Enhance Web Performance with Best practices: Methodology & Modeling

To really understand how your website performance will hold up—or not—under holiday stress, and to understand what the experience will be like for users, use an arrival rate methodology and factor in behavior models for the many, many types of users and tasks your site will serve.

Behavior modeling results in numerous permutations (often thousands) combining these variables:

• Familiarity:  experienced users vs. newcomers
• Connection speed:  super-fast FIOS vs. super-slow mobile device, and everything in between
• Latency tolerance:  patience of users with slow site response
• Interaction speed:  complexity of the page to navigate, and attention level of the user
• Tenacity:  willingness of users to stick with a task through completion

Test in the real world—all of it.

To know how your site will perform for users dispersed across the country or the world, load testing must be done over the Internet, from the same geographic locations as your users, not from behind the firewall.  There’s simply no way to simulate the vagaries of Internet backbones, third-party content feeds, CDN performance, and signal transmission through the critical last mile—unless you are at the end of that mile, with a browser.

With testing agents dispersed where your users are, you get an accurate picture of variations in performance, and overcome the danger of looking at averages.  An average page-load time of three or four seconds may seem OK, but that kind of average could mean your page is loading in one second for someone in New York, but taking six or more seconds for someone in Chicago.  And that is not likely to be acceptable.  The solution is to test from multiple, geographically dispersed locations, look at the data, and address any local or regional bottlenecks.

The holiday shopping season is the culmination of many hard hours of work for the IT/Web department.  And no matter how well things are planned, no matter how rigorously everything is tested, there’s always the chance that the unexpected will happen and something will go wrong.  So it makes good sense to have technical personnel on hand and on call during all the critical shopping periods to handle any emergencies, and to have extra computing capacity standing by just in case it’s needed.

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Monitoring Web Pages & 3rd Party Content

If you are the owner of the Web site, there are at least two ways to improve overall site performance. One is to optimize the Web site itself for each widget so that those widgets running on the page will be more efficient, a method that is not cost-efficient. The other, more cost-effective option is to use continuous and focused performance monitoring of your Web site. Breaking down performance by time and by component category allows you to pinpoint the components that adversely impact Web site performance.

The benefits of web page monitoing and third-party components are significant indeed. First, operations can target these issues quickly and efficiently, which can reduce potential downtime and loss of revenue. This metric, known as Mean Time to Identification, can be tracked. Second, business unit managers can track the performance of all content, both internal and external, which can establish SLA accountability with the third-party vendors, saving money on lost downtime or the cost of rebates. Another benefit is the accountability that can also be established internally on components and content that has been developed on your site. Third, development and QA teams can save money by tracking these issues in real time. Modifications to code on the Web site or to the widget have been known to adversely affect a previously well-performing Web site, and monitoring can nip these issues in the bud, saving time and therefore money. Finally, the user experience can suffer due to bad website performance. This can cause a loss of viewers, both because of direct experience and by word of mouth. This impact can be potentially devastating to the bottom line.

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Web Performance Varies by Geography and Network

Unlike Web content downloads to desktops, mobile downloads can vary dramatically based on time of day, network operator used, and geographic location. For example, a mobile Website can take twice as long to download in San Francisco as compared to another operator in New York, London, or Tokyo. If a content-monitoring strategy does not include monitoring web content from various geographic locations, it is impossible to know what the end users are experiencing.

In the Web world, both the user interface and the delivery mechanism have been standardized for years, keeping mobile browser compatibility in mind. However, mobile content must be routed to the user through an operator network, and additional operator specific content may be added during the download. Also, different devices render content differently, so when the Web server detects a specific device type it may choose to send a variant of the generic content to the requesting device.

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Mobile Monitoring Strategies

The mobile environment does not consist of a single delivery system to a standardized device interface. Therefore, different strategies need to be deployed to monitor different types of content. Both emulated devices and real devices are employed for mobile monitoring, and a review of both content delivery and monitoring objectives will help determine when each should be used.

Real device monitoring is the only choice. For example, the growing popularity of smartphones has led to a growing market for native applications residing on a device.

However, many classes of applications and services that can be monitored using device emulation.Emulated device monitoring is well suited for websites and services that are accessible by a broad range of mobile devices. These devices range from simple-feature phones to sophisticated smartphones. Many Websites and services require only a browser to render the page and do not depend on the operating system of the device (for example,SMS)

Read more on Mobile Monitoring Strategies and Mobile Browser compatibility