image optimization is to adopt correct sizing and formatting for all your images.

  

Go Easy with Affiliate Codes & Ads  

Ads and affiliate code are good . . . up to a point! But when you go overboard, this can lead to high bounce rates and can adversely impact your overall website performance. Constantly check how third-party applications impact your load speed! 

 

Cache Often 

Caching is a mechanism for the temporary storage of web pages in order to reduce bandwidth and improve performance. This saves server time and makes your website faster overall.

  

Use a CDN 

Content Delivery Networks deliver the static files of a website, like CSS, images, and JavaScript, through servers that are in closer proximity to the user’s physical location. Every second that you save in download time is dollars in your pocket.

  

Make Your CTA Front & Center 

Don’t make your landing page a game of “guess where to check-out the merchandise.” Visitors don’t want to spend extra time trying to figure out where to complete their transactions. Your Call to Action should be front and center on the landing page.

Adopt Cloud-based Website Monitoring 

Imagine having all of the vital statistics for your website in a nice convenient dashboard, and getting alerts about trouble spots long before they reach impact your customers. Cloud hosted web monitoring is the crucial component in today’s digital marketplace. IT system monitoring is first of all a real time data that can help you respond to problems. You cannot do without monitoring tools, if you hope to optimize and maximize your application’s performance.

Sign up for Monitis FREE 15-day full-featured trial! Premium plan starting from $12/month only!