Using Web Monitoring Service to Track Downtime and Improve Site Speed

While launching a website you as an owner are typically careful about its loading time. However, as times passes by it is often neglected. As you add more functions, content and work on the design, loading time keeps on increasing. Generally users care more about the speed than how you represent your site.

Moreover, page loading time is an important parameter when it comes to search engine ranking. Hence, you need to keep a watch on page loading time. Recent Google updates have given positive preference in ranking faster sites especially mobile sites. Speed is something that is being encouraged because users like fast and responsive sites.

Today, all the web users expect a site to load within 2 seconds or less than that. They abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds. It is likely that most of these users having issues with page loading time will never return to that site again. This means with a slow loading website you are losing lots of potential sales.

There are two popular measures for site speed. The first being FCP which stands for First Contentful Paint (FCP) which measures when the user gets to see some initial structure of the website and gets confidence that the site will load soon. The other measure is the DCL which stands for DOM Content Loaded (DCL). DOM stands for Document Object Model. When the initial HTML document fully gets loaded and parsed then this event is considered as DOM Content Loaded. At this time the site is still waiting for stylesheets, image and sub frames to complete loading. When the DOM content gets loaded, the visitor gets enthuses as there is traction from the website and feel confident to spend a bit longer for the full site to get loaded.

A slow performing site is not optimal even if it delivering 100% uptime. It causes inconvenience and possibly frustrates some visitors. In addition to avoiding downtime, it is important to ensure good site speed.

So, How Fast Does Your Site Load?

There are web based tools to access page speed. Search engines like Google classify sites into 3 groups – top one-third, the middle one-third and bottom one-third. Your goal should be the top one-third of websites. Remember to check site speed for both desktop and mobile version of the site.

How to Deliver Better Page Speed?

Optimizing your site and making it faster for the web users is thus a smart thing to do. There are lots of ways to trim the milliseconds from the loading time. Here we will discuss a few of the common ways.

Run Compression

You have to get your files as smallest as possible, without sacrificing the visual style or appeal. You need to work on HTML, plain text, XML, JavaScript and CSS files.

Choose The Right Hosting Option

Most of the new site owners look for the cheapest hosting option. Shared hosting is obviously the cheapest, the other two types being VPS hosting and dedicated server. With shared hosting, you need to share CPU, RAM and disk space with other sited hosted on the same server. VPS hosting is almost similar, it is only that you get a dedicated portion of the server. It is fair to begin with shared hosting, but as soon as your organization can afford it, better to upgrade.

Rendering Optimization

The website does not load until the CSS does. By nature since CSS defines how the page objects will display it prevents rendering of the site till the CSS itself loads first. For this reason it is important that the CSS files are optimized and load fast in order for the full site to be displayed quickly to the user. Same is the case with JavaScript files, they also need to be render optimized for faster site performance.

Optimize Images

Large images eat up most of the bandwidth in web. There are two ways to optimize images. You need to scale your images before you upload them, because if you scale it down after uploading browser will load the full image size. The second way is to compress them.

Additional Ways of Improving Page Speed

Along with these there are various other ways to improve page speed. You can reduce plugins, redirects and server response time.

As you work on page speed, you need to monitor it often to see how it changes over time. They will help you to keep track of your site’s speed and catch any issues early on.

In conclusion, you should intelligently combine both the web monitoring service and site speed monitoring tools to deliver a superior and faster website user experience to your visitors. When the difference in site uptime or site speed is substantial, the visitors can easily notice it.