Real-Time Performance Monitoring: Tools and Techniques

For the stable operation of a website, its performance is extremely important. Productivity is a complex concept. This includes page loading speed, interactive design, and ease of use of the resource. When users visit a site, they primarily evaluate the site’s performance. And it is precisely low performance that can provoke customers to leave the resource and go to competitors. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this element. Therefore, you need to monitor the performance of your website regularly in order to spot problems in time and quickly resolve problems. There are various tools and methods available online for this purpose.

Website performance value

The first thing that a user sees when visiting a site is its performance. It forms a good opinion about the web resource and speaks of its reliability and effectiveness. Site performance is characterized by the following indicators: load time, rendering time, time to byte (TTFB)

Thanks to site performance you can achieve:

• High user ranking. Of course, a slow website is of no interest to anyone. People will quickly leave such a site, and such a resource will only be remembered from the negative side.
• User involvement. Performance directly affects how website visitors interact with the web platform. The faster the site, the more users want to stay on it longer.
• The first positions in the ranking. High performance directly affects the site's visibility in search engines.
• High conversion and level of sales. Website performance metrics directly affect conversion rates. It is this advantage of fast page loading that encourages users to make purchases online. At the same time, even a slight decrease in speed can affect the decision of a potential buyer.
• Brand promotion. Effective website performance helps create a brand image and make a good impression about the company.

Productivity monitoring tools

Popular tools for monitoring and analyzing website performance include the online services Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, WebPageTest, GTmetrix, and Pingdom. Let's look at the functionality of each in more detail.

Pingdom

It is one of the popular online performance monitoring services. In fact, it is a special test that can be used to simulate the actions of real site visitors. The program generates reports that display page loading times, provides values for key performance metrics, and also sends Pingdom notifications about possible problems with the operation of the web resource.

Google PageSpeed Insights

A universal and even free service. It can be easily configured to work with both a website and any mobile application. Google PageSpeed Insights analyzes the speed of a website and a number of other performance characteristics. Based on the results, it provides a report on the monitoring carried out.

Lighthouse

This is a more in-depth tool. Its main difference is open source. Requires professional installation. Allows you to conduct a wide audit of site performance. It shows page loading speed and site availability. The report provided by Lighthouse helps you find shortcomings and easily fix problems.

GTmetrix

Another online service that allows you to evaluate the page loading speed of a site and other performance indicators. GTmetrix helps not only to identify the reason for the slow operation of the site, but also provides options for solving the problem. It's also convenient in that it saves the history of web resource performance reports.

The importance of monitoring website performance

If the site is slow, this affects its popularity and performance, leads to a decrease in sales, and increases the payback period. That is why it is important to monitor such problems and timely optimize the performance of a web resource.

Performance monitoring is an ongoing process and must be consistent and effective. The above discussed convenient and useful tools for monitoring and improving website performance. You can choose any tool that best suits its functionality, cost, and ease of use.