While marketers and designers want to push creative boundaries when designing websites, it’s important that they have access to relevant data to make important and strategic data-driven decisions.
That’s where website performance monitoring comes in. You need to make sure you’re tracking all the right metrics.
But which metrics should you pay attention to? And what integrations and tools should you use?
Here’s our comprehensive guide.
What is website performance monitoring?
Website performance monitoring is the practice of tracking site performance metrics related to technical performance, user experience, and marketing success.
Must-track performance metrics include:
- Page load time
- Mobile-friendly rankings
- Time to first byte (TTFB)
- Time to interactive (TTI)
- Error rate
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- Website uptime and unplanned downtime
- Network availability
Here are the best web performance monitoring tools and integrations that allow you to track the important metrics, spot performance issues, and fix them.
8 best web performance monitoring tools for different needs and budgets
1. Solarwinds Pingdom
Solarwinds’ Pingdom is a website and web application performance monitoring solution that combines real and synthetic user monitoring:
- Real user monitoring lets you track your website’s performance in real time and analyze historical trends. It allows you to better understand your users by gaining insight into their behavior on your website.
- Synthetic user monitoring enables you to simulate visitor interactions so that you can identify potential problems and fix them before these issues start affecting your users.
Pingdom also allows you to automatically test your website’s availability every minute from over 60 servers across the globe. This means you won’t have to worry about your website going down without anyone on your team noticing it — Pingdom will notify you immediately if it happens.
Pingdom is an affordable yet powerful performance monitoring tool that’s simple and easy to use even if you aren’t a technical person.
Main features:
- Real user monitoring
- Synthetic user monitoring
- Uptime monitoring
- Webpage speed analysis
- Transaction monitoring
- Website status alerting
- User experience monitoring
- Root cause analysis
Pricing:
- Starting at $10 per month
2. Site24x7
Site24x7 is an all-in-one infrastructure, website, and web application performance monitoring solution. It’s built specifically for DevOps and IT teams and gives you complete control over the end-user experience.
This tool offers real user monitoring that lets you understand what’s happening on your website in real time and synthetic user monitoring that lets you simulate user behavior.
It also has many advanced features that enable you to analyze your website performance in granular detail. This includes the ability to check individual load times for all page components, including CSS and JavaScript, and tools to help you reduce page size and improve site speed.
One caveat — Site24x7 is a bit more in-depth and complicated than others. Expect a steep learning curve if you’re a beginner in this area.
Main features:
- Website monitoring
- Web server monitoring
- Cloud monitoring
- Network monitoring
- Application performance monitoring (APM)
- Real user monitoring
- Synthetic user monitoring
Pricing:
- Starting at $9 per month
3. UptimeRobot
UptimeRobot is an uptime monitoring tool that regularly checks your website and sends you notifications if it’s down.
It offers integrations that let you choose the channel the alert is sent to, including email, Slack, SMS, and more.
Uptime is important to monitor for business websites because having downtime can result in lost revenue and hurts your brand.
With UptimeRobot, you can quickly set up a nice status page to track and showcase your website status. It’s an excellent choice given its simplicity, reliability, and affordability.
Main features:
- Website monitoring
- Cron job monitoring
- Port monitoring
- SSL monitoring
- Keyword monitoring
- Ping monitoring
Pricing:
- There’s a free plan
- Pro plan costs $8 per month
4. Datadog
Datadog is a web application monitoring solution for enterprises running large-scale cloud applications.
This tool combines infrastructure metrics, traces, and log data in a single platform that gives you the full picture of your web app’s performance.
With Datadog, you can collect data from hundreds of technologies that you can use for troubleshooting, visualization, machine learning, and more.
Main features:
- Real user monitoring
- Synthetic user monitoring
- Network monitoring
- Security monitoring
- Log management
Pricing:
- There’s a free plan
- Paid plans start at $15 per host per month
Get 13 need-to know tips on website SEO — whether or not you use Webflow.
Get 13 need-to know tips on website SEO — whether or not you use Webflow.
5. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics solution in the world. It allows you to fully understand the different factors that shape your audience and the data-informed reasons why visitors are coming to your site.
Given Google Analytics’ popularity, many web apps and software — including Webflow — offer integrations with it.
Google Analytics is best used by those who need an in-depth look into their performance metrics.
A note: Google has received a lot of criticism and concern due to its approach to user privacy. For privacy-conscious businesses, Google Analytics might not be the best solution. If you’re looking for an alternative tool, check out these alternative web analytics solutions to make an informed decision.
Main features:
- Traffic reporting
- User tracking
- Conversion tracking
- Conversion goals
- Referral tracking
- Custom dashboards
Pricing:
- Free
6. Nocodelytics
Nocodelytics is a web analytics solution designed specifically for no coders and has a powerful Webflow integration.
With this tool, you can track searches, CMS items, and clicks on links and buttons.
Currently, Nocodelytics integrates with Jetboost, and Memberstack and Zapier integrations are coming soon.
Main features:
- CMS item tracking
- Click tracking for links and buttons
- Search tracking for searches on your Webflow website
- Embeddable dashboards
- Simple data visualizations
- Fast no code setup
Pricing:
- There’s a free plan
- Paid plans start at $19 per month
7. Hotjar
Hotjar is a user behavior monitoring tool used by 900,000 websites worldwide and is best known for its heatmap functionality. Heatmaps represent how users move around your website, how far down they scroll, and where they click.
Hotjar shows you a heatmap of your website and lets you compare heatmaps for desktop, tablet, and mobile versions to determine how user behavior changes depending on the device.
With this tool, you can record user behavior on your website and collect user feedback via feedback boxes that people can click on while exploring your site.
You can also collect user feedback via on-site user surveys that only take a few seconds to answer. And if you don’t know what to ask, you can use one of Hotjar’s survey templates.
Main features:
- Heatmaps
- Recording
- Feedback boxes
- On-site surveys
- Webflow integration
Pricing:
- There’s a free plan
- Paid plans start at $31 per month
8. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a website performance and user behavior monitoring tool that takes a snapshot of your website and then produces five easy-to-understand reports:
- A heatmap report that shows the areas that get the most clicks.
- A scrollmap report that shows the most popular scroll depth (usually the best place for a meaningful call to action).
- A confetti report that shows individual clicks displayed as color-coded dots.
- An overlay report that shows the percentage breakdown of clicks on all your page elements.
- A list report that shows numerical click data.
With all this data, you can make various adjustments to your website to increase conversion rates.
Another neat feature is Crazy Egg’s traffic analysis functionality that analyzes all of your traffic in one place and compares the performance of various traffic segments based on specific referral sources.
It can help you identify traffic segments that are the most valuable to your business and adjust your marketing strategy in a way that allows you to get more of that type of traffic.
Additionally, Crazy Egg also has a heatmap to give you actionable insights into your data and a monitoring functionality for JavaScript errors.
Main features:
- Heatmaps
- Recordings
- A/B testing
- Traffic analysis
- Error tracking
- Surveys
Pricing:
- Starting at $29 per month
Improve your website with performance monitoring
Website performance monitoring allows you to spot performance issues and fix them.
When you track performance metrics, you gain knowledge that you can use to improve the functionality of your website or web application, optimize it for conversions, and provide a better user experience.
The possibilities are endless, which makes it even more important to pick the right website performance monitoring tool that fits your needs.
