Website monitoring tools help ensure you provide a great experience for your users.
They can help you keep track of:
- Website performance: Track your website’s speed through metrics like page load time and Google’s Core Web Vitals
- Usability: Learn how visitors use your website through user session recordings and heatmap analysis
- Uptime: Monitor the availability of your website to prevent downtime
- Search engine optimization (SEO): Track how well your website is optimized for search engines and detect any issues that might be holding you back in search rankings
Below, we’ve gathered the 16 best website monitoring tools for a variety of use cases.
1. Domain Overview
Best for: Monitoring your competitors’ organic search performance
Pricing: Starts at $139.95/month, free trial and free account available (10 searches per day)
Semrush’s Domain Overview tool lets you monitor a domain’s search traffic, market share, and search visibility. This lets you monitor your own—or your competitors’–organic search performance.
Just type in a domain and click “Search.”
The tool will then generate a detailed report on the domain.
You’ll be able to see the website’s total organic and paid search traffic. And the number of backlinks pointing to it.
If you scroll further down, you can examine the geographical breakdown of the domain’s search traffic. Along with traffic and keyword ranking trends over time.
This makes it ideal for monitoring your own performance as you roll out SEO campaigns. Or for keeping tabs on your rivals’ content marketing efforts.
The Domain Overview report can also show you a domain’s top keywords, main competitors, referring domains, and more.
Head to the “Growth Report” tab to compare any domain’s performance over specified time periods.
This lets you spot traffic patterns, ranking changes, and seasonal trends. Whether for your own website or to keep an eye on your competitors.
2. Site Audit
Best for: Monitoring your website for SEO issues
Pricing: Starts at $139.95/month, free trial and free account available (crawl 100 URLs)
Site Audit monitors your website for SEO issues that might be preventing you from achieving higher search engine rankings. It covers site performance, Core Web Vitals, internal linking, crawlability, and more.
Here’s how to use it:
Enter your domain and click “Start Audit.”
On the next page, you’ll be able to adjust a number of settings for the audit, including the total number of pages to check, the user agent for the site crawl, and more.
In most cases, you can stick with the default settings and click on “Start Site Audit.”
The tool will then crawl your website and present you with a detailed overview report. This gives you a rundown of your site’s overall health, crawled pages, and top issues.
Go to the “Issues” tab to see a list of all the discovered SEO issues on your site.
Click the linked part of an issue to see all the pages where that specific issue is present. Or click “Why and how to fix it” to learn more about the issue.
You can schedule Site Audit to regularly crawl your site.
Then, head to the “Progress” tab to understand how your site’s health is improving over time.
This way, you can compare crawls as you (or your developers) fix your technical SEO issues.
3. Position Tracking
Best for: Monitoring your website’s keyword rankings
Pricing: Starts at $139.95/month, free trial and free account available (track 10 keywords)
Semrush’s Position Tracking tool monitors your website’s keyword rankings in search results. It shows you historical rankings for each keyword, your domain’s visibility and share of voice in search results, and more.
This lets you get a better understanding of how your content is performing.
Just enter your domain and click the “Set up tracking” button.
Next, select the search engine, device, and location you’d like to track rankings for.
Then, click “Continue To Keywords.”
Enter the keywords you’d like to track. Then click “Start Tracking.”
Once the tool generates a report, go to the “Rankings Overview” section in the “Overview” tab to see a list of all your keywords and their respective rankings.
You’ll even see your potential traffic and potential traffic growth if you created quality content targeting those keywords.
The tool can also send you a weekly digest of your keyword rankings.
Simply click on the cog icon at the top and check the “Get weekly updates by email” option.
This makes monitoring your website’s ranking gains (and losses) even easier.
4. UptimeRobot
Best for: Monitoring website uptime
Pricing: Starts at $8/month, free plan available
UptimeRobot monitors your website and notifies you about any downtime. You can also set it up to monitor the status of your website’s SSL certificate and domain expiry, among other things.
This will ensure your website visitors never get the dreaded “Your connection is not private” error message when visiting your website. And help you avoid losing your domain name by mistake.
It performs checks from multiple locations to prevent false positives. So you don’t waste time worrying about or trying to fix issues that don’t exist.
Image Source: UptimeRobot
Apart from sending you email notifications, it can also notify you via SMS, voice call, Slack, and more. So you don’t need to constantly check the tool.
It’ll do all the monitoring for you and let you know if and when there are issues.
5. Uptime.com
Best for: Real-user monitoring
Pricing: Starts at $24/month, free trial available
Uptime.com is a website monitor tool that offers a variety of different types of site monitoring. These include uptime monitoring, API monitoring, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and more.
You can also use Uptime.com to create a status page where your users can learn about any downtime or scheduled maintenance. Or set up automatic maintenance notifications for users.
This can help reduce the number of support tickets your team gets every time you’re performing a website update.
There’s also the option to create custom dashboards to track website performance and uptime at a glance.
Image Source: Uptime
6. Middleware
Best for: Synthetic monitoring
Pricing: $0.3 per GB of metrics, logs, or traces; free plan available
Middleware is a cloud observability platform that lets you monitor website infrastructure, logs, and databases in real-time.
You can use its synthetic monitoring feature to spot issues in a simulated environment. So that you can fix them before they impact real users.
You can also use Middleware to perform real user monitoring. This can help you identify and address points of friction or confusion in the website experience (e.g., users not knowing where to click to move to the next step).
Image Source: Middleware
The platform also allows you to create custom dashboards and alerts to stay on top of website performance and detect issues at a glance.
7. Pingdom
Best for: Page speed monitoring
Pricing: Starts at $15/month, free trial available
Pingdom offers synthetic and real user monitoring from 100+ locations worldwide. And it sends you instant alerts when issues arise.
Image Source: Pingdom
When it comes to page speed monitoring, Pingdom doesn’t just show you how fast your website is. It also provides recommendations on how to make your site even faster.
Since page speed is a known ranking factor, following these recommendations can potentially help you improve your website’s rankings.
There’s also a built-in transaction monitoring feature. This helps you track key processes, such as user signups, logins, website searches, and purchases. And the tool immediately notifies you about any issues.
Image Source: Pingdom
8. Hotjar
Best for: Monitoring website usability
Pricing: Starts at $39/month, free plan available
Hotjar offers a suite of products designed to help you understand how visitors use your website.
Its core feature is the heatmap function. Which shows you where users click and scroll on your website. This can provide invaluable data about your site’s user experience.
You can also use Hotjar to record user sessions and analyze how users interact with your site in detail. Which lets you uncover points of friction or confusion and allows you to create a better website experience.
Plus, the platform is built with privacy in mind. Which means that it only records user interactions and not sensitive data.
9. Zabbix
Best for: IT infrastructure monitoring
Pricing: Free self-hosted version, custom pricing for cloud version
Zabbix allows you to monitor your entire IT infrastructure. Including your network and servers, cloud deployments, websites, applications, and more. This makes it one of the most advanced website monitoring tools on this list.
It lets you define problem thresholds and alerts you when issues need attention. So that you can address them as quickly as possible and minimize website downtime.
Image Source: G2.com
You also have the option to create custom dashboards to monitor metrics that matter the most to your organization.
And you can schedule reports to be delivered to your email inbox daily, weekly, or monthly for hands-off monitoring.
10. Visualping
Best for: Monitoring competitors’ websites for changes
Pricing: Starts at $14/month, free plan available
Visualping is a site monitoring tool that helps you detect changes in a website’s design, copy, and more.
It allows you to keep an eye on your competitors and get notified as soon as they make any changes.
Visualping will send you automatic email alerts containing a screenshot that highlights the detected change. Making it easy to see what your competitors are up to at a glance.
The software can also provide you with AI-powered summaries of these changes.
11. Site24x7
Best for: Network monitoring
Pricing: Starts at $9/month for basic uptime monitoring, free trial available
Site24x7 is an AI-powered website monitoring tool aimed at DevOps and IT operations teams. It offers website, server, cloud, and network monitoring.
Image Source: G2.com
You can also use it to collect and analyze logs from different servers and networks. And identify issues and anomalies using AI.
The tool lets you create reports on performance, availability, and a variety of other metrics. And set up problem thresholds and alert triggers to get notified about issues that matter to your business.
12. Uptrends
Best for: Web app monitoring
Pricing: Starts at $5.25/month for basic uptime monitoring, free trial available
The Uptrends platform supports web app, web performance, API, and uptime monitoring. And it can notify you about any issues via email, SMS, call, Slack, and more.
So you don’t have to keep refreshing its dashboard to learn about new issues.
Image Source: Uptrends
Uptrends has a network of 233 global monitoring checkpoints. Letting you get a comprehensive view of your website’s performance across the world (ideal for sites with international SEO needs).
You can also use it to create a public status page where you can keep users updated about any downtime and scheduled maintenance.
Best for: Website performance monitoring
Pricing: Starts at $19.99/month, free trial available
You can use Dotcom-Monitor to perform page speed performance, uptime, protocol, and API monitoring. You can also set up load tests to stress-test your website using thousands of connections from real web browsers.
Image Source: G2.com
The software instantly detects and alerts you about server outages and website downtime.
And it uses an advanced check system to prevent false positives and avoid wasting your time.
14. Zipy
Best for: Monitoring user sessions
Pricing: Starts at $49/month, free plan available
Zipy offers AI-powered session replays that let you see how real users use your website. This can help you pinpoint potential usability issues.
Image Source: Zipy
It also supports performance, JavaScript, and API error monitoring. And instantly notifies you about critical issues.
There’s also a heatmap analysis feature that helps you identify rage clicks (instances where users repeatedly click on a part of a website due to frustration) and dead clicks (clicks on non-clickable elements).
This helps you improve your website’s design and overall user experience.
15. Lumar
Best for: Monitoring for technical SEO issues
Pricing: Available on request
Lumar is a website optimization and monitoring platform that checks your website for performance, technical SEO, and accessibility issues.
It uses AI to generate detailed tickets for your developers to help them address issues quickly. Saving you time while maintaining a great user experience for your site’s visitors.
It also lets you create custom alerts to notify your team of issues as they arise. And build comprehensive dashboards to stay on top of website performance and spot issues. Before they have an effect on your rankings and traffic.
Image Source: G2.com
16. Intruder
Best for: Vulnerability monitoring
Pricing: Starts at $172/month
Intruder is a website vulnerability monitoring software. It offers automated vulnerability scans and continuous network monitoring.
Image Source: G2.com
It alerts you about potential vulnerabilities and issues via email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams. And provides you with a detailed report outlining uncovered issues so you can fix them as soon as possible.
It also integrates with cloud accounts, such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, to automatically scan newly deployed services.
Get Started with Website Monitoring
To choose the right website monitoring tool, you need to decide what you’re looking to monitor (e.g., website uptime, SEO issues, or keyword rankings).
Then, choose the right tool based on your goals.
Semrush lets you monitor your website for performance issues, keyword rankings, and technical SEO issues all in one place. And you can even monitor your competitors’ websites too.
Sign up for a free trial to start benefitting from 55+ helpful tools and reports.
Source link : Semrush.com
