What is performance monitoring

Web Performance Monitoring is the measurement of a website or web service’s ability to respond efficiently to interactions with end users. Data collected with monitoring helps to improve the speed of the service and ultimately increase user satisfaction, resulting in higher user retention rates while decreasing bounce rates and cart abandonment.

Why should you use web performance monitoring?

Research shows that a site has only three seconds to load before losing 40 percent of its visitors (source), and research from Google shows that a half second delay is enough to annoy users and 20 percent of Google’s users to leave. To protect a brand’s reputation and revenue stream, companies conduct regular Web Performance Monitoring on their web assets to avoid the costly loss of site visitors.

What Causes Bad Web Performance?

Many things can cause a website or web service to perform poorly. File amounts, file sizes, system architecture and user variables such as location, device, browser type, operating system and connection speed can all combine to make for a great or bad end user experience. With dynamically distributed content, performance problems can manifest at any time as a result of site changes or failing or inadequate hardware. Third-party content often plays a role in poor performance, but identifying slow third-party content can be difficult without synthetic web performance monitoring.

The importance of a large checkpoint network in synthetic web performance monitoring

End user location latency is a serious problem for many websites and web services. For a synthetic solution to act as a true indicator of user experience, the tests must come from a location close to the actual users of the site. By using a service that provides a large network of checkpoints, a site can indicate where the checks are coming from. This provides data that better reflects the actual user experience with the site and helps identify location-specific issues.