AI for website performance monitoring: Top tools to optimize for conversions

Using AI for website performance monitoring is not just for web developers. As a marketer, I rely on all sorts of tools to check my websites’ performance and ensure they’re loading fast and functioning as expected. The cost of not doing so? Missed leads, hampered conversion rates, and lost revenue.

Below, I’ll review the best AI tools for website performance monitoring and show how marketers can use them to optimize their websites for conversions.

Table of Contents

• AI for Website Performance Monitoring Summary
• What Marketers Need From AI Website Monitoring
• Which AI website monitoring metrics impact lead generation?
• The Best AI Website Monitoring Tools for Marketing Teams
• How to Evaluate AI Website Monitoring Tools Without Engineering Support
• Frequently Asked Questions About AI Website Performance Monitoring

AI for Website Performance Monitoring Summary

AI website performance monitoring tools can monitor uptime and latency, identify form errors and broken links, and alert website owners to other issues. They’re an improvement over traditional website tools because the AI can monitor 24/7 and offer insightful suggestions. Marketers are using AI for website performance monitoring to continually identify and fix the issues that are hurting conversions. By using tools that offer AI anomaly detection, AI summaries, and AI answers, marketers can quickly get actionable insights into how to generate more leads, optimize conversions, and protect their campaigns.

Want to see where your website stands? Try HubSpot’s free Website Grader to identify performance fixes.

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What Marketers Need From AI Website Monitoring

From a strict web development perspective, website performance monitoring refers to technical metrics that indicate how fast a website appears on the visitor’s screen — metrics like page load time, time to first byte (TTFB), and largest contentful paint (LCP).

From a more holistic perspective of the many parties involved in a website’s success, including SEOs and marketers, website monitoring also involves the metrics that affect marketing campaigns and search engine rankings — metrics like bounce rate, conversion rate, and session duration.

AI website monitoring, depending on the tool, can provide important insights into all of those metrics I just mentioned. Some of these tools also track changes and how those changes affect your website. Developers often use AI testing tools on websites, but marketers can also benefit from the data AI monitoring tools provide.

How does website performance affect your marketing KPIs?

• High page load times can lead to high bounce rates, resulting in lower conversion rates.
• Poor uptime can cause a decrease in website traffic.
• Errors on your landing page can lead to failed form submissions, resulting in lost leads.

How does AI help with all of this?

Website performance monitoring tools like Pingdom and Google Lighthouse have been around for years. But AI goes beyond mere reporting tools, providing deep analysis, context, and suggestions for improvement.

Which AI website monitoring metrics impact lead generation?

“AI website monitoring metrics” are actually the same metrics you track all the time to gauge technical and marketing performance — they’re just surfaced and enhanced by AI.

Here are the top AI website monitoring metrics that impact lead generation:

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is an interesting one because it’s more of a symptom than a problem in and of itself. If you’re noticing a high bounce rate, it’s likely because you’ve got issues with one of the AI website monitoring metrics below.

In your landing page KPIs, you’ll probably see bounce rate decreasing your conversion rate because you’ll have high visits but low form submissions.

Page Load Time

Page load time impacts conversion substantially. If a visitor has to wait too long for a page to load (and in this day and age, “too long” might be as little as four seconds), your prospect will bounce, resulting in a missed lead and lower conversion rate.

If you want to maximize transactions, digital marketing agency Portent recommends aiming for a one- to two-second page load time. Portent’s research found that visitors converted the highest when pages loaded between one and two seconds — an average of 3.05%. Once a website hit a four-second load time, that plummeted to 0.67%.

In your analytics, a high page load time might affect your landing page by lowering conversion rates.

Pro tip: Your web host can affect your page load time, which can be improved with a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Be sure to choose a web host with a global CDN, which HubSpot has.

Core Web Vitals

Google research found that when websites meet Core Web Vitals, their visitors are 24% less likely to leave the page before any content has shown up. The three Core Web Vitals are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

These Core Web Vitals might show up as a high bounce rate or low conversion rate on your landing pages.

UX Friction Points

A UX friction point might be a pop-up that a visitor can’t exit, a button that a user can’t click because it’s covered by another design element, or a form field that doesn’t expand to show all of the text the user is entering. It could also be an accessibility issue, such as a visitor’s screen reader being unable to read your site.

These friction points cause frustration, inaccuracies, and bounces, meaning that they can cause you to lose a lead. Importantly, UX friction points can lead to “dead clicks” on a page, which is something an AI website performance monitoring tool like Fullstory can address (we’ll talk more about that tool below!).

Broken Links and Other SEO Issues

When a user clicks a link and gets an error, such as a 404, that’s a broken link. This is devastating if you’re hoping for them to enter their contact information or make a purchase. Often, broken links happen because of a typo or a redirect that didn’t get set up correctly.

Other SEO issues might include missing image alt text, duplicate content, or sitemap issues. These problems impact your rankings, which means your prospects might not ever even find your page.

In your analytics, if you’ve got SEO issues, you’ll likely notice your landing page is getting little organic traffic.

Form Errors

Every marketer knows that we should always test forms before launch to ensure they work properly. But when you’re faced with a deadline, that doesn’t always happen. Form errors often occur when the form wasn’t set up correctly. So a user might enter their information and hit submit — but you never gain their info.

In your dashboard, if you’ve got form errors, you’ll likely see that your landing page has a high form abandonment rate.

The Best AI Website Monitoring Tools for Marketing Teams

Hexometer

Best for: Ecommerce businesses that want 24/7 monitoring of website availability, performance, UX, health, SEO, and security

Marketing use case: Optimize and protect your landing page conversions.

Standout features:

Hexometer uses an AI-powered platform to monitor across six areas:

• Uptime monitoring
• User experience (UX) monitoring, including spelling and grammar checks
• Performance monitoring
• Health monitoring, including broken links, errors, and W3C accessibility checks
• SEO monitoring
• Security monitoring

Hexometer monitors your entire website and sends real-time notifications via email, SMS, or Slack if issues are detected. The issues could range from spelling mistakes to missing images to broken links. Hexometer has integrations for many popular tools, including Telegram, Gmail, Discord, and Trello.

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Flowtest.ai

Best for: Marketers who make constant website changes and want a dedicated AI QA tester

Marketing use case: Test complex flows like payment gateways, registrations, and form submissions at scale.

Standout features:

• Uptime monitoring
• Set up flows (a sequence of steps you want the AI agent to take) without needing to code.
• Flowtest’s AI agent automatically adapts to any changes to your site. You don’t have to retrain it.

Flowtest.ai is a newcomer, having launched in August 2024. Beyond merely monitoring uptime, Flowtest is a QA tester that never gets tired. It‘s an AI agent that monitors your site and can even be specifically prompted (similar to ChatGPT) to test specific user flows (such as a form submission or checkout experience) — no coding or technical implementation necessary. It’s like a human visitor; it even has keyboard and mouse access.

Watching the founder demo this incredible AI website monitoring tool truly wowed me. Here’s a screenshot of Flowtest completing a purchase on an ecommerce site:

New Relic (Website Performance Monitoring)

Best for: Marketers who want something like Google PageSpeed Insights, but with much more advanced insights

Marketing use case: Continuously monitor Core Web Vitals and receive suggestions to help optimize conversions.

Standout features:

• Average page load time by geography
• Active, continuous monitoring of your website up to every minute
• Access to New Relic AI on paid plans

New Relic’s Website Performance Monitoring (WPM) works like this: You enter a URL, and it sends automated bots to measure metrics like Core Web Vitals, broken links, and page load. You’ll quickly receive a scorecard in your dashboard that shows if the page is down, the load time, and the Core Web Vitals.

Source

New Relic’s WPM is especially useful for non-technical marketers, as you don’t need to code anything; it’s as simple as entering a URL. If you’ve ever used Google PageSpeed Insights, New Relic’s WPM reminds me of that — but it does so much more. Importantly, instead of having to re-enter the URL every time you want to check its performance, you merely enter it one time, and New Relic will continuously check it for you in the dashboard.

In addition to website performance monitoring, New Relic offers AI anomaly detection, which means you can configure it to do things like detect when a key landing page has dropped below its norm (indicating you need to identify and fix something asap to protect your campaign).

Fullstory (StoryAI)

Best for: Marketing teams that want the behavioral data that drives the complete customer journey

Marketing Use Case: Move beyond synthetic monitoring and find the UX friction points that cause funnel drop-off.

Standout Features:

• StoryAI, a team of AI agents powered by Google Gemini, analyzes and summarizes customer data and surfaces conversion opportunities.
• AI summaries condense user data into actionable takeaways.
• AI answers let you ask questions in natural language and get instant insights.

Data-driven marketers will fall in love with Fullstory, especially StoryAI, AI agents that empower you to predict, prioritize, and personalize better than ever before. You can use natural language to ask StoryAI things like “Why did my conversion rate drop last week?” and get instant insights.

Powered by Google‘s Gemini, StoryAI can predict customers’ likelihood to buy, identify opportunities to lift conversion, and provide AI summaries that condense the data into actionable takeaways. Importantly, StoryAI doesn't require coding or a complicated setup.

Pro tip: If you think StoryAI is cool, you should meet Breeze, HubSpot’s suite of AI tools. Breeze helps marketing teams surface actionable insights about sales, marketing, and service data through a conversational chat. Try HubSpot CRM for free.

Keep in mind that Fullstory doesn’t monitor technical website aspects like uptime, and it isn’t a synthetic monitor (a bot that performs actions on your site to simulate a real user). Fullstory tracks real human user sessions. It’s a great asset to add to your AI website monitoring toolkit in addition to a synthetic monitor like Flowtest.

How to Evaluate AI Website Monitoring Tools Without Engineering Support

Your engineering team likely has its hands full with product development, fixing bugs, and the like. They don’t always have immediate availability to support the marketing team, and if you’re trying to move fast, you don’t have time to wait.

That’s okay! Here’s how to evaluate AI website monitoring tools — without internal engineering support.

1. Decide what insights you want to track and how that equates to success.

I asked Eric Do Couto, Head of Marketing at Visualping (an AI website change detection tool), for his best advice for marketers evaluating an AI website monitoring tool.

“This goes for any marketing team anytime you onboard any tool or choose between any tool, and that's having a clear definition of what success looks like with this tool,” he says. “So that means understanding very clearly what this tool is intending to solve for, what sorts of insights you expect to get from it, what you intend to do with those insights, and then what you expect that means for the bottom line of a campaign, or for your marketing results, your marketing targets and goals.”

Get clear with your team by conducting an online survey or discussing it at your next marketing standup. Make a list of the frequent website marketing problems that continually surface, the KPIs that are most crucial to your digital campaign success, and the problems you expect the AI performance monitoring tool to solve. This will help you pinpoint the features the tool must have.

2. Assemble your decision-making team.

Making a decision will be much easier if you narrow down your decision-making team to a few key stakeholders. Your CMO and CTO will likely have the final say on which software you purchase, but before then, pick two or three people on the marketing team to be in charge of evaluation and implementation.

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• Security
• Mobile Performance

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3. Find tools that are marketer-friendly (no-code, easy implementation, integrations).

Take a look at the list of AI website performance monitoring tools above. Do some research via Google, ChatGPT, review sites, and ask fellow marketers for recommendations. Once you have your list, research which ones are the most marketer-friendly. Since you don’t plan on having engineering support, look for ones that claim to be “no code,” “easy implementation,” and have integrations with the software your team currently uses.

Pro tip: Marketers need a CRM to turn those AI website monitoring metrics into actionable insights. Equipped with the data from the AI monitoring tools, marketers can use HubSpot Smart CRM to get a fuller picture of how website performance impacts revenue. Check if your chosen tool has a native integration with HubSpot, and if it doesn’t, consider using a third-party automation platform like Zapier or hiring a HubSpot partner to help.

4. Evaluate vendor implementation and long-term tech support.

In reality, this evaluation will continue during your free trial period (see next step). But doing it before signing up for trials prevents wasted time, since you can narrow down your list based on who actually promises assistance.

You might not have internal engineering support, but many software vendors offer implementation support from their own teams. Search the vendor websites or contact their sales team to find out what kind of short- and long-term support they can offer, and how much it’ll cost.

5. Sign up for free trials or demos.

Now, for the fun part! All of the tools I mentioned above (Hexometer, Flowtest.ai, New Relic, and Fullstory) offer either free plans or free trials. Additionally, if you want more a of a guided experience or access to features that aren’t on the free plans/trials, sign up for a demo with the vendor.

6. Run experiments on existing campaigns.

With access to a free trial or plan, you can finally get real-world data by connecting it to your website and campaigns. Make sure to get a snapshot of your chosen campaigns before you run the experiments so you can get a clear before-and-after picture of the effect the AI website monitoring tool had.

I recommend at least two weeks, but four weeks would be better. The issue you’ll run into there is that some of these free trials last shorter than two weeks. In that case, it’s worth investing in a month-to-month plan so you can test it for the full month and cancel if it doesn’t work out.

7. Meet with your decision-making team to calculate ROI based on experiments.

After you’ve run your experiments, pull the data from before and after for each campaign and create a comparison deck to easily present findings to your decision-making team. Compare metrics like conversion rate, leads generated, bounce rate, and load time. If you saw success, present the findings to the entire marketing team and to leadership if they need to sign off.

And if you have questions that the vendor websites and trial periods didn’t answer? Contact the sales team and ask.

“The worst thing ever is getting the hard-earned approval for that cool new budget, that cool new toy, diving in, not really understanding that ‘Oh, it can‘t do this. It can’t do that. And I didn't really ask that question,’” says Do Couto.

Be sure to ask those questions now, so you don’t end up with a tool your team doesn’t use.

Frequently Asked Questions About AI Website Performance Monitoring

How do I pick an AI website monitoring tool if my team is mostly marketers?

Choosing an AI website monitoring tool for marketers might feel daunting at first because many of these tools are primarily marketed to technical teams like engineering and DevOps — but don’t let that scare you off. Many marketing teams take advantage of these tools to improve conversions.

If marketers are the primary users of the AI website monitoring tool, prioritize software that:

• Is no-code
• Is easy to set up
• Provides implementation support and long-term tech support
• Integrates with the tools your marketers already use, such as HubSpot or another CRM or CMS

I also found it helpful to specifically add “for marketers” at the end of a Google search for a specific tool, as it surfaced some landing pages on AI website monitoring tool websites that highlighted the use case specifically for marketers.

What’s the best way to connect AI monitoring to CRM and attribution?

To connect AI website monitoring to your CRM, you first need to ensure that the AI tool has a native integration with your CRM. If it does not, look into connecting the two tools via a third-party automation platform, such as Zapier.

Even without technical integration, you can make the connection between AI website monitoring tool insights and attribution by manually checking AI monitoring data and CRM data.

For example, you notice a sudden drop in conversion rate on an important landing page in the past week. Your AI website monitoring tool flagged that page as having a load time that’s two seconds slower than the week before, and it tied it to an issue with a video you added to the page that’s slowing it down. You remove the video, and page load time speeds back up by two seconds, and your conversion rate returns to normal. You can then know that the AI monitoring tool helped improve that conversion rate.

When should marketing receive alerts versus engineering?

Both marketing and engineering should receive AI website monitoring alerts because both teams need that crucial context for different reasons. For example, if your AI tool sends an alert that your site is down, engineering will need to know because they’ll need to fix the issue, but marketing still needs to know because they’ll likely want to pause paid ad campaigns.

If you want some examples of low-stakes, simple alerts that can be marketing-only, here they are:

• Broken links
• Missing images
• Missing metadata, such as image alt text or meta descriptions

Can AI website monitoring help non‑technical teams prioritize fixes?

Yes! AI website monitoring helps non-technical teams prioritize fixes. This is exactly what Fullstory’s StoryAI does. StoryAI analyzes customer data and prioritizes each issue based on its impact on conversion. That way, your marketing team always knows which business-critical issues to tackle first.

What should we measure in the first 30 days of implementing AI website monitoring?

Before you implement the AI website monitoring tool, be sure to get a 30-day baseline of the following metrics that impact lead generation:

• Bounce rate
• Page load time
• Core Web Vitals
• UX friction points
• Broken links and other SEO issues
• Form errors

Once you have your baseline, implement the AI performance monitoring tool and see what issues it surfaces and the fixes it recommends. Implement those fixes. Then, give it 30 days, and pull the data from those same metrics. Keep in mind that the AI monitoring tool might continuously find new issues and fixes throughout that 30-day period, and you should implement them as soon as you can.

At the end of the 30 days, compare the before-and-after metrics. If you see significant improvement thanks to the AI monitoring tool, create a simple executive summary to show leadership and get buy-in. Remember, leadership will care most about how it impacts the bottom line, so while it’s fine to report that conversion rate improved, tie that to actual revenue generated thanks to the higher conversion rate.

Ready to use AI for website performance monitoring?

I’ve long relied on website graders like Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights. But using AI for website performance monitoring automates mundane tasks and provides deeper, actionable insights so you can improve conversions and boost the bottom line.

This article was written by a human, but our team uses AI in our editorial process. Check out our full disclosure to learn more about how we use AI.

Free Website Optimization Checklist

This website optimization checklist will help you perfect your website's:

• Performance
• SEO
• Security
• Mobile Performance

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You're all set!

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