Your site’s performance is important to Google
Poor performance can now degrade your business in an even more real and meaningful way. Recent changes by Google will allow site performance to affect whether traffic is driven to your site. This places a new urgency on the ability to accurately measure performance in terms of the end user.
Recently, the Mashable blog reported on a decision by Google to add performance as another deciding factor in how they rank their search results. This marks a significant milestone in which performance will affect your site’s ability to attract visitors. Essentially, the faster sites will receive more attention. By taking this action, Google hopes to shine a spotlight on performance and drive better overall development practices. I have no doubt that this is a direct result of Steve Souders‘ move to Google from Yahoo, where he had been busy leading the YUI best practices effort that produced YSlow. Since that time, Google has become much more of an advocate for web performance. Here’s a direct quote from their blog that sums up their current perspective:
“We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed … not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.”
Essentially, Google has now made performance an important factor in driving business to your site. At the same time, performance is one of the hardest things to accurately and properly measure for web-based traffic. Google suggests a number of very good tools, most of which run inside your browser. These tools look at performance in terms of the end user, which is now a recognized best practice. However, they only measure the performance of your site while you are actively browsing it. They won’t tell you anything about how your site performs for others or how it performs during the other 99% of the time when you are not personally measuring it with your browser. Synthetic testing suffers from the same drawbacks.
More importantly, these approaches miss the elusive problems that affect specific people or that occur at specific times. Nor will they find the problems that only occur under specific circumstances. The fact is, these elusive issues are the most common. They are the ones that plague every web site administrator because they are hard to find and nearly impossible to reproduce. They eat up days of investigation time and are the biggest destroyer of public confidence in your site. To find these problems, you need to be watching ALL traffic on your site every second of every day. Moreover, you must do so while maintaining the end user perspective.
There are very few solutions out there that can do this effectively. Consequently, we are justifiably proud of our TrueSight product line and it’s ability to tackle this very difficult problem. Once installed in your data center behind your firewall, TrueSight is able to monitor all traffic from your load balancer all the way back to your database and 3rd party tiers – from web request right down to code, SOA and SQL calls. We auto-discover new applications and web servers as they are deployed without any need for additional configuration. Moreover, our monitoring solution continues to perform its duties, even as you gradually virtualize your infrastructure or integrate back-end cloud services.
In fact, using a unique ground-breaking integration, we can provide full visibility of any deployments using Akamai’s Application Delivery Assurance services, like acceleration or caching. Our unique relationship with Akamai has also recently led to the first co-developed solution that is being offered directly from Akamai for managing their services.
Furthermore, our technology is capable of providing accurate overall performance measurements for mashups or hybrid solutions.
If you have blind spots in your performance monitoring, you will not be protected from the negative consequences of this new trend. If you lack insight on your end users’ actual experience on your site, you should seriously start planning to acquire it.
