What steps have you taken to reduce the bounce rate of your company website? That is, when a user visits your home or any of your inner pages, are there any elements (or lack thereof) that might cause them to quickly lose interest, leave, and click through to one of your competitors? Well, if they are greeted with pages that are slow to load, or fail to load entirely, that will become a moot point as most users will leave rather than wait to even have a look around. Aside from reliable web hosting, you need an easy way to keep tabs on any problem pages, and Pingdom is a handy resource for doing just that.

Uptime is huge when it comes to the success of your search engine optimization campaign, as it increases the likelihood users will spend longer amounts of time on your website, thus demonstrating to Google your content is worthwhile and relevant to the search results through which they found it. One of the first factors we check out with new Los Angeles website design clients is the loading time and general speed of their pages. If there is a problem, we have plenty of hosting solutions at our fingertips, but a small or startup business owner might prefer the simplicity and affordability of Pingdom.

Pingdom is nice and straightforward and presents an easy-to-read, clean-cut layout. Select either a Basic or Business account, which will enable you to track up to 30 sites. Your account will then send you instant SMS and email alerts whenever it perceives an error, slower-than-typical loading time, or loading failure. At that point, you can immediately alert your webmaster, or even remedy the problem yourself rather than hearing about it a week later when a prospective client complains.

Pricing for Pingdom accounts ranges from $9.95 to $39.95 per month with the option of a 30-day free trial to see if it's a good fit.