A whopping 62 percent of Sweden's largest websites have no external monitoring or continuous supervision to ensure that websites are available to visitors. As many as 35 percent did not know if they had any form of monitoring at all.
This was the conclusion of Web Service Award's annual trend survey: "Hur mår Sveriges websiteer?" (“How well do Swedish websites perform?”) which is based on questionnaire interviews with some 600 website managers.
Web Service Award and SiteScanner have performed a joint analysis of perceived and actual availability of websites. Our surveys clearly show that it is insufficient simply to monitor a website's start page. In many cases, although the measurements indicate that the start page have excellent availability and fast download times, visitors perceived the websites on the whole to be unstable and slow. In these cases when SiteScanner performed a more in-depth test of the service, availability was low. Transactions frequently took a long time to complete and some purchases were never completed at all.
Numerous examples show that a service can be down from the visitor's perspective despite all the control lamps in the server room indicating normal working order. This clearly demonstrates the inadequacy of simply monitoring a website's start page or using internal monitoring only.
It is remarkable that so many people dismiss external monitoring despite the serious consequences that low server capacity or operating disruptions can have on a website's credibility or a brand's perception. This deficit of information can be devastating and result in loss of revenue, increased costs and disgruntled visitors.
The Web Service Award's trend survey shows that just 21 percent of Sweden's largest websites perform load tests to measure capacity. There are clear signs of lack of knowledge among many website managers because as many as 39 percent did not know whether or not their websites had been load-tested at all.
External monitoring and load testing in combination with visitor surveys provide website managers with a powerful toolbox for keeping their websites in peak working condition.
“It is surprising that not more people are aware of this, given the substantial costs that are incurred when servers are unable handle the flow of visitors,” says Pierre Du Rietz, Managing Director of Web Service Award.
About the survey
The "Hur mår Sveriges webbplatser?" survey is conducted by Web Service Award AB to find out how Sweden's website managers perceive the quality of their websites and their work conditions. It has been performed each year since 2006. This year it was answered by some 600 respondents.
The report "Hur mår Sveriges webbplatser? Trendundersökning 2009” (Swedish only)? is available for download at:
http://www.webserviceaward.com/pdf/Trendrapporten_2009_WSA.pdf