Performance is key to the success of any device or application. In today’s digital world, more people than ever before are relying on web applications to help them manage business operations, address customer service needs, and more. It’s no wonder concepts like application monitoring are becoming increasingly appealing to today’s teams.
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Application performance monitoring solutions, or APM tools, allow companies to effectively monitor, manage, and maintain an application’s performance.
The right technology will often combine monitoring of the application’s technical performance with insights into the satisfaction levels of everyday users.
Crucially, APM solutions aren’t just necessary for handling things like mobile apps, or proprietary apps created by businesses for customer service.
These tools can also help you in monitoring and managing some of your most important back-end tools for business development – like the software you use for building and controlling your website. Let’s explore the world of application monitoring for WordPress.
What is Application Monitoring for WordPress?
Application monitoring for WordPress is essentially a form of apm software focusing directly on your WordPress website and ecosystem.
You can use this software for everything from database monitoring, to get a complete picture of the database queries that are slowing down your network, to transaction monitoring for pinpointing outliers.
In general, an application performance monitoring tool can be any service that offers front-end monitoring on user experience and synthetic transaction recording, and application discovery tracing, and diagnostics tools.
The diagnostics part of the software will often feature a range of elements, including automated discovery of various components of your WordPress ecosystem, from web server performance to API failures.
Most of the APM solutions available today come with access to in-depth analytics, available in a range of reporting formats, so you can more easily explore the data collected by your application when tracking potential performance issues.
Why is WordPress APM Technology so Important?
At first glance, WordPress seems simple enough to use as a website builder and content management system. However, it’s also an application at its core – one that integrates with a host of frameworks and other tools.
The wide range of customization opportunities available from a WordPress site means that you’re constantly adding more complexity to your solution.
Successfully monitoring the ever-evolving performance of a tool like WordPress means you can reduce your risk of significant problems which might bring your business reputation crashing down around you.
What Does WordPress Performance Monitoring Do?
Ultimately, a WordPress application performance monitoring tool will offer many of the same features of any APM solution – tailored specifically for WordPress.
The exact functionality you get will depend on the company that makes your performance monitoring system. Most solutions will at least offer the following features:
- Measure transaction monitoring:
- Database monitoring:
- External requests:
- Code insights:
- Transaction traces:
- API failure tracking:
- Error tracking:
At the heart of most APM tools is a solution for measuring the performance of every response and request. Together, these actions are known as a transaction. Monitoring the transactions on your WordPress site is how you can determine potential outliers that are slowing down your WordPress experience.
A strong application performance monitoring tool for WordPress will allow you to view a complete picture of the time-consuming database queries in your ecosystem.
You’ll be able to see which application dependencies are dragging down the performance of your website, and whether you have any issues with things like web server management, caching, and third-party services.
If you’re connecting with third-party solutions, your application performance management tool will help you to find the slowest network calls having the biggest impact on your application’s performance. Then you can trace the cause of the problem back to its original source.
An APM solution can show you which of your requests and transactions aren’t working, but also where you need to gain useful insights into areas where you may need to approve and adapt your code.
You can use transaction tracing to visualize where your code is spending the most time, as well as which functions have been executed, for how long. The right technology will even centralize all of your insights and tracing information in the same location, so you can make better assumptions about your data.
When you’re using API connections on your WordPress site, your application monitoring tool can help you gain a detailed overview of all the HTTP failures that may be impacting your users. You’ll be able to track the status of codes and their breakdown across various WordPress request parameters.
The error tracking system available from your application monitoring tool may allow you to collect crashes, exceptions, and other information with full-stack frames, so you can better understand how your customers might be affected by changes in your technology.
Some companies can also use their application monitoring technology to access real user monitoring. This basically tests to see whether the application will perform as its intended when your customers or users access it.
Do Ecommerce Sites Need WordPress APM Technology?
Companies selling products can definitely benefit from a WordPress APM solution. Imagine if you were running an ecommerce website, to make money through selling products to your customers. The better your website runs, the better the shopping experience will be for your customers.
Many customers will typically decide whether or not to purchase from a company based on the user experience they can offer.
A small delay in your site’s loading performance could be enough to send your customers running to your competition – and that’s only the start of the problems you might notice without APM.
For instance, if your eCommerce site has a problem which causes it to go down – even for a short space of time, this could cause you to lose the trust of your target audience, and opportunities for sales.
Every minute your website spends not working as it should, is a minute when you could be missing out on all kinds of sales and costing you money in the long run.
Although an APM solution won’t always have what it takes to prevent every possible outage or problem you might have with your WordPress Site, it can at least speed up the process of figuring out where the issue began.
In a WordPress site that uses a host of software solutions in one environment, from product catalogues to user account management and shopping cart tools, this can save you a lot of crucial time.
It’s not just sales companies focusing on selling physical products that benefit from this technology either. Any website which intends to collect money from an intended audience needs to perform perfectly.
Membership and community sites, as well as sites where you might sell digital products, also need to operate at their best all the time, so your customers don’t demand a refund on their subscription.
You may find that subscription-based companies are even more reliant on WordPress application monitoring. After all, if you’re making money on a subscription basis, the majority of your income will depend on the experience you can give your target audience. A poor experience will lead to an overall reduction in your current customer base.
Which WordPress Websites Need APM?
Application performance monitoring is a valuable tool for virtually all businesses using WordPress websites today.
Although it might seem obvious that you need to track the performance of your website and keep it perfect when you’re trying to sell products to customers, this doesn’t mean that you can overlook the performance of your WordPress website when running a different kind of business.
Enterprise sites and company websites can make or break the credibility of a company. Most customers do initial research on a website to determine whether they can trust a brand before they consider buying from them.
If your site isn’t working as it should be, this instantly drives customers away. Particularly now, as the relationships we build with businesses grow more digital, customers expect companies to have a high-performing website.
News sites and blogs which release regular content and entertainment to attract a dedicated audience can also struggle if they don’t have the right WordPress APM technology in place.
If you’re making money on advertisements and affiliate links on your website, but these connections don’t work, you’re missing out on earning the revenue you need.
At the same time, you’re gradually losing the attention of your audience who needs to look for entertainment elsewhere.
Should You Be Using Application Performance Monitoring?
In a world that runs on applications and technology, the best companies will be the ones that know how to monitor and manage every step of their digital journey.
Application performance monitoring solutions for WordPress ensure that one of the most important parts of your business can continue to run effectively, no matter how much your site might evolve over the years.
With the right application performance monitoring tools, you can ensure you’re giving customers the amazing experience they deserve, while avoiding losing your hard-earned clients to potential competitors elsewhere on the web. Application performance monitoring for solutions like WordPress has never been more important.
Sonnal S Sinha is a passionate writer as well as WordPress and WooCommerce rockstar who loves to share insights on various topics through his engaging blog posts. He runs a successful website design and digital marketing company. With 15+ years of experience in WordPress theme development, he strives to inform and inspire readers with his thought-provoking content. He helps thousands of small and medium businesses and startups create a unique online presence. Follow Sonnal S Sinha for your regular dose of knowledge and inspiration.
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