Web application performance monitoring8/18/2023 As the noted tech-industry venture capitalist Fred Wilson said back in February 2010:įirst and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Somewhat ironically, as websites begin to load almost instantly and the margin of difference between the speed of one site and another shrinks into the arena of milliseconds, those 1/1000 th-of-a-second differences start to make all the difference between who profits and who loses online. Web performance optimization, or WPO, now returns nearly a million Google search results, and its significance is only growing. WPO also improves the user experience, increases revenue, and reduces operating costs. WPO is similar to SEO in that optimizing web performance drives more traffic to your website. convergence of awareness, even urgency, on the business side and growing expertise in the tech community around web performance marks the beginning of a new industry that I’m calling “WPO”-Web Performance Optimization. By early 2007-the year of the iPhone-Sounders was speaking and blogging about what he termed “Web performance,” publishing a book called High Performance Web Sites later that year and, in 2008, cofounding Velocity, a popular conference series devoted to the subject. Although the source of problems or site slowness wasn’t always immediately evident or easy to figure out, webmasters interested in improving their visitor retention rates could spend some of their spare time making tweaks to likely trouble spots until site performance seemed to improve.īut it wasn’t until 2004, as high-speed internet connections and ecommerce websites (often with elaborately overdone Flash-animated intros) came to dominate the digital marketplace, that the relationship between high-speed websites and business revenue became obvious enough for a few performance engineers, such as Google’s Ilya Grigorik and Yahoo's (and now Google’s) Steve Souders, to begin actively evangelizing the topic’s importance. Among other things, cleaning up and optimizing lines of code, ensuring that the most important page elements loaded first, conducting various A/B tests, and maximizing server hardware to meet site visitors’ demands-taking advantage, always, of the latest telecommunications infrastructure and modem baud rates-all became relevant considerations in the development and maintenance of any website. If only to keep their visitors happy, conscientious webmasters of yore realized that they had to do something about their less than impressive page-load and response times. And everyone was-and, to this day, continues to be-frequently frustrated by it too. Nobody had to explain this, because everyone experienced it, constantly. Pages containing plain text loaded the fastest pages containing audios, videos, or high-resolution images took a lot longer. ![]() Whether it was simple HTML text, massive 640x480-pixel BMP images, looped MIDI audios, tiny embedded AVI videos, e-shopping cart JavaScript, or pages packed full of tacky, blinking animated GIFs, the amount of content that lived on a website was tacitly understood by all Web visitors, within their first few experiences of using it, to largely determine how fast any given page would finish loading. Since the early days of the Web, making sites and their content load as quickly as possible has been crucial for increasing visitor retention and engagement. But these issues weren’t always so clear. These days, a variety of automated software applications are available that can continuously monitor a website, alert webmasters or system administrators to potential problems, and identify specific errors that may be inhibiting a site’s optimal performance. ![]() ![]() There are two main types of Web Performance Monitoring, Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring. Add to this picture the rise of smartphones and mobile-optimized websites, which have enabled people to communicate, read, watch, and shop online while busy and on the move, and the sheer speed of the Web has never been more important. ![]() The fiscal significance of monitoring website performance has been driven home in recent years by repeated studies demonstrating that even barely noticeable sluggishness in site response times-including delays lasting just a fraction of a second-can lead to increased bounce rates and decreased sales on major ecommerce sites. Web performance monitoring tools like AlertSite can drastically improve the efficiency of your WPM and WPO strategy and often times necessary to gain the upper edge in today's competitive e-commerce market. But for businesses, it can be disastrous. Everyone knows what it’s like to arrive at a website only to have to wait, ever so patiently, for the site’s content to load.
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