Web Performance

End Bad Experiences!
Improving Web Performance with Better Monitoring
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
MEETING AND EXCEEDING USER

EXPECTATIONS DRIVES MORE BUSINESS!
Site speed affects

your brand image
80% 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
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.
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
Third party tag removed (errors stopped), then reinstalled
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.
10
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.
Large gap in script loading due to coding error

impacts load
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
Great performance in Phoenix.your smallest market
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.
11
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.
Servers cant handle traffic spike from promotion
WEBSITE FRONTEND 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
12
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.
13
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 and
Infrastructure
4. Synthetic Web Performance Monitoring Active Monitoring
14
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
Issues have already impacted the end user and
systems already existing.
Direct interaction with customers.

Ability to discover performance edge cases on
the less common navigational paths (irregular
user onsite actions).
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.
15
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.
BENEFITS
LIMITATIONS
Measures the webpages performance as
Cannot detect or measure downtime or where it
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.
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.
16
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.
BENEFITS
LIMITATIONS
Provides deep visibility into application
Lack of visibility on the performance
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.
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.
17
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.
BENEFITS
LIMITATIONS
Continuously monitors your website from a set
Lack of visibility into the experience of actual
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.
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.
18
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.
19
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 realtime 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.
20
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 Protection

Be 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 Productivity

Spend less time troubleshooting and dealing with frustrated users. Identify early
performance/availability degradations, before the call center gets flooded.
3. SLA Compliance
Hold your technology partners to their SLAs and ensure you are meeting internal goals.
4. Discovery and Measurement of Optimization Opportunities

Find 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 Intelligence
Benchmark competitors and industry peers to define market-leading performance goals.
21
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.
22
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
23
REFERENCES
http://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cost-amazon-16-billionsales
2
http://www.akamai.com/4seconds
3
http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2009/press_091409.html
4
http://blog.radware.com/applicationdelivery/applicationaccelerationoptimization/2013/
05/case-study-page-load-time-conversions/
5
http://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-realuser-measurement-mobile-performance/
7
http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/the-road-to-a-universal-mobile-webexperience#axzz2yJY7ZAd3
8
http://www.aberdeen.com/aberdeen-library/5136/RA-performance-webapplication.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-geekgeneral/
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End Bad Experiences!

Improving Web Performance with Better Monitoring

End Bad Experiences!

Improving Web Performance with Better Monitoring

HAS THIS EVER

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

SHARE THE FACTS: CUSTOMERS ARE

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

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

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

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

NOT MEETING ONLINE USER

Additional Marketing Costs

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

MEETING AND EXCEEDING USER

Site speed affects

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

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

IDENTIFYING THE CAUSES

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

RELIANCE ON THIRD PARTY SERVICES

Websites are a complex

Third party tag removed (errors stopped), then reinstalled

performance and could bring

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

CHANGE AND HUMAN ERROR

Large gap in script loading due to coding error

NETWORK AND LOCATIONS

Great performance in Phoenix.your smallest market

end users browse from and which networks

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

WEBSITE FRONTEND CODE

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

MEASURES TO REDUCE YOUR RISK

Solutions such as Tag Management Systems and CDN Load Balancing

If development resources are scarce for front-end performance

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

4 WEB MONITORING STRATEGIES

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

4. Synthetic Web Performance Monitoring Active Monitoring

The Ultimate Guide to:

Improving Web Performance with Monitoring

HELP DESK, TECH SUPPORT, &

No added cost with support and help desk

Issues have already impacted the end user and

systems already existing.

Direct interaction with customers.

Customers are not performance experts or

Not everyone will contact you immediately (if at

If the site is down or unusable, a customer may

The Ultimate Guide to: