When you are working on your website, you frequently visit it so your browser caches a lot of content.  If you’re not careful, it’s easy to assume what YOU experience on your browser is how the rest of the world will experience it.  NEVER assume and clear your browser’s cookies and cache, also called “Temporary Files”.  Test your site in different browsers and on different devices frequently.  Often, different browsers will display pages differently and you may find pages don’t display at all in Google Chrome but fine in Firefox.

Using an independent website tool to check the status of your site and certain pages is critical to making sure you find potential issues with your website before your visitors encounter them.  This will give you time to fix issues so the UX — “user experience” is optimal.  Remember, if your site loads slowly or shows other issues, people will leave.  The more frequently such a bad experience happens the more the chance that they will also never come back.  That’s bad for traffic and worse for your business.

I suggest going to Pingdom and test your own website.  It’s a pretty straight forward process as you will just need to enter your domain name in the field and click “Test Now”.  They go pretty deep with their analytics and have other options to also test your website’s DNS records, too.  To make sure your site, server and DNS records are all optimized, this is another step that you should add in your web development deployment and maintenance checklist.

If Pingdom detects any issues with your site, these tools will help you pinpoint the problem areas, like a slow-loading image or a Javascript library that takes too long to load.  The issues Pingdom’s tools detect will then help you resolve them.  You can even subscribe and have Pingdom monitor your website to ensure it is up and running and it will also alert you by email or text if there is something wrong with your website.  For e-commerce and websites critical to your company’s profit model, this is a small investment to stay on top of your website.