13 website monitoring tools & software to improve site performance and the user experience

There are several tools that can make the website monitoring process much more efficient. Choose the right combination and you’ll gain thorough website data faster, freeing up your time for other things: like using what you learn to improve your site and create a delightful user experience.

We’ve broken down thirteen key website monitoring tools to add to your tech stack below, so let’s get going.

Why website monitoring is crucial for great customer experience

Website monitoring is the ongoing process of making sure your site is working as expected—and helping you know when it’s not.

There’s an important link between website monitoring and customer experience: your site is one of your most important lines of communication with your customers, so website performance is vital to maintaining a high-quality connection.

If your website is down, filled with bugs and glitches, or delivers poor UX, customers will probably navigate away and take their business elsewhere. Poor website performance also damages your company's reputation and negatively impacts SEO rankings.

Put simply, the harder it is for customers to navigate your site, the more likely they are to get frustrated and give up. That’s one of the main website monitoring advantages⁠—when customers can seamlessly and successfully interact with your site, they’re more likely to convert, which is the cornerstone of any online business.

13 excellent website monitoring tools to add to your tech stack

These thirteen website monitoring tools all have one thing in common: they excel at monitoring the metrics that impact customer experience. 

Use these tools strategically and you’ll have no trouble creating and maintaining a site that’s a breeze for your customers to navigate.

We’ve divided the tools into four categories:

• Site usability

• Site performance

• Site health

•  Site security

Site usability

Site usability goes beyond just identifying whether your site works. Rather, it explores how easy it is for visitors to use and whether it serves their wants and needs.

Understanding how your customers experience your site is vital because they’re the people you want to satisfy and keep coming back for more.

1. Hotjar Observe and Ask

How Hotjar’s features help with site usability

Hotjar gives you insight into exactly how users are experiencing your site. Rather than providing solely quantitative data, they give you qualitative information to round out your website monitoring and zero in on what elements your visitors enjoy as well as the issues they run into.

Hotjar Observe offers comprehensive product or website experience insights:

• Discover which elements of your site attract attention and which get ignored with heatmaps 

• Watch replays of user sessions to pinpoint what makes them rage click and u-turn with session recordings 

• Identify where users drop off in your main conversion flows with Funnels

Hotjar Ask provides you with complementary tools to gather user feedback: 

• Surveys let you collect long-form feedback to dive deeper into how your customers experience your site. 

• With Feedback tools, you can gather quick insights from users as they experience your site to learn what’s working well and what needs improvement.

Hotjar tools measure metrics like session duration, page speed, and scroll depth. But where they really excel is in helping you tap into the human side of website monitoring. 

Because numbers often don’t tell the whole story, it’s a great idea to pair traditional web analytics and website monitoring tools with user-centric software like Hotjar. This way, you can broaden your understanding of how your site is operating and make sure it’s seamless and intuitive for your users to navigate.

2.  Hotjar Engage

How Hotjar Engage’s features help with site usability

Hotjar Engage (yes, that’s us again! 👋) is all about making usability testing easy. The platform is ideal for teams who don’t have existing users to work with⁠: you can hire people to test out your site from within Engage itself. And if you do have your own testers, simply bring them into the platform to run your interviews and benefit from:

• Accurate video transcripts, to focus only on gathering actionable insights from your users during interviews

• Shareable time-stamped notes, to align and act on those insights with your team after the interview

• Integration with Hotjar Observe tools (Heatmaps and Recordings), to analyze participants' journey on your site in detail

By letting you recruit the right users, easily schedule interviews, and seamlessly hosting, recording, and transcribing your calls, Engage enables you to pinpoint usability issues on your site and improve the user experience. 

Remember, one of the most important aspects of website monitoring is ensuring your users can navigate your site and achieve their goals as seamlessly as possible. Conducting pre-launch user testing research and integrating your results into future iterations is a fantastic way to do that.

Site performance

Site performance investigates how well your site works from a technical viewpoint. It’s frequently linked to criteria like overall loading time, operational smoothness, and user interactivity.

If your site has performance issues, you’ll miss out on customers, sales, and conversions until you resolve them. That’s why diligently monitoring site performance is so essential.

3. Pingdom

How Pingdom’s features help with site performance

Solarwind’s Pingdom dives deep into website performance metrics. They provide users with actionable insights so they can make sure their sites always run smoothly and their customers keep coming back.

Although Pingdom delivers technical information, their platform isn’t only for developers. The product’s reports present data clearly and concisely so team members working in departments like digital marketing and customer experience can understand it as well.

Pingdom’s tools help you keep an eye on website performance in four ways:

1. Synthetic Monitoring: simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end-user experience with uptime monitoring, page speed, transaction monitoring, and alerting

2. Real User Monitoring: enhance your site’s performance with data from actual site visitors with live maps, user experience monitoring, page load performance, and user behavior metrics

3. Infrastructure monitoring: instant visibility into servers and virtual hosts with server monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), and both standard and custom metrics thanks to a powerful API

4. Application monitoring: comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

An example of Pingdom in action

Pingdom is a popular software for ecommerce website analysis. Retail brands know that first impressions are everything—when customers have problems the first time they visit your website, they might never come back. In fact, as many as 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after having a bad experience.

Ecommerce companies do business with customers from all over the world. It can be hard to make sure your site is performing well with so many geographic locations and time zones in the mix. 

Pingdom’s 'Real User Monitoring' tool pinpoints site performance trends across devices, regions, and time periods so you always know exactly who’s impacted by downtime or usability issues. This gives you the ability to resolve specific issues quickly, minimize downtime, and make sure you’re always delivering a high-quality experience to your users.

4. UpTrends

How UpTrends’ features help with site performance

UpTrends is a website monitoring service that makes website performance metrics clear and accessible. Their goal is to help users explore and fix site issues quickly to minimize any impact on their bottom line.

They do so with the following monitoring solutions:

• Synthetics: uptime monitoring with 233 checkpoints to track how your website performs in different locations, web application monitoring throughout the user journey, web performance monitoring to identify what slows down your site, and multi-browser monitoring of Core Web Vitals and W3C metrics in the latest Chrome and Edge browsers.

• Web performance monitoring: Ensure that your website is always loading quickly and correctly⁠— and receive alerts the moment it isn’t. You can also optimize your site for different browsers and devices.

• Web app monitoring: Dive deeper into your site’s core functions to make sure they’re easy for customers to interact with. This product is especially popular for ecommerce sites because it focuses on interactive elements like shopping carts and payment screens. 

Critically, UpTrends is reliable when alerting you of website performance issues by reducing false positive alerts and offering a flexible alert system that notifies you via email, SMS, phone calls, and mobile apps. The tool also integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, or PagerDuty, or lets you build custom integrations with webhooks.

An example of UpTrends in action

Let’s talk about the importance of monitoring website performance in the hotel industry. When people have trouble making online bookings, hotels will lose business and revenue—it’s as simple as that.

UpTrends’ products are fantastic for hotels and rentals because of how well they monitor click paths and core functions like log-ins, reservations, check-ins/check-outs, and search results. They make sure guests consistently have quick, seamless experiences on your site. When problems do arise, you’ll know before anyone realizes anything is amiss and be equipped to resolve them quickly.

This kind of monitoring results in:

• Less abandoned reservations & lower permanent abandonment rates

• Great brand perception & loyalty

• Frictionless online transactions

• Better SEO rankings

• Knowing about site performance issues before customers complain

5. Datadog

How Datadog’s features help with site performance

Datadog is a cloud-based, comprehensive website monitoring tool. In addition to Real User Monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring, it provides:

• Infrastructure monitoring with historical records, latency tests (response times), load times, load error rates, and machine learning-based alert tools

• Logs management with website uptime record-keeping and rapid troubleshooting via root-cause analysis

• Cloud security management with streamlined collaboration for DevOps and IT teams, simplified security workflows, and the ability to map all the relationships between cloud resources

6. Site24x7

How Site24x7’s features help with site performance

Site24x7 is, like Datadog, more than a website monitoring tool, as its advanced features also let you track and improve the end-user experience:

• Website monitoring: monitor the performance of internet services like HTTPS, DNS server, FTP server, SSL/TLS certificate, SMTP server, POP server, URLs, REST APIs, SOAP web service, and more from 120+ global locations

• Server monitoring: stay on top of outages and pinpoint server issues with root cause analysis capabilities

• Cloud monitoring: get complete visibility across your cloud resources, public or private, and monitor workloads and troubleshoot app performance on cloud and virtualization platforms

• Network monitoring: monitor critical network devices such as routers, switches, and firewalls

• Application performance: identify application servers and app components that are generating errors and monitor for Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, and mobile platforms

• Real user monitoring (RUM): gauge the application experience of real users, then analyze and segment performance by browser, platform, geography, ISP and more

Unlike Datadog, Site24x7 is better suited to DevOps and IT teams, but less accessible to digital marketers.

7. Uptime Robot

How Uptime Robot’s features help with site downtime

Uptime Robot has come from being one of the most popular uptime monitoring services on the market to becoming a comprehensive website monitoring software, with a variety of tools that help avoid potential leads landing on a dreaded error page and more:

• Website monitoring: receive alerts via email, SMS, voice call, Twitter, Slack, Webhooks, and even Discord as soon as your website is down

• SSL monitoring: notification of expired SSL certificates so you’ll always have time to renew them before they wreak havoc. 

• Ping monitoring: ping networks, computer systems, and devices to make sure they’re available

• Port monitoring: monitor specific services (like email or database server) that are running on ports

• Cron job monitoring (or ‘heartbeat monitoring’): make sure devices are connected to the internet at all times

• Keyword monitoring: check for the presence (or absence) of specific text in HTML and JSON files

In addition, Uptime Robot will check incidents in different locations to reduce the amount of false-positive alerts, and let you share incident updates to your subscribers.

An example of Uptime Robot in action

Downtime leads to annoyed customers, lower website conversions, and lost revenue. 

In an ideal world, your dev team should find out about website downtime before your customers so they can work to resolve it as quickly as possible. Uptime Robot’s wide range of integrations means your team can receive alerts however they want. That way, notifications will not only get seen by the right people but can also fit into your existing workflows seamlessly.

Slack is a great platform to use in the website monitoring process because it also integrates with other tools (like Hotjar). That means you can receive messages as soon as downtime is on the horizon and whenever your customers are having usability problems.

8. Uptime

How Uptime’s features help with site downtime

While Uptime is best-known for monitoring downtime, they also have features that check other metrics like page speed and usability. Nevertheless, their simple yet detailed interface, minimal ‘false positive’ notifications, and top-rated support team make them one of the best solutions for downtime monitoring out there.

Here are some of the capabilities that make Uptime stand out:

• Uptime monitoring: conduct dozens of different kinds of site checks on both public or internal websites, apps, and services

• Website downtime alerts: get accurate, immediate alerts about issues and outages via call, text, email, or an integrated app like Slack. You can also set up escalation procedures based on problem severity and seniority.

• Real user monitoring: make sure your site is serving actual user needs—analyze real user data to optimize for speed, performance, and experience

• Status pages: when outages do happen, you can let people know from within Uptime’s platform. Simply create a customized status page or communicate via an integrated app.

An example of Uptime in action

It’s important to be diligent about monitoring downtime, but receiving lots of false alarms and notifications can be frustrating. 

Imagine your dev team complaining about getting bothered with urgent alerts that end up being inaccurate. Even worse, your business starts losing money because employees are unnecessarily investigating notifications at unsociable hours.

Uptime has a great reputation for reliability. When you receive an alert from them, you can be sure it’s for a good reason. That means you’ll be able to allocate your team’s time and resources effectively and focus on resolving downtime issues rather than sifting through notifications.

Uptime also takes things a step further in helping dev teams resolve downtime problems. Say you’re launching a new product tomorrow and your site has been plagued with issues you just can’t fix. Uptime has one of the best tech support teams in the industry and they’re available 24/7. So, you can count on their help if you find yourself in a sticky, last-minute situation.

Site health

Just like people, websites need to be in good health to operate properly. 

Site health dives into your site’s vital functions and determines how healthy they are. An unhealthy website has many errors, issues, and warnings. Some of the most harmful include:

• Broken internal links or malformed links

• Slow page loading times

• Broken internal JavaScript and CSS files

• Issues with certificates (expired, near-expired, incorrectly named)

• Non-secure pages

These kinds of product and technical SEO problems put your website at a high risk of performing poorly, so it’s vital they’re resolved quickly.

9. Lumar

How Lumar’s features help with site health

Previously known as DeepCrawl, Lumar offers a full suite of website intelligence solutions, combined in a platform that offers four key products:

1. Analyze: quickly uncover the technical issues that are impacting your website’s search ranking & user experience with ultra-fast website crawls

2. Monitor: track site health trends even across multiple domains and take action quickly with smart alerts

3. Impact: compare your website’s health score to your competitors’, prioritize tasks to improve yours efficiently, and track the impact over time

4. Protect: prevent traffic loss with automated SEO QA testing and take advantage of powerful automations to resolve common website problems

Lumar’s comprehensive-yet-accessible platform is ideal for SEOs, marketers, engineers, and DevOps teams, for a wide range of use cases, from website audits to website monitoring and SEO testing. 

An example of Lumar in action

As a digital marketer, your website is a major asset. But understanding how things work under the hood isn’t always easy, and you’re left wondering what to do (and what not to do) to improve your site’s performance.

Lumar tells you exactly which technical changes you should prioritize for the greatest impact. The tool’s insights help you pinpoint and fix technical mistakes that will improve the health of your site. 

This way, you can:

• Detect traffic-driving opportunities

• Monitor new issues and track trends over time

• Automate testing to proactively preserve your existing traffic

10. Ahrefs’ site audit

How Ahrefs’ Site Audit helps with site health

While Ahrefs is widely known for its SEO features, their Site Audit tool provides an effective way to keep track of your website’s technical health and on-page SEO issues:

• Exhaustive website analysis: after crawling your site’s mobile or web pages, the tool provides a health score highlighting issues (and recommendations to fix them) in its crawl log

• Issue grouping: check your site’s health against 100+ pre-defined issues including latency, social and HTML tags, content quality, localization, incoming and outgoing links, resources like images, JavaScript and CSS, and more

• Progress tracking: schedule daily, weekly, or monthly crawls and track site health over time, wherever you are, with Site Audit’s cloud-based solution

Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool complements the rest of this web analytics tool’s SEO features and help you find exactly what is holding your site back from ranking, from a technical aspect. 

Site security

Site security deals with the protection of your website from external attacks. The best security tools:

• Ensure you have visibility on your site’s vulnerabilities

• Run penetration tests and provide means of defense

These software act as the line of defense between your site and hackers against potential attacks, and, like insurance, are the necessary kind of website monitoring tools you hope you’ll never need to use.

11. Intruder

How Intruder’s features help with site security 

A healthy website is a secure website, and that’s exactly where Intruder’s platform comes in. Intruder is a vulnerability scanner that monitors site hygiene and detects cyber security weaknesses that hackers could take advantage of.

They’ve got four core features:

1. Continuous vulnerability management: run government-grade security checks, proactively scan your systems, and receive automatic alerts so you can always stay ahead of any vulnerabilities on your site

2. Attack surface monitoring: see your network from a potential hacker’s point of view and remove any open ports and services that don’t need to be there

3. Effortless reporting and compliance: produce high-quality reports that will ensure you meet compliance requirements and pass security audits

4. Intelligent results: quickly find and fix your most critical vulnerabilities with actionable remediation advice

An example of Intruder in action

Unfortunately, cyber attacks are becoming increasingly frequent and can put companies out of business. Approximately 43% of cyber crimes in the United States target small businesses, and most aren’t financially equipped to recover from these kinds of attacks.

For this reason, it’s a smart business decision for SMEs to invest in a vulnerability scanning platform like Intruder. This is especially the case if you have a remote team, which has been shown to increase the probability of data breaches.

Intruder’s tools will make sure that you don’t have any vulnerabilities anywhere in your tech stack, public or private. They cover everything from services to cloud storage to websites to endpoint devices, so you can rest assured your data is safe as your company’s online environment evolves.

12. Metasploit

How Metasploit’s features help with site security

Metasploit is a penetration testing framework resulting from the collaboration between the open source community and Rapid7. It helps security teams do more than just verify vulnerabilities, manage security assessments, and improve security awareness. It empowers and arms defenders to always stay one step (or two) ahead of cyber attackers:

• Gather attack information: access real-world exploits via the Metasploit Framework, maintained by 100,000+ contributors and users, and automatically correlate the right exploits to the right vulnerabilities

• Prioritize leading attack vectors: test user awareness with intuitive phishing and USB drop campaign wizards, and use hackers’ antivirus evasion techniques and post-exploitation modules to dive further into a network after an initial breach

• Remediate: ensure your compensating controls are working properly by testing them with real attacks and simulate every step in the kill chain to ensure your incident detection and response team can catch attackers at any stage

Metasploit helps you put yourself in the attackers’ shoes, so you’re better able to repel them should they really come after your website.

13. Nessus

How Nessus’ features help with site security

Nessus is a powerful vulnerability assessment tool part of Tenable’s platform. Built based on feedback from the security community, it is one of the most comprehensive solutions:

• Fully portable: Nessus can be deployed on any platform, regardless of how distributed your environment is

• Efficiency and accuracy: faster completion of the first scan and quick time-to-value thanks to plug-ins increasing scan performance

• Visibility: find and assess internet-connected assets before they find you to gain visibility on your attack surface

• Pre-built policies and templates: easily audit configuration compliance against CIS benchmarks and other best practices with 450+ templates

An example of Nessus in action

Say you’re the Security Administrator of a small- to medium-sized business (SMB). Part of your role entails protecting your company from cyberattacks. 

If SMBs were once immune to such attacks, that certainly is no longer the case. The risk of ransomware is rising, and small businesses can rarely afford themselves the luxury of a full-time Security Admin. 

To protect your company at all times, you may find it helpful (even necessary) to use a tool like Nessus, which can identify and assess vulnerabilities and significantly empower and improve even a one- or two-person IT security department.

Get your site in tip-top shape with monitoring tools

The best way to ensure that your customers consistently have satisfying, frictionless experiences with your site is by choosing the right website monitoring tools. They’ll provide you with key insights into your site problems, allow you to resolve them faster, and minimize any negative impact on users.

Whether you want to zero in on usability and make sure customers accomplish their goals on your site or investigate pesky performance issues like slow-loading pages and downtime, this list has a tool for you.

Understand why users drop off

Funnels lets you visualize the conversion steps on your site. But more than merely telling you what happened and how many users dropped off between two steps, it shows you the relevant recordings at each step so you understand why they didn’t convert. It's easier and faster than ever to connect your numbers to real user behavior and identify usability issues.