Top Website Performance Monitoring Tools

Your website’s technical performance may be holding you back: If your website has broken elements, doesn’t load almost instantly—or worse, isn’t available—it can impact your bottom line.

Thankfully, many monitoring tools are available to help ensure your website loads efficiently and error-free.

What is website performance monitoring?

Website performance monitoring is the process of ensuring your site works properly and loads quickly. These tools have a variety of features, prices, and objectives. Some focus on a specific key metric like uptime, which measures how long a system runs without interruption, while others evaluate a broad range of performance signals.

There are many options for performance monitoring tools across different price levels. Factors influencing cost include how often checks are performed, the number of features offered, and the traffic volume the tools monitor, as higher-traffic sites tend to be more expensive to monitor. For beginners, free options like Google Search Console or Datadog are usually adequate. As your company and website grow, investing in a more advanced, paid solution may become necessary.
How to choose a website performance monitoring tool

1. Determine your website goals
2. Assess your existing tech stack
3. Select necessary features

There are many considerations to consider when assessing performance monitoring tools.

1. Determine your website goals

When selecting your website monitoring tools, first consider your goals. The most common goals are:

• Improve page load speed. This has many definitions, such as total site speed, time to first byte, and time to interactive (TTI). A shorter page load speed improves the user experience.

• Ensure the site consistently loads without errors. Errors on a site can arise for many reasons, including a website update. Other possible causes are third-party code, unusual site usage, and browser incompatibility. Errors can render vital site functions unusable and make your site look unprofessional.

• Ensure the site is always available. In other words, make sure the site doesn’t go down, becoming unloadable for users.

• Improve search presence. In recent years, Google has emphasized website performance in its ranking algorithm. Google also introduced a new performance framework to monitor—Core Web Vitals (CWV). Monitoring CWV gives your site the best chance of showing up in search results.

Knowing which goals are relevant to you will help you assess which tools best meet them. It will also help you understand which features you’re willing to pay more for and which you aren’t.

2. Assess your existing tech stack

Consider how monitoring tools fit into your existing tech stack. For example, websites that use Shopify also use Shopify’s servers to host them, so they don’t need server monitoring tools, which would be redundant. Instead, they can go to Shopify’s status page to troubleshoot problems. Make sure any performance monitoring tools you subscribe to align with your site’s code.

3. Select necessary features

• Uptime monitoring. This is the process of checking if a site is available to users (up), as opposed to unavailable (down). It is the simplest type of performance monitoring.

• Transaction monitoring. This type of monitoring focuses on website transactions, such as purchases. This is important for custom ecommerce sites. Transactions get special focus in performance monitoring because they are high-value relatively complicated actions—they require user input, credit card verification, and back-end data.

• SSL certificate monitoring. This monitors whether a site’s security certificate (SSL) is still valid. An invalid SSL certificate will prompt browsers to show users a “connection not secure” message.

• Alerting system. This refers to the process of letting website managers know when there are issues. Monitoring tools can send alerts in real-time (for urgent issues such as the site being down) or in regular roundup alerts on a daily or weekly basis.

• Public status pages. This is a page that users can access to understand if a website is working properly or if it has issues. It helps the user understand if the issue is on their end or the website’s. Some performance monitoring tools create and manage public status pages automatically for their customers.

• Speed testing types. There are many ways to test a website’s speed, such as connection speed, server response time, total load speed, and time to first byte.
• Options for customization. Some performance monitoring tools allow for custom metrics or scripts. For advanced users or unique tech stacks, this can be important.

Top website performance monitoring tools in 2024

• Shopify Web Performance dashboard and reports
• Google Search Console
• ShopStatus Performance Monitor
• Pingdom
• Datadog
• Uptrends
• Enterprise performance monitoring

Here are some of the best website monitoring tools currently available:

Shopify Web Performance dashboard and reports

Our Web Performance dashboard is designed to give you insight into how your store is performing across Core Web Vitals, combined with the ability to review and optimize real user experience.

• Price range: Free
• Best for: Shopify users with Liquid storefronts
• Strongest feature: Detailed reports showing loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability

Google Search Console

Google Search Console focuses on your website’s search presence and includes a robust report on your Core Web Vitals and detailed load time metrics. It also includes simple flags for high-level code errors or changes in availability.

• Price range: Free

• Best for: Marketers focused on SEO performance

• Strongest feature: Reports showing the number of pages on your website indexed by Google

ShopStatus Performance Monitor

ShopStatus Performance Monitor for Shopify costs $9.99 per month. ShopStatus is an app-based option for Shopify stores, designed to monitor technical outages across all your apps, as well as non-website issues such as inventory stockouts.

• Price range: $9.99 per month

• Best for: Shopify store owners with multiple instances of third-party code on their site.

• Strongest feature: Outage alerts for Shopify and all Shopify apps

Pingdom

Pingdom is a simple, popular tool that works primarily as an uptime monitoring service. Whereas Google Search Console focuses on your site’s availability to Google, Pingdom looks more broadly at your site’s performance to all users. It looks at both website speed and availability.

• Price range: Synthetic and Real User Monitoring each start at $10 per month. This is generally sufficient for websites with up to 100,000 pageviews per month, and each plan grows in price based on traffic from there.

• Best for: Marketers with simple codebases but enough traffic that any downtime or speed slowdown would be very costly.

• Strongest feature: In-depth Page Load Performance reports included in Real User Monitoring.

Datadog

Datadog has robust features relative to its price point. It focuses on synthetic monitoring and can emulate both browsers and APIs. Most synthetic performance monitoring tools emulate browsers, but emulating APIs is equally important for websites that rely on API calls to other websites (for example, if your website has a chatbot that relies on ChatGPT as its underlying chat technology). API monitoring can help you understand how the availability of other websites affects yours.

• Price range: Free 30-day trial available. Synthetic monitoring starts at $5 per thousand test runs per month for APIs and $12 per thousand test runs per month for browsers. The number of test runs you need will depend on how quickly you want to be able to catch errors, but a thousand test runs per month (roughly 30 per day) should be sufficient.

• Best for: Website owners with medium traffic levels and crucial API or custom functionality.

• Strongest feature: Code-free testing—no coding ability needed.

Uptrends

Uptrends offers a full set of performance monitoring tools and an easy-to-use visual dashboard. Whereas other monitoring tools offer fractional product pricing (i.e. pay separately for RUM, synthetic, and API monitoring), Uptrends offers a single suite of monitoring services and a simple pricing model. They also offer free diagnostic tools.

• Price range: Standard plans start at $100 per month and increase based on traffic. 

• Best for: Website owners of custom ecommerce stores with non-standard (non-Shopify) checkout flows.

• Strongest feature: Custom transaction monitoring.

Enterprise performance monitoring

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor and New Relic are two examples of enterprise, engineer-focused performance monitoring tools. Instead of just monitoring the availability and speed of a website, these tools monitor the actual server infrastructure, custom applications (i.e. not built on any CMS), custom databases, and more. Think of it this way: instead of being a tool for Shopify owners, this is a tool for the engineers who make Shopify itself.

• Price range: Businesses generally budget at least $1,000 per month for these services if their applications have live users.

• Best for: Application engineers.

• Strongest feature: Diagnostic assessments—these tools excel in not just telling you when something isn’t working, but why it isn’t working.

Website performance monitoring tools only measure signals

Selecting the right website performance monitoring tool is crucial for optimizing your website’s speed and ensuring a seamless user experience. Consider factors such as your ecommerce tech stack, necessary features, and budget when making your decision. Synthetic monitoring tools like Google Search Console and Pingdom offer valuable insights into website availability and speed, while real user monitoring tools provide a more comprehensive view of the end-user experience. By using these tools, you can identify performance bottlenecks, troubleshoot issues promptly, and make data-driven decisions to enhance your website’s performance and conversion rates.

Keep in mind that website performance monitoring tools can only highlight the issue and not resolve it. Beyond simple tweaks, it could be the architecture of your platform or website that’s holding back conversion. And because conversion increases with every millisecond of improved site speed, it might be worth considering a total platform migration to Shopify. After all, our ecommerce performance is second to none. So even though a migration may feel like a big investment, the payoffs will be more than worth the effort.