Why Small Banks Should Use Uptime Monitoring Services
For small banks and credit unions, your website and online banking platform are critical customer touchpoints. Downtime directly impacts revenue and reputation.
Yet small financial institutions often lack the in-house expertise and budget for comprehensive monitoring. This leaves them flying blind, only finding out about outages after customers complain.
That’s why leveraging an affordable external uptime monitoring service is so essential. In this guide, I’ll outline the benefits of uptime monitoring for small banks and highlight features to look for in a monitoring provider.
Why Website Uptime Matters to Small Banks
Your website is often the first interaction consumers have with your brand. Server failures, network outages, cyber attacks, and other disruptions can knock your site offline and block customers from:
- Checking interest rates and account options
- Reading about your services and features
- Finding your branch and ATM locations
- Completing online account applications
Without reliable website uptime, you miss opportunities to impress potential customers and lose prospects to competing banks with an online presence.
Impacts of Online Banking Downtime
When your online and mobile banking platform experience outages, existing customers get prevented from:
- Checking account balances
- Viewing statements and transaction history
- Transferring funds between accounts
- Paying bills online
- Depositing checks via mobile
- Applying for loans or new accounts
Frustrated customers may defect to a more reliable bank if outages are frequent. Even brief disruptions can directly impact customer satisfaction and retention.
Why Small Banks Need Monitoring
While large banks can invest heavily in sophisticated monitoring software and in-house specialists, small institutions face key challenges:
Budget Constraints – Proper IT monitoring tools and headcount requires significant investment most small banks can’t afford.
Lack of Expertise – No IT staff with skills to run enterprise monitoring systems and quickly troubleshoot issues.
Legacy Systems – Older hardware and software lacks visibility and manageability compared to modern infrastructure.
Always-On Expectations – Customers expect online banking to be available 24/7/365 with no downtime.
Increasing Threats – Hackers aggressively target financial institutions of all sizes with DDoS, data breaches, and cyber attacks.
Without monitoring, small banks remain blind to outages until customers complain. This impacts reputation and customer retention over time.
Key Website Metrics to Monitor
Comprehensive monitoring should examine:
Uptime – Confirm overall website availability across regions without downtime.
Page load times – Measure how quickly pages render fully for customers.
Functional components – Verify forms, site search, chatbots and other features work properly.
Transaction performance – Test online account opening, loan applications, wire transfers to completion.
Third-party performance – Monitor outside APIs, services, and trackers used on site.
Security threats – Detect failed login attempts, exploit efforts, malware indicators.
Global availability – Check performance in all geographies you serve customers.
Capturing metrics across these facets provides full coverage into the customer experience.
Website Monitoring Best Practices
Follow these best practices to implement effective monitoring:
Set up external monitoring – Monitor your website externally from multiple regions to best simulate real customer views.
Establish baseline metrics – Determine normal response times and thresholds for alerts based on data over time.
Check frequently – Test website at least every 5 minutes to detect issues rapidly.
Monitor web transactions – Validate completing key web transactions like new account opening.
Use real browsers – Test across real Chrome, Firefox, Safari browsers, not just HEAD requests.
Follow customer journeys – Click through critical site pages/flows customers would experience.
Set alert thresholds – Get alerted immediately if page load times exceed normal baselines.
Verify fixes – After resolving problems, confirm performance is restored to normal.
Review reports – Analyze uptime and performance reports to identify patterns and outliers.
Affordable Monitoring Service Options
Specialized monitoring tools tailored for small banks include:
Uptime monitoring – Services like Network Notification and StatusCake perform frequent website checks from across regions to measure uptime and alert on outages. Plans start around $19.99/month monitoring.
Synthetic monitoring – ThousandEyes and Pingdom simulate customer clickpaths through your website to test performance and transactions. Pricing starts around $40 per month.
Real user monitoring – Datadog and Rigor capture metrics and sessions from actual customer visits to your site to identify usability challenges. Roughly $30/month minimum.
Log analysis – Platforms like Splunk Cloud ingest web server logs to analyze traffic, errors, security events. Predictable pricing model under $10/GB indexed.
Managed SIEM – Arctic Wolf monitors internal security logs, network traffic, endpoint activity and correlates events for threat detection. Starts around $10 per endpoint monthly.
Web application firewalls, penetration testing services, and DDoS protection solutions also provide additional layers of monitoring and defense.
How Network Notifications Can Help
Network Notifications makes uptime monitoring easy and affordable for small banks starting at just $19.99/mo.
It delivers the essentials you need:
✅ 24/7 monitoring from within the US.
✅ Uptime percentage to track reliability.
✅ SMS/Email notifications, etc of downtime.
✅ Easy setup by just entering your URL.
✅ Ease of use with an intuitive interface.
✅ Reliability with us based monitoring nodes.
✅ Affordable plans fit small bank budgets.
Sign up now at NetworkNotifications.com to start monitoring your website uptime!
Conclusion
Without monitoring, small banks remain unaware of website and online banking outages frustrating customers. Budget-friendly services deliver easy, reliable uptime monitoring to fit the constraints facing small financial institutions.
Monitoring website availability and performance 24/7 enables rapid detection and resolution of issues. This minimizes downtime and safeguards reliability for customers.
Uptime monitoring paired with real user monitoring, synthetic testing, log analysis, and security technologies provide visibility across the customer digital experience.
Don’t wait for customers to report issues. Start monitoring proactively today to provide the always-on banking experience users expect.
Sign up now to try Network Notifications risk-free!
