An unreliable or poorly performing website can damage brand reputation and customer relationships - and, for ecommerce sites, can dramatically reduce your visitor numbers, conversions and basket sizes.

The download speed of your site matters. There is now a recognised three second rule: 57% of online shoppers will wait three seconds or less before abandoning the site. Site Confidence’s current “benchmark” for performance is that a normal un-cached web page should begin to display to the user (what’s called “initial render”) after 750ms and be fully downloaded and ready for the user interaction after 3 seconds maximum.

Site Confidence’s 24x7 website monitoring checks your site at frequent and regular intervals from your customers’ perspective to alert you to live issues and provide metrics that help you to improve the technical performance of your website.

Core to Site Confidence’s website performance monitoring is our unique testing methodology and accurate, targeted alerting, delivering the most reliable and consistent data on website performance available:

• External perspective: All our website testing is done from an external perspective. We test from outside your firewall, gaining the same view of your website’s performance as a real user would. This is a vital complement to typical internal monitoring systems that may fail to identify all of the issues that users experience.
• Latest browser emulation: The technology we use to do the testing is based on latest generation browser emulation. This means your system will view us as just another user browsing the web site. We are able to get the whole page as delivered to real end users, including full CSS and JavaScript parsing and execution.
• Consistent, repeatable testing: Each test is throttled to simulate the end user connection speed. This means a realistic and consistent view of web site speed can be gained without the interference of ISP connectivity over which you have no control. The testing is also conducted from multiple UK data centres through ‘tier 1’ connections, so results are not affected by individual ISP slowdowns or fluctuations in exchange performance.
• Constant, accurate testing: We test 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at a frequency of your choice starting as low as every minute. This gives you a very accurate view of speed and availability for any time period. Our unique double testing methodology ensures accurate, relevant alerts.

We can monitor anything you choose to test on your site. Anything a customer can visit, we can test. We can also monitor any web-based application that you can give us access to through your firewall. This includes:

• Web pages: Our tailored services give an insight into the website speed and availability that end users actually experience when downloading pages from your website. We’ll tell you how consistently your website performs with detailed speed analysis showing performance variations over time - enabling you to analyse how stability is affected by time of day or week or load on your servers.
• User journeys: You can monitor any multi-step user journeys through your website. Whether it is booking a holiday, purchasing insurance, or even applying for a job, Site Confidence can ensure your key processes are functioning in a proper and timely manner. Any application a user can use on your site, we can monitor. As our scripts are all built by our expert engineers, they can achieve a higher level of robustness and complexity than anything a script recorder can achieve. Furthermore many ‘script level’ controls can be added to enhance the functionality of our user journey monitoring.

We also monitor a variety of competitor sites and industry-leading comparators for our customers. See next section.

Many of our customers want to benchmark their own performance against others in the industry. We therefore offer:

• Competitor site monitoring: You nominate the competitor websites for site availability and download speed monitoring. We will provide reporting on your performance versus these competitors.
• eKPIs and Benchmarks: the performance data the business needs without the detail of the operational monitoring. As well as monitoring your home pages for speed and availability, Site Confidence’s eKPIs package allows you to monitor your competitors’ websites, so you can see how you compare, and to monitor Google, letting you know straight away if you’ve slipped off the front page for your target search term – and if your closest competitor leapfrogs you in the rankings. To save you time, a monthly report, showing you how the biggest names in your sector are performing online, is delivered straight to your inbox according to the schedule you nominate.

Even if you don’t deliberately market abroad, most businesses are receiving more and more traffic from around the world. If your web stats tell you this traffic is significant, it is important to maintain the quality of service for your users on the other side of the globe.

Whilst there is little that can be done in the immediate term about the transcontinental network performance that slows down your site, there comes a moment when strategic decisions regarding CDNs, local hosting or customised sites need to be made.

In common with Site Confidence’s monitoring philosophy, our international monitoring gives you the right information to inform those decisions. By deploying strategic international monitoring locations around the globe and gathering performance trend data, we can help inform those decisions and provide the assurance that you are delivering the best possible service to your international users.