Skip to Content
Shopify logo
  • By business model
    • B2C for enterprise
    • B2B for enterprise
    • Retail for enterprise
    By ways to build
    • Platform overview
    • Shop Component
    By outcome
    • Growth solutions
    • Shopify
      Platform for entrepreneurs & SMBs
    • Plus
      A commerce solution for growing digital brands
    • Enterprise
      Solutions for the world’s largest brands
  • Customer Stories
    • Everlane
      Shop Pay speeds up checkout and boosts conversions
    • Brooklinen
      Scales their wholesale business
    • ButcherBox
      Goes Headless
    • Arhaus
      Journey from a complex custom build to Shopify
    • Ruggable
      Customizes Headless ecommerce to scale with Shopify
    • Carrier
      Launches ecommerce sites 90% faster at 10% of the cost on Shopify
    • Dollar Shave Club
      Migrates from a homegrown platform and cuts tech spend by 40%
    • Lull
      25% Savings Story
    • Allbirds
      Omnichannel conversion soars
    • Shopify
      Platform for entrepreneurs & SMBs
    • Plus
      A commerce solution for growing digital brands
    • Enterprise
      Solutions for the world’s largest brands
  • Why trust us
    • Leader in the 2024 Forrester Wave™: Commerce Solutions for B2B
    • Leader in the 2024 IDC B2C Commerce MarketScape vendor evaluation
    What we care about
    • Shop Component Guide
    • Shopify TCO Calculator
    • Mastering Global Trade: How Integrated Technology Drives Cross-Border Success
    How we support you
    • Premium Support
    • Help Documentation
    • Professional Services
    • Technology Partners
    • Partner Solutions
    • Shopify
      Platform for entrepreneurs & SMBs
    • Plus
      A commerce solution for growing digital brands
    • Enterprise
      Solutions for the world’s largest brands
  • Latest Innovations
    • Editions - June 2024
    Tools & Integrations
    • Integrations
    • Hydrogen
    Support & Resources
    • Shopify Developers
    • Documentation
    • Help Center
    • Changelog
    • Shopify
      Platform for entrepreneurs & SMBs
    • Plus
      A commerce solution for growing digital brands
    • Enterprise
      Solutions for the world’s largest brands
  • Get in touch
  • Get in touch
Shopify logo
  • Blog
  • Enterprise ecommerce
  • Total cost of ownership (TCO)
  • Migrations
  • B2B Ecommerce
    • Headless commerce
    • Announcements
    • Unified Commerce
    • See All topics
Search
Type something you're looking for
Log in
Get in touch

Powering commerce at scale

Speak with our team on how to bring Shopify into your tech stack

Get in touch
blog|Customer Experience

Top Website Performance Monitoring Tools for 2024

Learn what performance monitoring tools are available and how to choose the best one for your website.

by Michael Keenan
Three stylized data visualization panels on an orange background, featuring charts in modern graphic design.
On this page
On this page
  • What is website performance monitoring?
  • How to choose a website performance monitoring tool
  • Website performance monitoring tools only measure signals
  • Website performance monitoring tools FAQs

The platform built for future-proofing

Get in touch

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 practice of ensuring your site functions properly and at a high speed. Website performance monitoring tools have a wide range of features, pricing, and goals. Some focus on a specific key metric of website performance, such as uptime (a measure of how long a system operates without interruption), and others aim to measure a full spectrum of performance signals.

There are a wide variety of options for performance monitoring tools, at a wide range of price points. Factors that affect the price differences are the frequency of monitoring checks, the number of monitoring features, and the volume of traffic the tools monitor (higher-traffic websites can be more expensive to monitor). If you’re just getting started, a free option like Google Search Console or Datadog is likely sufficient. As your company and website scale, a more costly option may be 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.

See how your site speed and conversions can improve

Use our exclusive Shopify Speed Audit Tool to see how much faster your site could perform and calculate potential increases in conversion rates. Don't miss out on optimizing your online store for success.

Try the Shopify Speed Audit now

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.

Is your site speed costing you sales?

Conversion increases with every millisecond of improved site speed. Measure your storefront’s performance to see how it impacts your sales and compares to the competition.

Get your report

Read more

  • The Ecommerce Guide to Improving Your First Contentful Paint (FCP) Score
  • Every Millisecond Matters: How to Optimize Page Load Time for Ecommerce Websites
  • What Is the Fastest Ecommerce Platform? (And What Can It Do for Your Business?)
  • Mobile Site Speed Optimization: How to Speed up a Mobile Site
  • How to Monitor Website Performance
  • How To Improve Website Performance
  • 9 Essential Strategies for Web Performance Optimization
  • Website Benchmarking: How To Benchmark Your Website
  • Common Misconceptions about Google Lighthouse Scores
  • How to Optimize Time to First Byte (TTFB) for a Lightning-Fast Ecommerce Website

Website performance monitoring tools FAQs

What is a website performance monitoring tool?

A website performance monitoring tool is a class of software that actively reviews your website to identify performance issues. Performance issues can be related to site usability, speed, security, or availability.

How do monitoring tools optimize website performance?

Monitoring tools themselves do not make any changes to your website. However, monitoring tools can help you identify issues on your website—specifically around speed and code errors—that you can then address to optimize your performance.

What should you consider when building your web performance tech stack?

When building your web performance stack, you should consider your goals, such as improving speed, minimizing downtime, or reducing error messages. You should also consider the rest of your technology stack, such as your CMS and the third-party scripts you use, to ensure your monitoring tools work well with them.

MK
by Michael Keenan
Published on Jul 1, 2024
Share article
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
by Michael Keenan
Published on Jul 1, 2024

The latest in commerce

Get news, trends, and strategies for unlocking new growth.

By entering your email, you agree to receive marketing emails from Shopify.

popular posts

Enterprise commerceHow to Choose an Enterprise Ecommerce Platform for Your Scaling StoreTCOHow to Calculate Total Cost of Ownership for Enterprise SoftwareMigrationsEcommerce Replatforming: A Step-by-Step Guide To MigrationB2B EcommerceWhat Is B2B Ecommerce? Types + Examples
start-free-trial

Unified commerce for the world's most ambitious brands

Learn More

popular posts

Direct to consumer (DTC)The Complete Guide to Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Marketing (2025)Tips and strategiesEcommerce Personalization: Benefits, Examples, and 7 Tactics for 2025Unified commerceHow To Sell on Multiple Channels Without the Logistical Headache (2025)Enterprise ecommerceComposable Commerce: What It Means and Is It Right for You?

popular posts

Enterprise commerce
How to Choose an Enterprise Ecommerce Platform for Your Scaling Store

TCO
How to Calculate Total Cost of Ownership for Enterprise Software

Migrations
Ecommerce Replatforming: A Step-by-Step Guide To Migration

B2B Ecommerce
What Is B2B Ecommerce? Types + Examples

Direct to consumer (DTC)
The Complete Guide to Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Marketing (2025)

Tips and strategies
Ecommerce Personalization: Benefits, Examples, and 7 Tactics for 2025

Unified commerce
How To Sell on Multiple Channels Without the Logistical Headache (2025)

Enterprise ecommerce
Composable Commerce: What It Means and Is It Right for You?

subscription banner
The latest in commerce

Get news, trends, and strategies for unlocking unprecedented growth.

Unsubscribe anytime. By entering your email, you agree to receive marketing emails from Shopify.

Popular

Headless commerce
What Is Headless Commerce: A Complete Guide for 2025

Aug 29, 2023

Growth strategies
How To Increase Conversion Rate: 14 Tactics for 2025

Oct 5, 2023

Growth strategies
7 Effective Discount Pricing Strategies to Increase Sales (2025)

Ecommerce Operations Logistics
What Is a 3PL? How To Choose a Provider in 2025

Ecommerce Operations Logistics
Ecommerce Returns: Average Return Rate and How to Reduce It

Industry Insights and Trends
Global Ecommerce Statistics: Trends to Guide Your Store in 2025

Customer Experience
Fashion Brand Storytelling Examples to Inspire You

Mar 24, 2023

Growth strategies
SEO Product Descriptions: 7 Tips To Optimize Your Product Pages

Powering commerce at scale

Speak with our team on how to bring Shopify into your tech stack.

Get in touch
Shopify logo

Shopify

  • About
  • Careers
  • Investors
  • Press and Media
  • Partners
  • Affiliates
  • Legal
  • Service status

Support

  • Merchant Support
  • Shopify Help Center
  • Hire a Partner
  • Shopify Academy
  • Shopify Community

Developers

  • Shopify.dev
  • API Documentation
  • Dev Degree

Products

  • Shop
  • Shop Pay
  • Shopify Plus
  • Shopify Fulfillment Network
  • Linkpop
  • Shopify for Enterprise

Global Impact

  • Sustainability
  • Build Black
  • Research

Solutions

  • Online Store Builder
  • Website Builder
  • Ecommerce Website
  • Australia
    English
  • Canada
    English
  • Hong Kong SAR
    English
  • Indonesia
    English
  • Ireland
    English
  • Malaysia
    English
  • New Zealand
    English
  • Nigeria
    English
  • Philippines
    English
  • Singapore
    English
  • South Africa
    English
  • UK
    English

Choose a region & language

  • Australia
    English
  • Canada
    English
  • Hong Kong SAR
    English
  • Indonesia
    English
  • Ireland
    English
  • Malaysia
    English
  • New Zealand
    English
  • Nigeria
    English
  • Philippines
    English
  • Singapore
    English
  • South Africa
    English
  • UK
    English
  • Terms of service
  • Privacy policy
  • Sitemap
  • Privacy Choices