By IntroSpectrum on February 15, 2010
How many people click through to your site and leave before the page can load? How many switch to a competitor as a result? The answers would shock most website owners who have traditionally had to worry more about getting traffic to their sites in the first place. Recent research shows that a surprising amount of performance sensitivity from today’s internet users. Nearly 80% of users have switched to a competitors website because of slow performance during peak traffic, according to one study.
To make matters worse, lost customers are no longer the only result of poorly performing web pages. The world’s most popular search engine, Google, has already started to factor website performance into it’s AdWords rankings. The slower your site loads, the more you end up paying for clicks. It’s even been suggested that this year website speed will start being a factor in organic search ranking as well. It’s no surprise that web performance is such a hot topic right now.
But unless you can measure how your website performs throughout the day, there’s little that can be done to fix it. Fortunately, where monitoring services used to focus solely on uptime, a healthy ecosystem of performance monitoring services, such as IntroSpectrum, has sprouted up to help website owners find and fix the source of performance problems.
The good news? Experience shows that the most common performance issues are the result of a handful of simple problems with how a site’s web pages are constructed. By making some simple changes, often site-wide, most websites can see a big increase in page performance. Over the next few days, we’ll explain some of the typical causes of slow web pages.
Posted in Web Monitoring
By IntroSpectrum on February 5, 2010
We promised that there were more big improvements in store for the new year, and the latest is here. We’ve significantly improved the user interface to be simpler, faster, more compatible and easier to navigate and use.
As you can see from the screenshot, the interface is much more streamlined than before. We’ve minimized images and other resources as much as possible to improve page load times, while adding a new start page (pictured right) to make it even faster to get to commonly used sections of the application.
Even with these changes, we’re still eager to hear more suggestions from you, our customers, on how to improve the user experience of our core monitoring service.
So, please, continue to send suggestions and comments our way, and thanks for helping make this new year one to remember!
Posted in Startup, The Company
By IntroSpectrum on January 18, 2010
We’re starting off the year with a bang, here at IntroSpectrum, with some great changes to the service. The first, our new web site, just went live last week and the second only kicked off last night.
Optimization Report
You will notice starting next week that our Optimization Reports have been completely re-vamped to be easier to read and understand. In the new reports we examine all the test monitors in your account and based on the data collected during the day rank the performance of the site on several parameters.
This score can be used to compare and contrast the performance of your site over time as it changes. Each report is broken up into several sections that describe one of the ranking measures used to classify the sites performance. Each section can be expanded by clicking to show more details about specific pages, resources or servers that need attention.
There’s much more in store for IntroSpectrum in the first two quarters of 2010, and we look forward to our continuing mission of helping you find and fix performance issues with your website.
Posted in The Company, Web Monitoring
By IntroSpectrum on January 14, 2010
This morning we pushed a new build with a few enhancements. The most noticeable changes are some performance optimizations, which should significantly speed up the site, and a streamlined upgrade process.
Posted in The Company
By IntroSpectrum on January 8, 2010
After a whole lot of planning, a whole lot of development, and a whole lot of tweaking, tonight the new web site went live.
Once we start getting some customer feedback and see how the site metrics look there are bound to be small changes, but the major new features as outlined before are there.
We’re constantly looking for ways to lower the bar for new customers to try out the service, and with this incarnation we’ve managed to go as low as we probably can – just two form fields on the main page to complete a free trial signup. Time will tell how much of an effect that change will have on signups, and we’ll share what we can once we get some numbers.
So, let us know what you think. As always, comments are welcome.
Posted in Startup
