Hey Everyone, I am doing some research on additional services I can offer my clients. I am thinking of using a 3rd party monitoring service, as a built in service included with our basic site design. Do you think this is a beneficial tool to give to my clients? I am leaning towards yes, but am having a hard time articulating it to clients. My only argument at this time is that page loading speed effects your placement on google.
If it's free to them and hardly costs you anything to implement then sure, why not, but if it costs money for the client I personally can't see them going for it no matter how hard you try to sell it.
I think page loading does affect your SERPs and I have personally seen a drop after implementing a code which increased loading times and better rankings after dropping that code. So it does help a lot to have a fast loading website.
I agree with you but I personally don't think clients will buy that sort of monitoring with a web design. They might buy it when their website plummets out of the Serps but you know what clients are like.
I think that page load speed is important. In that way you keep users from leaving your site. There is a chance of 50-50 that user leave or stay and wait for page to be loaded. I often use YSlow addon for Firebug on FireFox to see what elements of my page are problem. There are a few hacks that you can also put in your htacces file....
Yes, the need to monitor your website is an important factor to keep up with your clients and your sites visitor. You can better move with the monitoring service to monitor your websites for downtime and response time for every 15 mins of time interval. You can get the Uptime button in your website which will show you the status of your website and when you click on the button you would be able to see the public report of your website for the last day, last week, present month and year.
In fact, you could search for a website monitoring service provider who will agree to provide your clients with cheap basic website monitoring service - if you have many clients, the discount could be very considerable and your customers would appreciate it.
I think it is useful feature. For example we provide free monitoring of every server we host. You could use Zenoss monitoring system not to only monitor page load time, you could also get any information from OS (mem usage, cpu load etc...) or SQL engine for example. Monitoring is one of the most important parts of high reliability.
Good idea if the service is free. There are a number of sites that will allow you to monitor your site for free. Why not offer this service within an upgraded package. For example, package 1 = website, package 2 = website, on page SEO and site monitoring. If you get your pricing right then the customer will probably choose the second package.
Loading speed is also important for visitors, who wants to wait around waiting for pages to load? Ok if the site is not busy and the server does not have much load on it then not such an issue, but if the site is busy and the server is getting bogged down this is essential to work on things that can help. Better for visitors and better for search engines, as a whole this should mean more conversions in money, what actually matters to business owners of course.