
5 Types of Checks Every Shopify Store Should Have
Running an online store based on Shopify can be a stressful experience. Meeting sales quotas or metrics, ensuring the store’s accessibility, and accessing data on user statistics are all concerns that any Shopify store owner will encounter. Though Shopify provides an excellent solution for sellers, additional monitoring services to ensure that the store is always available can be very helpful. Issues that affect your store such as slow page load times, issues with the checkout process, or complete outages have a significant impact on your ability to process sales.
This is where Uptime.com comes in—offering multiple check types that are beneficial for monitoring a Shopify store and providing alerts as soon as issues are detected, Uptime checks are uniquely suited to making sure that your Shopify store is accessible to customers. Following are 5 check types offered by the Uptime.com platform that are especially helpful in monitoring your Shopify store for the best customer availability.
Transaction Checks
Synthetic transaction checks simulate the steps that a user would take in adding an item to the cart and proceeding through the checkout process. These checks simulate a real customer’s workflow to verify that each step functions correctly. If an error occurs at any point in the process, the transaction check issues an alert which notifies the store owner of the issue. Proactive monitoring helps catch issues like broken checkout pages, payment processing failures, or cart malfunctions before they impact actual customers.
To see how transaction checks work behind the scenes to ensure your Shopify store is working correctly, see our blog: How Synthetic Transaction Monitoring Provides Complete Site Visibility.
Real User Monitoring
Real User Monitoring (RUM) measures the availability and performance of a webpage to the users accessing it. RUM reports break down the webpage by the types of content it contains, showing which elements loaded first and how long each took. For example, large images or background scripts can cause slower loading times, and RUM reports will bring light to those inefficiencies, providing actionable options for improvement.
All that’s necessary is placing a small snippet of code on the store’s webpages which collects real-time performance data from actual visitors. Key metrics such as page load speed, time to first paint, and time to interactive tell the story of how quickly the page is viewable and accessible to customers.
For more detailed information on using RUM for a Shopify store, see our blog here: Improve Your Shopify User Experience with Real User Monitoring.
Page Speed Checks
Recently introduced to the Uptime.com platform, Page Speed checks provide invaluable metrics that are surfaced in easily viewable reports and recommendations. A Page Speed check performs a comprehensive analysis of a webpage’s responsiveness and offers a detailed analysis of performance by component, providing insight into specific aspects that can be improved and where inefficiencies lie. Customers who visit your Shopify store and greeted with a slow or unresponsive experience are much less likely to make a purchase, so slow performance is a potential lost sale.
Especially important for Shopify stores is SEO, which helps drive traffic to your store. For more information on how SEO affects your Shopify store and how you can use Page Speed checks to improve it, see our related blog here: Does Page Speed Affect SEO & 5 Other Questions You Have About Ranking Factors.
HTTPS Checks
Though HTTPS checks are one of the most basic types offered by Uptime.com, they are also one of the most important, and are the first line of defense in ensuring your Shopify store is available. An HTTPS check pings your desired URL at an interval of your choosing, from 1 minute up to an hour. Instant alerts ensure that in the unfortunate event of downtime, you’re alerted via your chosen contact method. In addition to simple up/down reporting, HTTPS checks provide historical data on response time that can identify and help address trends in potential timeouts.
Cloud Status Checks
Also newly added to Uptime.com, Cloud Status checks monitor the availability of hundreds of third-party services that have wide-ranging impact on the infrastructure of many web applications, including Shopify. Though it’s straightforward to monitor your Shopify store for its up/down status, it also depends on backend services like Cloudflare which can have its own outages that affect availability. Cloud Status checks provide insight into the status of major third-party dependencies in the same interface as all of your other checks, consolidating alerts and reporting.
Also coming soon to Cloud Status checks are direct monitoring of Shopify’s status page, enabling alerting and historical tracking directly within Uptime’s platform.
Running a successful Shopify store requires close attention to ensure smooth performance, especially when it comes to customer accessibility and transaction success. Take advantage of Uptime.com’s comprehensive suite of checks and monitoring tools that make sure your Shopify store is operational and accessible to users. By using a variety of checks including transaction flows, real user monitoring, page speed, HTTPS statuses, and monitoring third-party service dependencies, you can address potential issues before they affect your customers.
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