Discover Something New That You've Never Seen Before with Synthetic Monitoring

Hidden Speed, Performance, and Availability Factors Impacting Your Website

This may not be a typical synthetic monitoring article, filled with technical details, feature descriptions, and diagrams. This article will focus on Two “unknowns”: Where the website speed is really hiding and where customer’s frustration lives on the website.

The biggest concern is this: a website’s performance affects a company’s online business directly impacting revenue/conversions. Specifically, most companies don’t know exactly what their page speed to conversion metric looks like, but many have a current/constant initiative to improve page speed. Check out our Business Analytics blog if you are interested in finding the optimal speed for the best business outcome: https://blog.bluetriangle.com/web-page-optimization/

After the IT department has done everything they can to make the website faster, after all the optimizations have been made, it may seem like there is nothing left to do. Let’s explore this for a moment.

Many companies start by analyzing where customers are leaving the website. This is usually accomplished by searching on a broken endpoint and then working backwards on a customer journey map to try to find these places within the site. This leads to some insights into where there is friction in the customer journey. As a follow up to this discovery, IT Groups review that page’s waterfall or Gantt chart that shows the content loading speed for the customer’s exit point. This typically leads to finding a few things in that chart to work on, an optimization here and there. We have all seen these waterfall charts:

There is something that resides in a waterfall chart that does not receive much attention: empty space (the circles of nothing in the above chart). These gaps are ignored while optimizing a website, and as it turns out, they are not filled with nothing. This is where customer frustration lives. This is where rage clicks live. This is where a website can get poor Core Web Vitals scores that lead to lower SEO rankings and site traffic. This is where HIDDEN SPEED OPPORTUNITIES LIVE. There is a solution that shows you what actually fills these spaces.

This is a Synthetic Function Tracing chart from Blue Triangle Technologies. Any JavaScript function lasting over 50ms is considered long running and given that these functions run single threaded in the browser, long running JS functions will block other key processes like mouse, scroll, button, and other activities that have JavaScript connected to it. With this chart, it is easy to identify the long running JavaScript functions that are loading onto the website and slowing down the page.

The JavaScript Function Tracing chart details the long running JS functions and breaks down the exact functions that are running slowly. It is a great visual representation of the items that are taking too long to load and causing those gaps on the Blue Triangle Aggregate Waterfall Chart (Blue Triangle aggregates all First- and Third- party data!). Without this information, it would be difficult to determine how to prioritize the load sequence to fully address improvements to Core Web Vitals and best optimize a website’s Time to Interactive. Slower pages lead to lower conversions, higher bounces, lower pages per session and lower average order value. Remember, speed = revenue!

Along similar “time is money” lines, Blue Triangle’s Synthetic Monitoring product offers a range of functionality that provides visibility into a website’s performance. To read more, download Blue Triangle’s Synthetic Monitoring Whitepaper that discusses our exclusive Tag & Content Governance, Network Health Checks, Data Science, Digital Experience Overview, and other Blue Triangle Synthetic Monitoring product features!

Download your copy of the Synthetic Monitoring Whitepaper today!