Detailed instructions on how to monitor a WordPress website

Monitoring every aspect of a website is an important task for anyone running a website.

To have a successful website, you need to make sure your website is always in top condition. You need to be a good analyst. More specifically, you need to know how your website is performing, for example:

The results of website monitoring activities will be a solid basis to help you make the right decisions. With that, your website’s health will always be in the best condition.

In today’s tutorial, I will show you everything you need to know for you to effectively monitor your website.

Specifically, we will take a look at the best tools to use in WordPress website monitoring.

Ready to explore them?

Let’s just get started.

What should you monitor for your website?

Like I said, website monitoring helps you collect data that tells you whether your website is working as you expect it to or not. These data are extremely important. Because it is the basis to help you take the right actions to improve the website better.

These are the things you need to monitor your website for

a. Visitor Statistics : Find out how many people visit your website. Which pages get the most traffic? Where do people come to your website from?

b.Page Speed : Does the site load quickly? Will all pages load quickly?

c. Uptime : Uptime is the amount of time users can access your website. Of course you want this number to be 100% or close to that. Monitor uptime to let you know when your website is offline. The opposite of uptime is downtime.

d. SEO : SEO is still an important thing you cannot ignore if you want to improve your website’s ranking in search results. SEO is a complicated topic, but when it comes to SEO monitoring, you need to know important information such as: how do you rank for the keyword you are targeting? How is the quality of the backlink profile? Are you getting a lot of bad links?

Tools used to monitor WordPress websites

We have no shortage of apps, tools and services out there to help us monitor our website. I will list the best tools and alternative tools for you to choose from.

The tools will be divided according to each monitoring item as above. There are tools that can do multiple monitoring at the same time. Such as Jetpack or ManageWP .

The best tool for user statistics: Google Analytics

Without a doubt Google Analytics is the best tool when it comes to website visitor statistics.

Google Analytics tells you how many page views your website receives, the number of visitors, the average time they spend on your site, and so on.

If you have not installed Google Analytics for your website, please refer to the Google Analytics for WordPress installation guide

Some other alternative tools to measure visitor statistics

It is very unlikely that any tool can replace Google Analytics. Therefore, the tools below are mainly used to supplement, rather than replace, Google Analytics.

a.Hotjar:

A tool to display heat map for your website. Heatmaps are a visual way to help you see how users are interacting with your website.

From there you can make decisions to help improve your website. Free HotJar up to 2000 page views per day. If your website has a larger pageview, you must upgrade to a paid plan. Speaking of paid, Crazy Egg is still the better option as it has many cheap plans.

b. Jetpack​

Jetpack has a Site Stats module that provides many important statistics right in the WordPress Dashboard. The data here is not as rich as in Google Analytics. But if you install Jetpacks, using this module also gives you some useful information.

c. Piwik​

Piwik is a self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics. It doesn’t have as many features as Google Analytics. But if you like to explore new stuff, see install Piwik here .. You need to install it on your own server.

In addition, it also has a WordPress plugin  to display statistics right in the WordPress Dashboard.

d. ​Go Squared  and Woopra

These are tracking solutions for business customers. If you are running an e-commerce website they are options worth considering.

Website Speed ​​Monitor: GTMetrix

You must have a fast loading website. Users want your website to load as quickly as possible. If your website takes too long to load, they will leave the site.

Google also takes page load speed as one of its 200 ranking factors. So slow website can affect your website ranking in search results.

Usually your website should load under 2 seconds. And you need a tool to monitor your website speed and warn if your website is slow. So you can know how to fix and prevent the effects of slow websites.

The best tool to monitor website speed is GTMetrix.

You can use it to test website speed and receive email alerts if website speed is problematic.

The tool’s free plan helps you perform basic monitoring. If you have more needs, you can choose the pro package like the price list here .

Here’s how to use GTMetrix for speed monitoring:

1. Go to GTMetrix and sign up for a free account

2. Enter your website URL and click the Analyze button.

3. You’ll see a detailed report on your site’s performance.

4. In the sidebar, you will see a Monitor section to help you monitor site speed, and a Set Up Alerts section that sends email notifications when your website speed takes too long to load according to the conditions you set.

The free monitoring feature only applies to locations in Canada, so it doesn’t make much sense for Vietnamese sites

Other WordPress Website Speed ​​Monitor Tools

Besides GTMetrix, you also have a few other options to monitor website speed as below:

a. Pingdom: a free tool for you to test website speed. But it also has a paid option that helps you monitor website performance automatically.

b. Monitor website speed using browser addons: You can also use some of the following addons to monitor website speed in the browser. Use Page Load Time  for Chrome or Page Speed ​​Monitor  for FireFox.

c. ManageWP : This tool has an addon called Performane Check that helps you monitor website speed. Its price is 1$/month for a website. You will receive daily test results and alerts when the page load speed is above the level you set.

c. Google Analytics: Inside Google Analytics there is also an area that tells you how fast your website loads. You can find this data by going to Behavior -> Site Speed. Other tools only measure the page you select while Google Analytics will monitor the entire website. So you should check here from time to time to check your page load status.

Uptime monitoring tool: Uptime Robot.

In 2013, the world’s largest online sales website Amazon.com down for about 45 minutes. And do you know what the damage figure is? $4.72 million dollars.

Maybe our website is not that big yet. But you will lose sales if your website is down continuously.

That’s why you need to monitor your website’s uptime. That way you know when the website is offline and how often. On that basis, you have a reasonable countermeasure.

There are many uptime monitoring tools out there. They do the same job, check your website automatically by sending a request every fixed time to the website to see if it is still online or not.

The length of time depends on the tool and the paid or paid version. For important websites the time interval should be 30 or 60 seconds. Normal website should be checked every 5 minutes.

The best website monitoring tool is UptimeRobot . It gives you 2 options:

UptimeRobot’s Dashboard screen is very intuitive. Looking at it you will know how long the site was last down. From the number inside UptimeRobot you can compare the number that your host commits when buying the host. This is the number of downtime minutes corresponding to the uptime percentage

You can see a big difference between 99% and 99.9% uptime. If you are not satisfied with the uptime of your current hosting, refer to a hosting service with high uptime like A2Hosting .

Another advantage of UptimeRobot is that it has an unofficial WordPress plugin. The plugin allows you to see uptime statistics right in the WordPress Dashboard. You can display this statistic anywhere in your website using the shortcode.

Plus, there’s an iOS and Android mobile app for UptimeRobot if you’re into the genre.

Using UptimeRobot is extremely simple. You just need to create a free account and add a new monitor such as HTTPS, enter the name and URL of the website. Choose to receive email alerts:

Some alternative uptime monitoring services

a. Monitority : A completely free uptime monitoring tool. With this tool you can receive SMS notifications if your site goes down without worrying about paying fees like UptimeRobot. The test interval is very short, only 60s. But compared to UptimeRobot you don’t have a WordPress plugin and a user interface.

b. Pingdom : besides speed testing and monitoring, Pingdom also helps you monitor uptime. The free option allows you to monitor 2 websites and receive email notifications when your website is down.

c. Jetpack : there is a module called Monitor that  will check your website is down.

d. ManageWP : has an Uptime Monitor addon that costs $1/month with the same features as other uptime monitoring tools: your website will be checked every 1 minute and notified by email. SMS, or Slack if it’s unreachable.

e. Updown.io  : This is a paid uptime monitoring service. You will pay the fee via credit purchase. Initially you will be given 100K credits, each credit corresponds to a request and has 2 requests/minute. If you click on the link above and sign up for a free account you will get an extra 100k credits

Updownio’s monitoring time is very fast. You can set the frequency to be every 30 seconds. Downtime alerts are sent via slack, email and sms. You also get a warning when the SSL is invalid or about to expire. This is the best option if you need a paid uptime monitoring service. 

Monitor SEO for your website.

SEO is a complex subject. But there are 2 things you need to check regularly. First you need to check the keyword rank you intend to rank in the search results. Next is the backlink profile of your website.

a. Monitor ranking position in search engines

Search engine ranking positions (SERP) refers to the ranking of your website for a search string (query string).

As you know a high ranking position means you will get more traffic. SEO – search engine optimization – are techniques that help you improve your rankings in search results.

When it comes to monitoring search rankings for specific keywords, you have many tools at your disposal.

Serplab is a great tool for SERP monitoring. Its free account offers many attractive features such as automatic SERP checking for unlimited keywords. The tool will also notify you if any ranking changes.

Google Search Console : although not as professional as Serplab, you can also know the location of your website for a specific keywork through this free Google tool.

b. Monitor backlink profile

Although Google’s algorithm has changed, backlink building is still the backbone of SEO. The point is that you need to build a natural backlink profile.

Gone are the days of spamming links to increase website rankings. On the contrary, now spam links or bad links also lead to the risk of penalties from Google.

So the whole backlink building process should be as natural as Matt Cutts says:

Backlink monitoring is a way to help you see the quality of inbound links that are coming back to your website. There are many tools to help you check backlink profile including:

SEO profiler is my favorite freemium tool. You just need to sign up for a free account and add your website.

Soon you will see the profile link of the website as below. Here I take Neil Patel’s site as an example:

Unique activate backlinks : shows the number of unique backlinks pointing to your website. Only here based on IP address. That’s a natural way to show links. The links here have been indexed by Google for the past 3 months.

Nofollow Link : the number of links with the rel=”nofollow” attribute. These are links that don’t push ranking value to search engines compared to dofollow links that push ranking value. However, to have a diverse profile you still need to have both types of links.

Link Influence Score (LIS) : shows the influence of a link from a website to the search engine of the linked page. Simply put, the higher the LIS, the better. Or alternatively, if you have a link to your site that has a high LIS, that’s fine.

The important point here is that you need to know the quality of the links that are coming back to your website. These are the signs of low quality links according to the Google Pengui 2.0 algorithm:

There are several tools to help you identify bad links including Monitor Backlinks  and Linkquidator .

Domain and DNS monitoring

Domain theft is a serious problem. Some people take advantage of the loophole to steal your website address and transfer it to another provider.

In these situations it is very difficult for you to get the domain name back.

To avoid these unfortunate situations, you need to monitor your domain name and DNS.

Ultra Tool is a service with such a function. Sign up for a free account and you’ll have plenty of information on the health of your domain in the Domain Health Report tab.

In the Monitoring tab, you can add the domain you want to monitor. You will receive an email alert whenever DNS changes.

Epilogue

There is a lot of statistical data associated with your website. To keep your website on track, you need to gain these data through the tools I mentioned in the article.

But having the data at hand is just the beginning. If you don’t take action, this data is meaningless.

The important point is that these data will help you take the right actions to improve your website.

Please share any good tools you know in the comments section below. ​

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