Why is Server Monitoring Important?

Continuously monitoring your server is therefore all the more important so that you can intervene quickly when there are problems. Ryte can help you with server monitoring.

Why server availability is important

The accessibility of your website is important for two main reasons:

Usability

When users visit a link to your website, whether via Google search or another website, they expect the destination to be reachable. If your server can't process the request because it's unavailable, visitors will lose trust in your site. Especially if server errors accumulate, the dissatisfaction of users may lead to them avoiding your website in the future.

Furthermore, an inaccessible website can have a significant impact on your business if you rely on your website to make sales. Slow response times or time-outs can also lead to a lack of trust in your website, as well as a lack of sales.

Crawling und Indexing

The Googlebot crawling your page is the first prerequisite for your URL to be indexed in the SERPs, and therefore able to rank. If your server is not accessible, the Googlebot cannot crawl your website within its crawl budget. Thus, persistent server problems can affect your rankings and your visibility in the SERPs in the medium term.

Even a slow server can cause disadvantages when indexing. If the server takes a long time to respond to requests, the Googlebot can identify problems and reduce the crawling frequency. As a result, your site will be crawled even less frequently and more comprehensively, and new content may not be indexed at all.

How to monitor your server with Ryte

Ryte offers you the possibility to monitor your server continuously. You can find the corresponding report in the Website Success module under "Server Monitoring".

What is displayed there?

Pings: Every 10 minutes, Ryte sends a ping to your server and tests its response time. In the first diagram, the pings sent and the response times are displayed over time. The areas marked in red indicate that the server is too slow.

Accessibility: In this segment, you get an overview of how well your server is up to date and reachable on a weekly or monthly average. The accessibility is indicated in percent. The closer you are to the 100 percent mark here, the better.

Under "Incidents", possible errors concerning the accessibility or loading speed are counted. The "Time to First Byte" shows you how much time elapses before a client receives the first byte from your server after making a request.

Timeouts and slow responses: This section provides you with certain times when your server took a particularly long time to respond. In addition, you get an indication of how long your server took to assign the domain URL to your IP address. The most important key figures here are the loading time and the time-to-first byte. Because a slow server can slow down the loading speed. As this is a possible ranking criterion, long loading times can have a negative effect on the ranking.

Figure 1: Server Monitoring with Ryte

What to do if there are problems with the server

If the server monitoring shows that the server is often not available for your web project, you should ask the admin of your website host. Errors in the configuration can lead to possible failures.

Another possibility for slow response times can also be an overload of the server. Scripts or other applications can be responsible for this. You should conduct an analysis here with the administrator or your programmer.

Conclusion

Your goal is to achieve a server availability of almost 100 percent. Ryte can help you in the first step to discover possible errors in order to offer the Googlebot and your users the best possible performance.