Getting ahead of hidden issues with error monitoring

According to Bugpilot, a 2019 study found that 96% of users will never report a website error. This statistic reveals a simple yet crucial fact: by the time a user reports an error on your site, far more users have encountered it and either ignored it or, worse, left your site altogether. This equals lost opportunities, whether you're selling a product or service, collecting leads, or pursuing other goals. Even more concerning, the longer the problem persists, the more it damages your reputation. Fortunately, great tools are available to make proactive error monitoring manageable, and you should utilize them.

Errors typically occur in two high-level areas: front-end and back-end.

Front-end errors occur in the user's device or browser. With today's sophisticated and highly interactive sites (featuring logins, forms, etc.), many features run in the user's browser. These can work perfectly on some devices/browsers while throwing errors on others.

Back-end errors happen on your server. When processing requests, the underlying server code can fail fatally, resulting in a site crash. Additionally, non-fatal issues are often logged, such as features that will be removed in future language updates. This information is valuable for staying ahead of potential problems.

Shouldn't my developer catch these errors before they happen?

In a perfect world full of perfect people - yes.  But neither of those is the case.  Even the best developer will have things slip through.  It is extremely difficult if not impossible to predict everything that could happen. Every possible user interaction.  Every possible device and browser combination.  Those add up fast.  And even then predicting future changes is impossible.  No one can tell you that next years new phone or updated web browser won't break something.  Your web host will update the server and something will break.  Don't expect your developer to catch everything that happens or could happen in the future.

There are some cost-effective benefits of monitoring.

Logging/monitoring errors can also have a positive cost-savings effect. Using the above statistics if you have 100 users that encounter an error then 96 of them will just leave.  That's 96 potentially lost sales and or leads.  But what happens when the user does report the error.  Usually that's an email that is usually too vague to be of much help to your developer.  I've seen the countless "I tried to checkout and it didn't work.  Please help." emails.  Without monitoring you are either blindly trying to solve a possible problem with no details or you are forced to seek help from the customer.  With logging you have a trace of the actions that let to the error which is critical for resolving the issue.  The cost of monitoring can quickly pay for itself through an error-free sales or lead funnel and faster issue resolution

Getting started with monitoring doesn't have to be complicated.

There are various third-party services such as Rollbar or Sentry.io that specialize in log management and monitoring. Most of them can be configured to email your developer, post to a Slack channel, or other notification options. Some development is necessary to implement and your developer will need to handle any errors.

A good starting point is to look for those user interactions that are crucial to your website goals and begin with them. These front-end interactions are the most affected by differences across user devices and browsers. They are also the most difficult to resolve without monitoring services which give browser and device information related to the error. From that point you can continue to extend the monitoring to other interactions as well as to the back-end server.

Logging and monitoring is an often overlooked tool to proactively monitor for issues and errors that arise on website. Talk to your developer about implementing error logging and monitoring on your site. If you don't have a currently active developer then contact us if you are interesting in discussing specifics of how error monitoring could help your site.