This article explains what website monitoring really is, why traditional approaches have reached their limits, and how to shift to a monitoring approach focused on what your users actually experience.
What is website monitoring?
Website monitoring involves continuously monitoring a site’s availability, performance, and usability from the outside, just as a real user would. The goal is simple: to detect issues before your customers report them.
But behind this definition, two approaches coexist, and they are not equivalent.
Traditional monitoring: checking whether your site is "responsive"
Traditional monitoring sends HTTP requests at regular intervals and checks that the server responds with a 200 status code. If the server responds, the site is considered “available.” It’s quick to set up, inexpensive, and covers the basics for a static website.
But for a transactional website—such as a bank, an e-commerce site, or a health insurance provider—this approach overlooks what really matters.
Overview monitoring: Checking whether your site is "working"
Synthetic monitoring goes much further. Instead of simply checking that a page loads, it simulates the entire journey of a real user: logging in, browsing, filling out forms, completing payment, and receiving confirmation. Every 5 to 10 minutes, 24 hours a day.
If a step fails or encounters an issue, an alert is sent immediately, including details of the affected step, a screenshot, and a video recording of the process. There’s no need for manual investigation to figure out what happened.
This is the approach we have been developing at 2Be-FFICIENT 25 years, working with major banking clients, insurers, and retailers who cannot afford to have their critical processes fail without their knowledge.
💡 A server may respond 🟢 even while a payment form is stuck for your customers. Synthetic monitoring detects issues that traditional monitoring misses.
Why Traditional Availability Monitoring Is No Longer Enough
Let’s look at a real-life example involving a major banking group we work with. One Tuesday morning, between 5:00 and 6:30 a.m., several user journey scenarios detected performance issues during account viewing and transfer steps. No HTTP errors. The server is responding normally. But a JavaScript resource (the one that drives user interactions along the journey) goes from a load time of less than 50 ms to more than 500 ms. A standard monitoring system would have shown green throughout this entire period. Users, meanwhile, were stuck with slow pages, tedious steps, and frustrating workflows. Without 2Be-FFICIENT, this issue could have gone on for hours before being reported by a dissatisfied customer. This case highlights the fundamental limitation of availability monitoring: it monitors the infrastructure, not the user experience.Incidents that go undetected by standard tools
The most dangerous issues aren’t outright failures. They’re the silent degradations: a form that only fails on mobile devices, a checkout page that takes 8 seconds to load instead of 2, a button that stops responding after an update. The server continues to respond. The technical metrics remain in the green. But the conversion rate quietly plummets. 39.6% of web sessions contain hidden friction: JavaScript errors, critical slowdowns, unloaded elements (Contentsquare, 2023). These are all issues that traditional monitoring fails to detect.The Business Impact of Undetected Frictions
Every extra second in a transaction process represents 7% drop in conversions (Akamai). During a payment process or online subscription, costs can quickly add up. But the impact goes beyond immediate revenue. Before 2Be-FFICIENT, LCL described its situation as follows: a slow and cumbersome information chain, incidents reported via email, and a feeling of being overwhelmed by customer feedback. An isolated case could escalate into a widespread incident before it was resolved.“We no longer rely on customer feedback to identify technical bugs. We are now able to monitor, analyze, and meet our commitments regarding the availability of our interfaces.” Stéphan Lidvan, LCL
Key metrics for effective website monitoring
A well-designed website monitoring system does more than just check that the site is "up and running." It measures factors that directly impact the user experience and conversions.✓ With 2Be-FFICIENT Each alert includes a preliminary diagnosis that identifies the nature of the incident and the stage of the process involved—without the need for manual investigation.
Availability and uptime
The uptime rate measures the percentage of time your website is accessible and fully functional. A 99.9% SLA translates to less than 9 hours of downtime per year, which may seem reassuring—until those 9 hours happen to fall during a marketing campaign or Black Friday.Performance and response times
The response time for each step of the user journey is often more revealing than a page’s overall load time. A login step that takes 3 seconds instead of 0.5 seconds won’t trigger any availability alerts, but it will be perceived as a friction point by the user and may be enough to cause them to abandon the site. The metrics to monitor first: the TTFB (Time to First Byte), which reveals server-side issues, the lead time for critical steps (authentication, payment, validation), and the MTTD : the average time between when an incident occurs and when it is detected.Stability of critical paths
The transaction success rate measures the percentage of journeys that proceed without incident from start to finish. This metric most closely reflects the actual experience of your users. A drop from 99% to 97% may seem insignificant, but out of 10,000 daily journeys, that represents 200 users who were unable to achieve their goal.How to Set Up UX-Centric Website Monitoring
Setting up an effective synthetic monitoring system involves four steps. At 2Be-FFICIENT, we handle these steps as a managed service—you don’t have to install or configure anything on the infrastructure side.
Step 1 — Identify your critical paths
The first question to ask yourself is: Which customer journeys, if they fail, have a direct impact on your revenue or customer satisfaction?
For a bank: login, check balance, transfer funds, open an account. For an e-commerce merchant: add to cart, pay, confirm order. For an insurance company: get a quote, customer portal, file a claim.
There’s no need to monitor everything right from the start. Starting with 3 to 5 carefully selected critical paths is more effective than skimming through 50 pages.
Step 2 — Set the frequency and thresholds
Monitoring scripts run every 5 to 10 minutes on critical production workflows. This frequency ensures that an incident is detected within minutes, before users report it. During critical periods, the frequency can be increased.
Alert thresholds are defined on a per-path basis: acceptable response time per stage, number of attempts before an incident is confirmed, and active monitoring time windows.
Step 3 — Connect alerts to your business tools
An alert sent to a general email inbox is useless at 3 a.m. Alerts must reach the right people, through the right channels, with the right level of detail.
Email, SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Signal, Discord, voice alerts… and, most importantly, a preliminary diagnosis that immediately identifies the nature of the problem and the affected stage.
“Within 15 minutes at most, identify a problem, address it, notify the relevant staff, set up a crisis response team if necessary, and even alert consumers.” Stéphan Lidvan, LCL
Step 4 — Maintain the scenarios over time
This is often the part that gets overlooked. A workflow changes after every deployment: a new page, a new form, a new login screen. Monitoring scenarios must be kept up to date to remain reliable.
That’s why 2Be-FFICIENT a fully managed solution: our teams build, maintain, and adapt your scenarios as your site evolves, without any action required on your part.
Website Monitoring by Industry: What Are Some Practical Use Cases?
Website monitoring addresses different challenges depending on the industry. Here are the most common issues we encounter with our clients.
Banking and Insurance
In the banking and insurance sector, critical workflows are often the most complex to monitor: strong authentication (PSD2, OTP, fingerprint), multi-device workflows that span both the web and mobile apps, and interactions with third-party APIs.
An incident during a transfer or subscription process can have regulatory consequences, not just commercial ones.
LCL, with 6.1 million customers and a 70% digitalization rate, continuously monitors its digital customer journeys using 2Be-FFICIENT. Before the solution was implemented, an isolated issue could escalate into a widespread incident before being reported. Today, the team receives a comprehensive dashboard every morning covering all monitored scenarios.
E-commerce and retail
For e-commerce sites, website monitoring focuses on the entire checkout process: browsing the catalog, adding items to the cart, entering shipping information, payment, and order confirmation. Each step is monitored independently, making it possible to pinpoint exactly where friction occurs.
The high-risk periods are well known: Black Friday, sales, and new collections. It is precisely at these times that stepping up monitoring is most effective—not after customers have already started complaining.
Frequently Asked Questions About Website Monitoring
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What is the difference between website monitoring and web performance?
Web performance encompasses techniques for optimizing page load speed, such as image compression, CDNs, code minification, and Core Web Vitals. It is a process of continuous improvement led by the development teams.
Website monitoring tracks in real time whether performance remains stable in production and alerts you as soon as a decline occurs. One optimizes, the other protects what has been optimized.
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How often should monitoring tests be run?
Every 5 to 10 minutes for critical production workflows. This frequency ensures that an incident is detected within minutes, well before your users report it. During critical periods, the frequency can be increased to once per minute.
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Does website monitoring require any technical setup?
No. Synthetic monitoring solutions like 2Be-FFICIENT entirely outside your infrastructure. No agents to install, no changes to your IT system, and no impact on production. The bots connect to your URLs exactly as a real user would.
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Is it possible to track an e-commerce site with a complex payment gateway?
Yes, and this is actually one of the use cases where synthetic monitoring delivers the most value. 2Be-FFICIENT simulate the entire purchasing journey—from browsing the catalog to order confirmation—across all browsers and devices, including mobile. Each step is monitored independently.
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What is the difference between website monitoring and DEM?
Website monitoring focuses on a specific website. Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is a more comprehensive approach that monitors all of an organization’s digital platforms—including websites, mobile apps, IVR systems, and APIs—providing a unified view of the user experience across all channels.
Move from reactive management to proactive monitoring
Most organizations we encounter handle incidents in the same way: a customer calls support, support forwards the information to the IT teams, and the IT teams investigate. The result: a delay of 30 minutes to 2 hours before any action is taken.
With website monitoring focused on user journeys, this cycle is reversed. You detect the issue before your customers do. You know exactly which step is causing the problem. And you can take immediate action.
That is what it means to shift from a reactive approach to a proactive one. And that is the promise we have been keeping for 25 years to the major clients who place their trust in us.
