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.