Compelling content, reliability and performance lend themselves to an excellent overall user experience and the kind of metrics Web workers like, such as increased time-on-site, higher click-through rates and more. If a site is slow, however, users won't stick around to view (let alone interact with) content or ads. And, as we know, successful sites rely on ads and eyeballs.
Microsoft's Bing did a study and found that a one second page delay cuts ad revenue per user by 2.8 percent. Add to that the proliferation of platforms for online viewing, PCs, tablets, smartphones , and the methods and challenges for measuring the true user experience get more complex. Since people want to have access from anywhere, the challenge becomes how to test and scale these different platforms for a consistent and responsive user experience.
Consider the breadth and scale of many consumer sites today (e.g. the amount of content, the frequency of updates, and the use of graphics and video). Then add to that the additional third-party applications that might also be part of the experience, such as embedded players, Facebook, comments sections, outbound links, etc. With that said, many website owners already have good Web performance monitoring tools in place, but some recent developments provide even better ways to measure the real viewer experience.
A good analogy is that of flying measurements. One of the critical measures is the airspeed indicator, which measures the plane's speed through the air. It's a critical metric, which tells the pilot whether the plane has enough air over its wings to fly. But unlike the speedometer, it won't tell you exactly how fast it's going. That's groundspeed, which is measured differently. Yet, both are needed to pilot a plane correctly.
And so it is for website performance. For years, websites have been "piloted" using airspeed only.
Most websites today use monitoring services that provide an external perspective of performance by measuring network latency. Testing systems located in datacenters all over the world measure the amount of time it takes to download content from the company's website. This continuously robotic sampling of a website's responsiveness can tell website owners a lot about how well their sites are delivering content, but it doesn't represent how well a user's Web browser is actually assembling that content or how the user interacts with it.
But there are new industry standards and technologies that reveal performance more holistically , based on users' true experiences. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and major browser organizations recently agreed upon the Navigation Timing standard for measuring speed from the browser client.
"The browser itself saves timestamps from various events in the process of navigating to a page, including timestamps for the starting and ending of phases," said Internet Explorer Program Manager Jatinder Mann, who is in the W3C working group.
Now implemented in the current versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox, the Navigation Timing standard helps measure:
These are important events in a page's lifecycle because customer expectations of a website's performance continue to increase. In 2006, studies found that users were willing to wait four seconds while a page loaded before they would abandon a site. By 2009, that time had dropped to two seconds, and users exited a site in droves at the three-second mark. Today, Microsoft reports that a miniscule difference of 250 milliseconds (that's one-quarter of a second; if you just blinked, that took longer) is enough to give one site a competitive advantage over another.
QUICK HIT!Web Performance in Focus
Keynote's News Performance Index, which measures and benchmarks the home page performance of the top general media and financial news sites, illustrates just how significant the differences are in performance across these destinations in terms of user experience. For example, the overall time it takes to render and use the Fox Business home page is nearly 37 percent longer than that of the Forbes home page. However, the amount of delay a user experiences before the Fox page begins rendering is 80 percent faster than Forbes.