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Monitor and Test Your Website

by | Jul 11, 2013 | Articles, Web Design, Web Development | 3 comments

You Should Monitor and Test Your Website

Whether your a blogger, web designer, web developer or anything else, chances are that you you have put a lot of time into your website. You have worked and toiled away hour after hour, and you are finally happy with the results. No matter who you are, you want your site to be up as much as possible. If you’re a good web designer, you want your site to be lightning fast as well. Keeping tabs on your website can be time consuming, and you may have to devote a lot of effort to looking after your website. You can’t afford for it to be down, especially if you are blogging for money. Every minute that your site is down is money that you aren’t making. You should definitely monitor and test your website.

How to Monitor Your Website

You could sit and watch over your website like a crazed lunatic, checking and rechecking your site. You could refresh your site each hour on the hour to see if it is up and is running like you want. The problem is, you have to sleep sometime. You have a life and can’t hover over your website like a mother hen. So what do you do? Fortunately for you, there are services out there that monitor your website for you. The one I use is free, and it is called freewebmonitoring. They test your site every 60 minutes. It’s 100% free, and you can have them monitor multiple sites. The best part is that they email you when it goes down. If you’re like me and take your smart phone everywhere, you’ll always know when your site is offline. Then, you can take a look at it and see if you need to take action.

How to Test Your Website

test your website

Testing your website is just as important. You want your site to be the fastest, highest performing site possible. The best thing about the sites I am recommending to you is that they don’t just tell you how long it is taking to load. They break down what is happening and they give you tips for improving your site. I recommend Pingdom for testing your site. Not only can you decide which servers you test your site from, Pingdom breaks down each process and shows you visually how much time each process is taking.

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The area that I especially like with Pingdom is where they give you a performance grade and let you know how you are doing. You can test your website and find areas that need improvement. The visual chart on the waterfall page shows you what is eating up the most time, making your page load slower. It breaks it down via color, showing you wait time, receive time, and connect time. The great thing is that if you want them to handle monitoring your website, they’ll do that for free, too!

Other Tools Used to Test Your Website

YSlow

Made by Yahoo, YSlow does basically the same thing that Pingdom does, but it is an addon for your Firefox browser. You can test in a matter of seconds how your website is doing and YSlow will produce a detailed report on how your website is doing. You’ll be graded of certain determining factors, and YSlow will break down what you need to do in order to get a better grade. This could be something like using a content delivery network, minifying scripts and CSS, and much more.

Google Pagespeed

Google Pagespeed is another site analyzation tool that will breakdown your site and what you can do to optimize it. Now, I will share something funny with you when I rran the Pagespeed analysis. I run Adsense ads in the sidebar of the site, and under minimize redirects, it lists their own ads as something that should be removed. I thought you’d find the humor in that.

Where Google Pagespeed really shines  is that it makes some suggestions that I don’t see in other areas. It also doesn’t just make general suggestions. Google will tell you what image or file is causing a problem or needs to have something done to it in order to improve performance.

Conclusion

The point above all else is just to keep an eye on your site. You need to test your website and optimize it so that it performs at maximum performance. A lot of work goes into making a website fast, especially a WordPress website. Over a basic html website, you also have a database to contend with. The tools I mentioned above are meant to help you and make this whole process much easier. What do you use to monitor and test your website? Is there something better than what I mentioned above? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

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