12 website monitoring tools to improve site performance and UX

1. Hotjar

Hotjar is a product suite that gives you insight into exactly how users are experiencing your site. Rather than just providing quantitative data, it also gives you qualitative information to complement your website monitoring, so you can zoom in on what elements your visitors engage with and the issues they run into.

Hotjar offers comprehensive product and website experience tools, such as:

• Heatmaps: discover which elements of your site attract attention and which get ignored

• Recordings: watch replays of user sessions to pinpoint what makes them rage click and u-turn

• Funnels: identify where users drop off in your main conversion flows

• Surveys and Feedback: collect long-form feedback to dive deeper into how your customers experience your site

• Engage: easily schedule, host, record, and transcribe interviews to pinpoint usability issues on your site

2. Pingdom

Pingdom dives deep into website performance metrics, providing users with actionable insights so your site always runs smoothly and your 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 also understand it.

Pingdom’s tools help you keep an eye on website performance with:

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

• Real user monitoring: enhance your site’s performance with data from actual site visitors using live maps, UX monitoring, page load performance, and user behavior metrics

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

3. UpTrends

UpTrends is a website monitoring service that makes website performance metrics clear and accessible, helping you explore and fix site issues quickly to minimize any impact on your bottom line.

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

Use the following monitoring solutions:

• Synthetics: conduct uptime monitoring with 233 checkpoints to track how your website performs in different locations and multi-browser monitoring of Core Web Vitals and W3C metrics in the latest Chrome and Edge browsers

• Web performance monitoring: ensure your website always loads 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 ensure they’re easy for customers to interact with. This feature is prevalent for ecommerce sites because it focuses on interactive elements like shopping carts and payment screens. 

4. Datadog

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 dev teams, simplified security workflows, and the ability to map all the relationships between cloud resources

5. Site24x7

Site24x7 is more than a website monitoring tool, with advanced features that 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), 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 generating errors, and monitor for Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, and mobile platforms

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

6. Uptime Robot

Uptime Robot is a comprehensive website monitoring software that checks incidents in different locations to reduce the amount of false-positive alerts, and lets you share incident updates with your subscribers.

It has a variety of tools that help prevent potential leads from landing on a dreaded error page, letting you conduct:

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

• SSL monitoring: get notifications of expired SSL certificates, so you have plenty of time to renew them 

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

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

• Cron job monitoring (heartbeat monitoring): ensure 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

7. Uptime

Uptime is best known for monitoring downtime with its simple yet detailed interface and minimal ‘false positive’ notifications.

It also measures page speed and usability metrics and has one of the best tech support teams in the industry that's available 24/7, so you can count on their help if you find yourself in a sticky, last-minute situation.

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

• Uptime monitoring: conduct dozens of different kinds of site checks on public and 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: ensure your site is serving actual user needs. Analyze real user data to optimize for speed, performance, and experience

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

8. Lumar

Previously known as DeepCrawl, Lumar offers a full suite of website intelligence solutions that help you detect traffic-driving opportunities and track trends over time.

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

Lumar offers four key products:

• Analyze: quickly uncover technical issues impacting your website’s search ranking and user experience with ultra-fast website crawls

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

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

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

9. Ahrefs

While Ahrefs is widely known for its SEO features, its Site Audit tool effectively keeps track of your website’s technical health and on-page SEO issues, helping you improve your search engine rankings.

Here's how:

• 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

10. Intruder

Intruder is a vulnerability scanner that monitors site hygiene and detects cyber security weaknesses that hackers could exploit, covering everything from services to cloud storage, and websites to endpoint devices, so you can rest assured your and your users' data is safe.

Intruder has four core features:

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

• 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

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

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

11. Metasploit

Metasploit is a penetration testing solution that helps security teams verify vulnerabilities, manage security assessments, and improve security awareness, so you stay a step (or two) ahead of cyber attackers.

Here's how:

• 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 to ensure your incident detection and response team catch hackers at any stage

12. Nessus

Nessus is a powerful vulnerability assessment tool built based on feedback from the security community, with comprehensive solutions and features:

• Fully portable: deploy on any platform, regardless of how distributed your environment is

• Efficiency and accuracy: get quick time-to-value with plug-ins that increase 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

Get your site in shape with monitoring tools

The best way to ensure your customers consistently have satisfying, frictionless experiences with your site is by choosing the right website monitoring tools. They provide 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 ensure 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.