Industry Focus:

Creating Sites That Sizzle: An Overview of Web Performance Monitoring

Why wait? If one site doesn’t deliver what you need when you need it, there’s a dozen — or a hundred — more queued up to serve you. Today’s Internet user is looking to make a purchase, conduct business, and get information now, not five seconds from now and certainly not ten. And increasingly, they expect a “rich” experience wherever they are online. Performance is a critical Web site success driver with real bottom-line ramifications; and an accurate, ongoing perspective on site performance is key to creating an experience that will satisfy users. Keynote experts offer insights into creating a high-performance process to monitor web performance.

How many seconds does it take to lose a shopper to a competitor’s site? How long will a business user wait for Javascript to execute so she can see the data she’s searching for? How many times will a user tolerate delays in downloading a bank transaction, or registering a bid, or completing a form, before they abandon the site?

The cost of poor site performance is not just lost visitors, it’s lost money. In a recent survey, nearly three-quarters of Internet retailers correlate poor site performance with lost revenue, and more than half with lost traffic.¹

Just a few short years ago, evaluating website performance was a fairly simple affair. “How fast did the page load?” was often the first and last question that needed to be asked. User expectations were far lower, and patience much higher, when the experience of accessing information or making a purchase online was new and different and amazingly convenient.

Today, however, user expectations are stratospherically higher. With the Internet now tightly woven into the fabric of everyday life, and a multitude of Web sites available to satisfy any given need or desire, users expect not only virtually instant page-loads, but fast and flawless execution of transactions and enhanced functionality that delivers a “rich” site experience. In the intense competition to attract and keep site visitors, web performance is now a critical business driver for site success.