Importance Of Website Load Time

An average Web site takes 2– 3 seconds to load. According to Apdex.org, as the load time increases to 4–6 seconds, users start to get frustrated. The level of frustration and the probability of switching to another web site increases if the load time goes beyond 6 seconds. This is where web load testing comes into play and is a very important part of website monitoring.

Many sites do not directly generate revenue, unlike a retail site or travel site, but instead focus on customer service. Sites like credit card, banking, and insurance sites reduce costs, cross-sell products, and help increase customer loyalty by servicing customers online. Website transaction monitoring plays an important role here and is much needed. A poor experience directly translates into increased calls to the call center and a decrease in overall customer satisfaction.  

In the case of online trading sites, online performance is extremely critical. A delay of seconds carries the risk of huge trading losses, and an equally large litigation and regulatory risk. Not only does a technical issue (poor performance, outages, and errors) impact the direct customer or user, it can also have ripple effects.

Website Performance - Quick Problem Detection and Triage

Triage is the process of performing just enough diagnosis to select the appropriate support team and convince them that the problem is truly theirs to solve. An effective triage system eliminates finger-pointing among the support groups and the resulting loss of valuable time. That time savings, repeated for each failure, can easily amount to many hours per month -- time that can be worth tens of thousands of dollars or more, in lost sales, performance penalties, and customer dissatisfaction.  If it takes too long, or involves complex, difficult-to-use tools, or delivers questionable results, it will not be usable in a production environment. Support teams won't use it, or they won't trust the results, and the classic finger-pointing exercises will reappear.

Attempting a diagnosis with general-purpose tools, although possible in some cases, almost always increases the total time spent repairing the problem. It's far better to get the right team involved quickly with the right set of website monitoring services, instead of wasting large amounts of time trying to do a complete diagnosis without the best tools.

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Website Performance Monitoring: Quick Problem Detection and Triage

Triage is the process of performing just enough diagnosis to select the appropriate support team and convince them that the problem is truly theirs to solve. An effective triage system eliminates finger-pointing among the support groups and the resulting loss of valuable time. That time savings, repeated for each failure, can easily amount to many hours per month -- time that can be worth tens of thousands of dollars or more, in lost sales, performance penalties, and customer dissatisfaction. Triage works well if it can be performed quickly and reliably, so that its results are available almost immediately and so that the support teams trust those results. If it takes too long, or involves complex, difficult-to-use tools, or delivers questionable results, it will not be usable in a production environment. Support teams won't use it, or they won't trust the results, and the classic finger-pointing exercises will reappear.

Attempting a diagnosis with general-purpose tools, although possible in some cases, almost always increases the total time spent repairing the problem. It's far better to get the right team involved quickly with the right set of website monitoring services, instead of wasting large amounts of time trying to do a complete diagnosis without the best tools.

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Web 2.0 Performance for End Users

The proliferation of rich media content that characterizes Web 2.0 environments makes the Internet experience dazzling for customers. At the same time, it’s challenging for IT deployment and operations staff, who need to figure out how to assess and manage the performance impact of asynchronous JavaScript and XML communications (AJAX), Web application hybrids (mashups), and standalone technologies, such as Adobe Flash, on applications and transactions. Services for load testing and measuring the performance of Web sites Application Perspective 5.0 and Transaction Perspective 8.0 have been enhanced to allow for comprehensive website monitoring and testing of AJAX-based and other Web 2.0 applications.

Companies strive to manage and improve the online customer experience, but they essentially lack visibility into end-users’ interactions with video, Flash, AJAX, and mashups. Companies are investing large amounts of capital in improving online experiences—adding movie clips, adjusting ease-of-use through navigation, etc. and the challenge is to know whether or not these investments are helping to retain customers and improve the users’ ability to do business with the company.

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Prerequisites For Transaction Monitoring

There are some essential components that need to be taken care of while selecting your website monitoring service. You will need to adopt the user’s perspective. The User’s experience depends on a number of elements, namely third party advertising, content distribution networks, content providers, ISPs, etc. which are part of the complex system.

The entire transaction needs to be monitored. This could include just submitting a request or including a much larger transaction of buying some merchandise. The user might go to many pages where he might perform a number of transactions. With just the knowledge of a failed transaction will not help, a root cause analysis will only bail you out.

By reducing the complexity and instilling credibility, the transaction monitoring solution should simplify IT tasks. Being user friendly is another necessity in crunch pressure situations. Monitoring solutions should not be too difficult to use. The solution needs to be accurate identifying problems quickly by providing detailed, end-to-end transaction information.

Dimensions Of Application Effectiveness

The Web continues to evolve to deliver new customer experiences and increased application utility. Web 2.0 technologies and design methods enable the creation of richer and more responsive interactions.

These technologies are more complex than the traditional ones. This complicates web performance management, imposing new requirements on web site performance monitoring and measurement tools. Measurement tools must recognize meaningful application milestones or markers that signal logical boundaries of interest for reporting, and subdivide the application’s response time accordingly.

To evaluate the success of any web application, we need to look at business performance metrics such as customer satisfaction, revenue and costs. The relative importance of these metrics may vary since they were created to serve the customers, members of the organization, or the employees. But the success of a web application needs to be judged on how effectively it achieves its goals. The conversion rate of a site mainly depends on four distinct needs: availability, responsiveness, clarity and Utility. These are your four dimensions of application effectiveness. 

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