Every second counts: One second longer load time costs an average of 7% conversion (Akamai). A complete outage? Lost revenue, frustrated customers, SEO damage. Professional shop monitoring detects problems in under 60 seconds - long before customers notice them. This is particularly critical for shops with optimized checkout. This guide shows how to reliably monitor your online shop.
Why Shop Monitoring Is Essential
An online shop is not a static website - it's a complex system of web server, database, payment provider, integrations, and external services. Any component can fail.
- Direct revenue losses: No shop = no orders. At €100,000 daily revenue, one hour of downtime costs €4,166
- Trust loss: Customers who see an error often don't return
- SEO damage: Google negatively evaluates outages and slow pages - rankings suffer
- Cascade effects: A small problem (full disk) becomes a major outage
- Response time: Without monitoring, you learn about problems through customer complaints
The Four Pillars of Shop Monitoring
Uptime Monitoring
Is the shop reachable? HTTP status code, SSL certificate, DNS resolution.
Performance Monitoring
How fast is the shop? Load times, TTFB, Core Web Vitals.
Error Tracking
What errors occur? JavaScript errors, PHP exceptions, 404/500 codes.
Alerting
Who gets notified how? Email, SMS, Slack, PagerDuty.
1. Uptime Monitoring
The foundation of any monitoring: Is the shop reachable? Uptime monitoring regularly checks (every 1-5 minutes) whether the website responds.
| Uptime | Downtime/Year | Downtime/Month | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 99% | 87.6 hours | 7.3 hours | Insufficient for e-commerce |
| 99.5% | 43.8 hours | 3.65 hours | Minimum for small shops |
| 99.9% | 8.76 hours | 43 minutes | Standard for e-commerce |
| 99.95% | 4.38 hours | 22 minutes | Recommended for high-revenue |
| 99.99% | 52 minutes | 4.3 minutes | Enterprise level |
2. Performance Monitoring
- TTFB (Time to First Byte): Time until server responds. Target: under 200ms
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Time until largest visible content loads. Target: under 2.5s
- FID/INP (Interaction Delay): Time until page responds to clicks. Target: under 100ms
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): How much does layout shift? Target: under 0.1
- Full load time: Time until everything is loaded. Target: under 3-4s
3. Error Tracking
| Priority | Description | Response Time |
|---|---|---|
| P1 - Critical | Shop completely down, checkout broken, data loss | Immediate (< 15 min) |
| P2 - High | Important function broken (search, cart), many users affected | < 1 hour |
| P3 - Medium | Feature limited, workaround possible, few users | < 24 hours |
| P4 - Low | Cosmetic errors, edge cases, no business impact | Next sprint |
4. Alerting Configuration
- Email: For low priority, asynchronous notification
- Slack/Teams: For team visibility, quick coordination
- SMS: For critical alerts outside working hours
- PagerDuty/Opsgenie: For 24/7 on-call with escalation
- Phone: For P1 incidents when SMS isn't enough
Prevention Over Firefighting
Professional shop monitoring is indispensable for every online shop. It costs a fraction of what a single multi-hour outage would cost. With uptime monitoring, performance tracking, error logging, and smart alerting, you detect problems before your customers notice them.
We set up professional monitoring for your Shopware or WooCommerce shop - including hosting with integrated monitoring. Contact us for consultation.
For e-commerce, we recommend 1-minute intervals for critical endpoints (homepage, checkout) and 5-minute intervals for secondary pages. More frequent checks mean faster detection but also more cost.
99.9% is the standard for e-commerce - that's a maximum of 8.76 hours of downtime per year. For high-revenue shops, 99.95% or better should be targeted.
Ideally both. External monitoring (from outside) shows what customers see. Internal monitoring (server metrics) shows why something happens. The combination enables quick diagnosis.
Define sensible thresholds that detect real problems but avoid noise. Use confirmations (2 of 3 checks failed) and group related alerts.
Basic monitoring (uptime, SSL) is easy to set up yourself. For comprehensive performance monitoring, error tracking, and APM, we recommend professional support - misconfigured monitoring can do more harm than good.
This article is based on data from Akamai (performance studies), Gartner (downtime costs), Google Web Vitals, and best practices from Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). As of: January 2026.
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