How to Measure Your Website’s Performance

According to the Forrester Research, online shoppers expect web pages to load in two seconds - and at three seconds, if they still find the pages loading they will abandon the site. Though the two-second rule is still considered as a bench mark for many web commerce sites, the experts in the industry think that the rule is outdated. The Speed specialists from Microsoft found out new user expectations and according to them people will visit the site less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds.

From this, we can clearly say that the better the performance of the website, the better would be the user experience and customer retention to the business. As the user's expectations are increasing year by year, it is the basic responsibility of every website owner to make sure that their site's performance is up to the expected range. In order to do so, they need to constantly measure the performance of their website. In the following article you can find different aspects that need to be considered for measuring website's performance

Metrics for measuring website performance

Website uptime: Website uptime is the amount of time the website is publicly accessible and available through the Internet. Uptime of a website is usually measured in percentage. For example, if a website's uptime is 95% a year then the availability of the website is 346.75 days a year and hence the site was down (unavailable) for 18.25 days in the same year. Website's uptime can be calculated for every week, month, or year. So, in order to ensure that your website is performing well, make sure that your site has the maximum uptime.

Server response time: Server response time is the time within which the server is responding to the requests made by the users. Despite your best efforts to build a website, make it user friendly, with good web designing, if the main server is not working properly and responds slowly to the requests, then it definitely affects the performance of the site and drives the users away from the site.

While using web hosting services frequently check the response time reports which are provided by the hosting services and evaluate the performance of your website.

Page load time: Page load time refers to time the web page takes to completely load once the request has been made by the user to view or load that specific web page. Page load time is another important aspect for every e-commerce site, as high page load times result in less traffic and low customer retention.

Along with other aspects, as page load time also impacts the performance of the website, better practices need to be followed to measure as well as to make sure that the website loads quickly without delay.

Subscribe for website monitoring services: So, now as you came to know the different metrics that measure the performance of the website, you might have understood the importance of evaluating and monitoring their individual performances in order to enhance the overall performance of the website. For this purpose if you are pretty sure about the monitoring tools, you can move a head with a in-house team. But, in case if you are less familiar about these things it is always better to opt for third party monitoring services that not only measure but also monitor all the above mentioned metrics.

Reliable service providers always present up to date reports on your website performance and can also present complex data in an easy-to-understand way.