Make Uxify one of your go-to sources on Google
Add Uxify on Google
What is Error Rate Monitoring?
Error rate monitoring means keeping a running count of how often visitors run into errors on your site, and watching that number move. The error rate itself is usually the share of sessions (or pageviews) where at least one error fired. So if 1,500 of this week’s 50,000 sessions hit an error, you’re sitting at 3%.
Most of these errors never show up as an error message. A JavaScript exception quietly kills the size picker. The shipping options never load because an API call timed out. A font file or a review widget script just doesn’t arrive. The shopper doesn’t see a red warning, they see a page that’s slightly off or a button that does nothing.
That’s what makes them sneaky. Plenty of errors only happen on one browser version, one Android model, a slow hotel Wi-Fi connection or with a particular ad blocker installed, which means your team can click through the whole site on their MacBooks and never trigger a thing. Real user monitoring is how you catch the errors your actual customers hit.
What this means for revenue
A slow page loses you some buyers. A broken one can lose you every single buyer on that step.
Picture an “Add to cart” button that throws an error on Samsung Internet. Everyone on that browser hits a dead end, and almost none of them will email support about it. They’ll go back to Google and buy the same thing somewhere else.
Errors also love to appear right after something changes, like a theme update, a new Shopify app, a tweak to a tracking tag or a release your developers pushed on Friday afternoon. Uxify’s guide to RUM points out that high error rates usually come before a spike in bounce rate, so the error rate works as an early warning rather than a post-mortem.
And watch the rate, not the raw count. A thousand errors a day is a rounding error on a site with ten million sessions. On a site with ten thousand, it’s a fire. Break the rate down by page, browser and device and you’ll see whether a problem is growing, and who exactly it’s hitting.
How Uxify helps
Reality picks up JavaScript errors and broken interactions in real time from actual sessions, so you hear about a problem before the complaints (or the quiet drop in orders) start. You can slice it by page, device, browser and location to see who’s affected. Then Ask Uxi answers the follow-up questions in plain language, like which pages saw errors climb after the last release and whether engagement dropped with them.
Error Rate Monitoring FAQs
What’s a good error rate?
There isn’t a universal number. Every tool counts errors a little differently, and some errors are harmless noise from browser extensions. Your own baseline is the useful benchmark: know what a normal week looks like, then treat sudden jumps on product and checkout pages as urgent.
What types of errors should I monitor?
JavaScript errors and failed network requests (API calls coming back with 4xx or 5xx codes) are the big two. Add resources that fail to load, like scripts, images and fonts. Then rank them by where they happen, because a broken checkout button matters a lot more than a missing icon in the footer.
Is error tracking the same as error rate monitoring?
Not really. Error tracking is the developer’s view: the message, the file, the exact line of code. Error rate monitoring zooms out to how many visitors are affected and whether it’s getting worse. You’ll want both. One tells you what broke, the other tells you whether to drop everything and fix it.
Can third-party scripts cause errors on my site?
Yes, and pretty often. Chat widgets, review apps, analytics and ad tags all run code you don’t control, so an update on their side can break something on yours overnight. Monitoring continuously, not just testing before your own releases, is the only way to spot those.