From expecting your website to load in milliseconds to constantly judging your website aesthetics, today’s 21st century e-commerce customers have exceedingly high expectations and it’s up to you to have the right website monitoring solution in place to manage end user experience and address these demands.
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.
Black Thursday Eve, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, are here and web sales are expected to increase up to 18% this holiday shopping season compared to 2011, according to ComScore. Last year’s online retail holiday sales were $37.2 billion. Unfortunately, some website owners will discover that their website’s speed and performance does not meet customer expectations and they’ll miss out on their piece of the web sale pie.
So, with pressure on e-commerce websites to perform, web operation personnel are tasked to make websites look great and handle the stress points of added holiday traffic. Moreover, 2011-2012 has seen an explosion in the use third-party apps such as widgets, social media buttons, and third party icons that impact website speed and performance.
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.
While at Velocity Conference 2012, Dotcom-Monitor is providing expert feedback on website performance and conducting live worldwide website performance tests. Dotcom-Monitor will also be demonstrating its exclusive Picture Match monitoring technology, which quickly automates the most complex monitoring scripts using its proprietary EveryStep Recorder tool.
The ability to quickly set-up effective monitoring is important for the same reason a fast website is important to website users – basically, goal-oriented people value their time. With that in mind, the EveryStep Recorder tool provides the fastest automation of complex website scripting of website monitoring available.
We ran a website speed test on the websites covering the Euro 2012 games. See how the top media sites ranked in this website speed Infographic.
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