Web Performance

End Bad Experiences! Improving Web Performance with Better Monitoring

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Has This Ever Happened to You? ................................................................................... 3

Defining Web Performance .............................................................................................. 4

Understanding the Impact of Web Performance ......................................................... 5

Identifying the Causes of Poor Performance ............................................................... 9

Reliance on Third Party Services .............................................................................. 10

Change and Human Error........................................................................................... 11

Network and Locations ............................................................................................... 11

Load on Servers, Web Traffic Fluctuations ............................................................. 11

Website Front-End Code ............................................................................................. 12

Measures to Reduce Your Risk ................................................................................. 13

Discovering Web Performance Issues ......................................................................... 14

Help Desk, Tech Support and Social Media ............................................................ 15

Real User Measurement (RUM)...16

Application Monitoring ................................................................................................ 17

Synthetic Monitoring ................................................................................................... 18

Choosing the Right Monitoring Strategy ..................................................................... 19

Which Tool is Right for Me? ....................................................................................... 19

Why You Must Have Synthetic Monitoring in Your Mix ....................................... 21

Synthetic Monitoring Checklist to Get You Going ..................................................... 22

End Bad Experiences! Improving Web Performance with Better Monitoring

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HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO YOU?

SCENARIO 1 Before you can put your coffee down, upper management is asking for updates on your mobile websites intermittent outages. You

werent even aware you had a problem.

SCENARIO 2 The phone is ringing off the hook and your users are complaining that your website is slow. Time goes by without a resolution and since you can't reproduce the issue, you are troubleshooting in the dark.

SCENARIO 3 In a quarterly review meeting with management, youre asked, "Why

is our website slower than our competitors?" You remain quiet, because you don't know how your website performance stacks up with your competitors and have no data to share.

The Ultimate Guide to: Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

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DEFINING WEB PERFORMANCE

Web performance (n.) The availability, speed, and reliability of viewing a web page on a user's browser.

Availability Is your website up and running and open for business?

Speed How long does it take to process and view web pages on the browser?

Reliability Are you delivering content as expected or are users encountering

problems like missing objects, JavaScript errors, non-functional

features, or other website issues?

Web performance impacts your users experience, how they view your brand, and whether they browse, consume content, purchase, or return to your site. User satisfaction, engagement, conversion rates, and business revenue depend on your quality of performance.

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UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT OF WEB PERFORMANCE

A one-second delay in webpage load time could cost Amazon up to $1.6 billion a year.

Just 4/10th of a second delay decreased Google searches by 8 million a day.1

Fast and reliable websites make for happy users and repeat business, but theyre not built overnight, nor is the work ever complete. Performance is a journey (not a destination), so creating a company culture of quality

performance is key to building and maintaining top performing sites.

Building such a culture isnt easy, but it starts with understanding and communicating the importance of reducing latency, maintaining uptime, and improving speed on every release.


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SHARE THE FACTS: CUSTOMERS ARE WON OR LOST IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE

Here are some facts and figures to help you frame and communicate the importance of a fast and reliable website to your organization:

In 2006, online shoppers expected a web page to load in 4 seconds.2

Today, the same shopper expects a site to load twice as fast and 40% will

leave if it doesnt. (Think, what will be your threshold 5 years from now?)3

Over half of online shoppers in the US say site slowness is the top

reason theyd abandon a purchase and even more were likely to

abandon a page after 3 seconds.4

Just 2 seconds of delay in load time during a transaction results in

abandonment rates up to 87%.5

More than $3 billion in sales were lost last year from carts that were

abandoned due to poor performance.5

64% of smartphone users expect pages to load in less than 4 seconds.6

74% of mobile users will leave after 5 seconds.7


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NOT MEETING ONLINE USER EXPECTATIONS IS COSTLY

Lost Revenue Every second of delay will lead to a 7% decrease in web conversions.8

Additionally, 75% of shoppers who experience a website that freezes,

crashes, is too slow, or involves a convoluted checkout process would

no longer buy from that site.3

Productivity Losses Underperforming web-based internal systems severely hinder employee

productivity. 68% of managers surveyed in a recent study cited slow

internet or inability to access documents from a network as affecting

their productivity.9

Brand Damage Poor web experiences generate social media negativity and deter other

prospects, jeopardizing future revenue. In fact, 4% of unsatisfied customers

(such as those impacted by an outage or a slow loading page) will

complain.10 And just one negative review can cost you 30 customers.

Additional Marketing Costs Inbound marketing leads will be lost when your site underperforms and

frustrated visitors leave without completing conversion goals. As a

result, you will need to increase your marketing spend to drive additional

web traffic to recoup lost leads.


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MEETING AND EXCEEDING USER EXPECTATIONS DRIVES MORE BUSINESS!

Site speed affects your brand image80% of people said online reviews and search results (Google favors quicker sites in ranking) determine what they think about a company, and social networks influence 49% of consumers.11

According to a recent study of more than 2,500 online consumers in the

US and UK, making each page in a transaction 2 seconds faster resulted

in more than double the number of completed transactions.4

Walmart optimized their site and found that every 100 ms of improvement

led to a 1% increase in revenue.12

Trulia decreased their page load time by 21%, resulting in an 11% increase

in sales.13


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IDENTIFYING THE CAUSES OF POOR PERFORMANCE

Now that you know how poor web performance can be a detriment to your online success, the next step is understanding where the biggest speed and availability risks stem from, and what measures you can take to mitigate these risks.


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RELIANCE ON THIRD PARTY SERVICES

If an application moves from a single infrastructure with 99.99% availability to an open one relying on five different providers with 99.99% availability each, the result is an infrastructure with 99.95% availability.

Websites are a complex ecosystem of social media, private and public clouds, internal components, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), ads, reviews, marketing, and analytics engines. Just one underperforming component within this delivery chain can severely impact your performance and could bring business to a halt. Even worse, site owners have little to no control over the performance of third party services. Furthermore, because of the proliferation of third party services, a seemingly isolated incident at the service provider may affect many more companies than just themselves.

Third party tag removed (errors stopped), then reinstalled


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CHANGE AND HUMAN ERROR

In a new, agile development world, change is happening constantly on the web, whether a developer pushes new code or content, or an infrastructure update is made. Due to complexity or a lack of understanding of performance impact, change can cause unexpected degradations. Furthermore, the web is coded and maintained by humans, and humans make mistakes. Unfortunately, these risks exist by nature and cannot always be prevented.

NETWORK AND LOCATIONS

The speed of the web is limited by physics the distance of the end user to the server dictates how long it takes to deliver the webpage. The further the user from the server, the higher the latency. Wireless, broadband and fiber networks also all provide the user with different connection speeds, changing how fast a webpage renders to the end user. While you have no control over where your end users browse from and which networks they use, you can place your datacenters closer to them to mitigate these factors which are outside of your control.

Large gap in script loading due to coding error

impacts load

Great performance in Phoenix.your smallest market


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LOAD ON SERVERS, WEB TRAFFIC FLUCTUATIONS

Sometimes an event or promotion can drive a burst of traffic to a website. If there are not ample resources available on the server side to handle the increased load, the server performance will rapidly deteriorate until reaching the point of failure. A website in a public cloud environment can be affected by resource-hungry neighbors in the same way as well.

WEBSITE FRONT-END CODE

How your website is coded and fetches resources affects performance. As a general rule, it is best to make sure your CSS and JS are non-blocking, the page makes as few requests as possible, and all images are optimized for performance (compressed and sprited). Keep in mind that desktop and mobile browsers render webpages differently.

Major delays caused by poorly configured JS

Servers cant handle traffic spike from promotion


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MEASURES TO REDUCE YOUR RISK

Before expected peaks of traffic, verify that your infrastructure (load

balancers, front end servers, edge servers, databases) can handle the

increased load.

Solutions such as Tag Management Systems and CDN Load Balancing

can reduce dangers stemming from the complex delivery of assets and

mitigate risk of third party issues.

Understand from where and how the majority of your users access the

site and develop responsive design based on your data. If necessary,

leverage a CDN to serve content closer to your global end users.

There are many different free tools (such as Google PageSpeed and

Yahoo YSlow) that can crawl your page and score it based on best

practice guidelines. Be careful thoughevery website is unique, so a

high score does not necessarily guarantee a fast website.

If development resources are scarce for front-end performance

improvement, rely on Front End Optimization solutions to automatically

apply optimizations to the website.

Desktop and mobile browsers render webpages differently; make sure that

these variations are tested for and optimized during development. Beware of

potential negative performance impact when using jQuery on mobile.


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DISCOVERING WEB PERFORMANCE ISSUES

Knowing what can cause performance degradations during development is one thing; spotting a performance issue out in the wild is another. There are multiple methods for keeping an eye on your website, but the success of each depends on your specific needs.

4 WEB MONITORING STRATEGIES

Many organizations rely on a combination of approaches to oversee their web applications.

1. Help Desk, Tech Support, & Social Media Responsive Monitoring

2. Real-User Measurement (RUM) Passive Monitoring for End User Experience

3. Application Monitoring Passive Monitoring for Applications andInfrastructure

4. Synthetic Web Performance Monitoring Active Monitoring


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HELP DESK, TECH SUPPORT, & SOCIAL MEDIA

Monitoring social media feeds and listening to your customers is an excellent way to understand their experience. A timely, human response to customers experiencing issues strengthens your business credibility and brand loyalty. While handling issues from calls to support or posts on social media means you are being responsive, it also means an issue has already affected end users.

BENEFITS LIMITATIONS

No added cost with support and help desk

systems already existing.

Direct interaction with customers.

Ability to discover performance edge cases on

the less common navigational paths (irregular

user onsite actions).

Issues have already impacted the end user and

your revenue.

Customers are not performance experts or

technical enough to report exactly whats going

on.

Not everyone will contact you immediately (if at

all) when they are having problems, so issues

may be missed or caught late.

If the site is down or unusable, a customer may

not know how to contact you.


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REAL USER MEASUREMENT (RUM)

Real User Measurement (RUM) tracks web performance from the browser using JavaScript embedded on the webpage. The solution measures the performance of the pages as experienced by the end users. Therefore, the performance data collected is impacted not only by your infrastructure, third parties, and CDNs, but it includes factors outside your control like the end users device, internet connection, and others.


Measures the webpages performance as

experienced by the end users.

Measures the performance of all pages

accessed by end users.

Gives a picture of user experience across users,

geographies, and devices.

Determines if code changes or

architectural/infrastructure changes had the

desired efforts or cause errors and/or

performance degradations.

Correlates performance data to user

engagement and/or revenue metrics.

Cannot detect or measure downtime or where it

occurred (DNS, TCP Connection, Server, etc.)

Can miss performance problems during light or

no traffic time periods.

Cannot benchmark website performance

against competition.

No screenshots, filmstrips, Ping, Traceroute.

Performance numbers driven by users in

particular geographies and time zones

Navigation Timing not supported in all

browsers.

Geo-IP data is not 100% accurate.


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APPLICATION MONITORING

Application Monitoring allows you to monitor the health, availability and performance of your applications and underlying infrastructure from within the datacenter. Application Monitoring is done primarily via deployed agents but there are different collection mechanisms, including Java byte code manipulation techniques, real-time transaction tracing, HTTP appliances, network packet sniffers, and others.


Provides deep visibility into application

performance down to a specific fault line of

code, which aids with triage and

troubleshooting.

Gives a complete understanding of internal

infrastructure performance and resource

utilization; a must for proper capacity planning.

Lack of visibility on the performance

experienced by end users.

Lack of visibility into third party components

and services.

Cannot benchmark your web performance

with competition.

Some application monitors are intrusive and

not suited for production environments.

Very costly pricing model for enterprises with

hundreds of servers.


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SYNTHETIC MONITORING

Synthetic Web Monitoring proactively monitors your website 24/7/365 from specific geographies and ISPs. It relies on software-based agents (backbone, last mile, wireless and private nodes) distributed throughout the world in a clean lab setting to simulate user experience. Synthetic testing measures and validates key business processes and functions in your website (shopping carts, CRM record retrieval, web lead registrations, conversion goals, etc.). Synthetic agents alert on availability and performance issues at the first sign of trouble.


Continuously monitors your website from a set

number of locations, 24/7, even when no users

are on the site.

Reduces external noise by testing from

backbone ISPs.

Lab environment can be used for SLA

management and verification.

Detects early performance issue signs.

Provides full insight on all requests.

Captures screenshots and headers for further

troubleshooting.

Benchmarks performance against

competition.

Lack of visibility into the experience of actual

end users visiting the site.

Have to correlate performance with

engagement and revenue metrics from RUM

or Web Analytics tools.

Can miss performance problems for less

visited webpages, not considered on your

monitoring plans.

Limited geography and ISP locations.

May become costly to monitor every webpage

and navigation path.


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CHOOSING THE RIGHT MONITORING STRATEGY All companies should monitor their social feeds; being responsive, informative, and timely is the best way to deal with unhappy customers experiencing performance issues. That said, catching and resolving errors before your users take to social with verbal pitchforks requires a more comprehensive monitoring strategy. Weve laid out the various monitoring

options (RUM, Application, and Synthetic); how do you decide which ones to use?

WHICH TOOL IS RIGHT FOR ME?

While RUM is beneficial to get broad-spectrum metrics and real user data, inconsistencies between users and user groups can skew data. For example, there can be many permutations between user environments (location, device, OS, browser, connection speed, etc.) and too small of a population size per environment to draw significant conclusions from the data. On the other hand, too large of a user group can cause the holistic data to be weighted toward that population.

Application Monitoring is very helpful in detecting, debugging, and troubleshooting the root cause of the problem. However, it can only detect issues within your web infrastructure, and cannot detect issues with DNS, ISP Providers, CDNs, and third parties.


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The biggest issue with RUM and Application Monitoring, or any passive monitoring solution, is that you cannot determine if there is an outage outside of the application/website layer (where the data is being collected). Additionally, if there is no traffic to the site or if a user cannot interact with the page, then passive monitoring solutions do not collect any data, so there is a chance that you miss substantial performance issues. Always remember that any performance issues you detect with these solutions means the problem has already impacted the end user.

For a complete approach to Web Performance and User Experience Optimization, using Application, RUM, and Synthetic is highly recommended.

Application Monitoring lets you troubleshoot and debug issues at the code level when they occur within your infrastructure. RUM gives you the real-time user insight needed to improve the user experience from all locations, and on most devices and browsers. Synthetic monitoring controls the variables that impact the experience of individual users. This allows you to run calibrated tests and collect performance data from any location to run analysis, spot trends, benchmark against competitors and detect early signs of performance degradations before users are impacted.


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WHY YOU MUST HAVE SYNTHETIC MONITORING IN YOUR MIX

You might be using Application Monitoring and RUM and think that is sufficient monitoring for your website or web application. However, when you explore the benefits of Synthetic monitoring, youll understand why it

needs to be a part of your monitoring strategy.

Additional benefits of Synthetic monitoring include:

1. Enhanced Brand ProtectionBe the first to know there is a problem so you can react and resolve issues faster (reroute

traffic, temporarily remove widgets, give updates on Social Media, etc.)

2. Lower Costs and Boosted Internal ProductivitySpend less time troubleshooting and dealing with frustrated users. Identify early

performance/availability degradations, before the call center gets flooded.

3. SLA ComplianceHold your technology partners to their SLAs and ensure you are meeting internal goals.

4. Discovery and Measurement of Optimization OpportunitiesFind new areas for web optimization to increase user satisfaction and conversion rates.

Test and deploy new technology with confidence they will have an impact on end user

experience.

5. Competitive IntelligenceBenchmark competitors and industry peers to define market-leading performance goals.


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MONITORING CHECKLIST TO GET YOU GOING

Identify key business functions and mission-critical transactions to test and monitor Examples: Web registration forms, shopping carts, database record retrieval,

CDNs, DNS, etc.

Identify worldwide monitoring locations You should take key factors such as which countries your customers are currently

coming from, upcoming marketing campaigns or new geo-targeted expansion

plans into consideration.

Decide which websites and networks you will test Use Google or other web analytics reports to baseline your current users, so you

can verify your website performs properly for top revenue generating customers.

Identify the weak links on a webpagewhat makes it unusable? Examples: Broken images, ads not displaying, broken checkout process, hanging

page, hard failure, etc.

Define monitoring frequency and alerting policies Decide what type of problems will trigger an alert (internal components only,

specific hosts, third party violations, etc.) and assign ownership to whom will

receive which alerts. Test crucial functions more frequently.


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ABOUT CATCHPOINT

Founded in 2008 by four DoubleClick / Google executives with a passion for speed, reliability and overall better online experiences, Catchpoint has now become the most innovative provider of web performance testing and monitoring solutions. Catchpoints acclaimed Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Measurement (RUM) tools empower top Internet companies like Priceline, Comcast, EdgeCast, Dyn, Business Insider, Ask.com, and Wayfair to truly understand and improve their user experience with clear visibility into complex, distributed online systems.

Clients across every major industry have achieved the following results with Catchpoint:

90% reduction of false alerts and associated IT cost

11.8x faster web response time

8x faster triage time

Troubleshooting reduced from hours to minutes

99% of problems identified & solved before their customers were impacted


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REFERENCES 1 http://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cost-amazon-16-billion-sales 2 http://www.akamai.com/4seconds 3 http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2009/press_091409.html 4http://blog.radware.com/applicationdelivery/applicationaccelerationoptimization/2013/05/case-study-page-load-time-conversions/ 5http://blog.radware.com/applicationdelivery/applicationaccelerationoptimization/2013/10/case-study-slow-load-times-shopping-cart-abandonment/ 6 http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2013/06/26/velocity-2013-user-experience-real-user-measurement-mobile-performance/ 7 http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/the-road-to-a-universal-mobile-web-experience#axzz2yJY7ZAd3 8 http://www.aberdeen.com/aberdeen-library/5136/RA-performance-web-application.aspx 9 http://alliedtelesis.co.uk/p-5190.html 10 http://returnonbehavior.com/2010/10/50-facts-about-customer-experience-for-2011/ 11 http://blog.kissmetrics.com/speed-is-a-killer/ 12 http://minus.com/msM8y8nyh/2e 13 http://www.stubbornella.org/content/category/general/geek/performance-geek-general/


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