Why Your Website is Burning Down and You Don’t Know It Yet
Website load times are going up and America’s attention span is decreasing. Your company website is slowly burning down and you’re losing money.
August 13, 2013
Website load times are going up and America’s attention span is decreasing. Your company website is slowly burning down and you’re losing money.
A customer’s experience with your website—including its speed, ease-of-use and dynamism—can make or break their decision to do business with your company. In today’s competitive market, there is little room to commit errors when it comes to your website. The key to an unmatched Internet experience for your customers, therefore, starts and ends with the quality of your site.
We compare the best web hosting companies, monitoring from around the globe to see whose website loads the fastest, indicating superior server performance. [infographic]
Is your slow website giving your customers “web stress”? Studies show 57% of online consumers will abandon a slow page after just 3 seconds.
Webpage speed, as the end-all and be-all of website monitoring performance webmetrics, breaks down when you actually consider the details of your website speed from a user’s view. And by user’s view, we mean website monitoring at the next level – an actual video that your website monitoring solution provides showing your website load in a browser.
Could a lack of Black Friday website outages in 2012 indicate a middle age for e-commerce? At this point during the holiday season of Black Friday 2012 and Cyber Monday 2012 online retail websites are more stable, but slower, and have increased in size, according to our monitoring and data we’ve seen. Moreover, these same websites are increasingly composed of a family of third-party hosted elements, that are “cooler” but are often less stable than the website itself. While 2012 didn’t see Black Friday website outages in the manner of 2011, there is an apparent e-commerce shift, perhaps indicative of a middle age.
Based on Internet Retailer magazine’s listing of the Internet Retailer 500, there are 12 Minnesota companies that ranked in the top 500 in 2011. With that in mind, Dotcom-Monitor (also a Minnesota-based company) set-up basic monitoring on these 12 top Minnesota online company homepages (run your own test here). The website monitoring gathered information on Minnesota online webpage speed, uptime/downtime, and details on the page element performance. By testing their home pages using an IE browser running every 15 minutes from nine North American locations over the course of a week, Dotcom-Monitor was able to pinpoint issues that are occurring on these Minnesota online company websites.
Company stakeholders are also carefully watching when highly publicized website crashes (such as Target’s website crash in 2011) impact Minnesota online retailers revenues and reputation with buyers. In 2012, according to Internet Retailer magazine now nearly all Minnesota online companies are monitoring their Web apps for performance. Monitoring helps these companies detect and diagnosis website errors during critical periods like the upcoming Black Thursday Eve, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday shopping season.
Election day results are in! – Well, for candidate website speed and performance, that is… We monitored the performance of presidential candidate websites from Nov. 1 to Nov 6, for speed and uptime in this year’s Romney vs Obama 2012 contest using an Internet Explorer (IE) browser from eight USA-based locations at 15-minute intervals. During that time the amount of user traffic to the websites of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney likely increased.
Campaign websites, like the campaigns themselves, have spikes and valleys similar to Romney’s popularity and the President Obama approval rating. Our review of the President Obama website and Mitt Romney website is focused on how the candidate’s balance the design of their campaign websites with the need for speed at their campaign websites.
Dotcom-Monitor recently chose 20 midsized online companies to monitor for one week from those ranked 500-600 in the Internet Retailer 2011 ranking. We focused our monitoring on a demographic that encompasses what is considered a mid-size company, not large enough to have inexhaustible budgets, and just large enough to begin considering ways to optimize web site performance. By testing their websites at a 15-minute frequency from nine North American monitoring locations for seven days using a non-caching, Internet Explorer browser we were able to pinpoint potential areas to improve and issues to avoid.
As the Nov. 6, 2012 Election Day nears the two presidential hopefuls are in a close standoff. This year, even more than in year’s past a candidate’s website play an important role in presenting the candidates views and as a fundraising conduit. Dotcom-Monitor has been tracking both candidates’ websites MittRomney.com and BarackObama.com for uptime and performance. After all, if the candidate’s website isn’t up, or isn’t performing well it neither presents the candidates views, nor raises funds. We monitored both sites in 15-minute increments from eight USA-only locations using Internet Explorer, non-cached, starting on October 26th 2:30 pm CST. We present our presidential election website performance findings to-date here on Oct. 30, 2012. We will provide updates on the websites’ performance over the next few days as the race continues to intensify.
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