Deloitte found that a 0.1 second improvement in mobile site speed resulted in an:
8.4%
increase in retail conversions
9.2%
increase in average order value
Web Optimization Takes a Team:
Better Collaboration across IT and Engineering Drives Better Digital Experiences
The most successful businesses build cultures of web performance
Delivering Great Customer Experience Is a Critical Component of Business Success
The best online experiences are born from development teams that share a passion for constant optimization and the pursuit of ever-higher degrees of performance.
Challenge
Collaboration has always been a challenge for front-end and back-end development teams. The move to cloud and cloud-native technologies like containers and microservices adds new levels of complexity that make close cooperation both more difficult and more important.
Solution
The solution is to create a culture of performance that puts customers first, fosters collaboration and allows development teams to consistently improve performance for better customer experiences.
Synthetic monitoring and web optimization are key ingredients to a culture of performance and collaboration as a competitive edge.
The Performance-Driven World of Digital Business
Today, every business is a digital business. And that means that delivering great digital experiences online has to be a top priority.
This puts particular importance on the web development, engineering and IT Ops teams responsible for building, maintaining and improving those customer experiences.
The relationship between web performance and customer conversion is clear.
Deloitte recently looked at mobile site data from retail, travel, luxury and lead generation brands across Europe and the US. Based on a 0.1s natural mobile site speed improvement, Deloitte found that retail conversions increased by 8.4% and average order value increased by 9.2%.
Regardless of industry, web performance matters. Google found that users are 24% less likely to abandon sites that satisfy the standard for core web vitals. Vodafone found that by displaying large images 31% faster, sales increased by 8%. The BBC found that for every second it took for its site to load, the broadcaster would lose 10% of its users.
As consumers continue to turn to digital channels, businesses that invest in building a culture of web performance will realize returns of increased conversion and user activity and decreased abandonment by their users.
Page Performance Determines Business Success
There is a direct and measurable relationship between web performance and business outcomes:
- 1s slower load
time =10%increase in user
abandonment for BBC - 100ms faster load
time =1%increase in revenue
for Walmart - 31% improvement
in LCP =8%increase in sales for
Vodafone - Core web vitals
met =24%decrease in user
abandonment for Google
To deliver great user experiences, modern development teams rely on advanced synthetic monitoring to help them proactively test, monitor and optimize web performance. By monitoring user endpoints, APIs and business transactions, back-end developers can know instantly when small changes cause big problems.
Synthetic Monitoring Defined
Synthetic monitoring tests and measures the digital experience of web applications by simulating traffic with set test variables (e.g. network, browser, location, device). Synthetic vendors provide remote (often global) infrastructure that visits a website periodically and records the performance data for each run.
The measured traffic is not of actual users, but rather traffic synthetically generated to collect data on page performance. Behavioral scripts (or paths) are created to simulate a flow that a customer or end user would take on a site. Those paths are then continuously monitored at specified intervals for performance indicators such as functionality, availability and response time.
Where Is Your Business on the Performance Maturity Curve?
Optimizing web performance is a journey that puts user and customer experience first.
Phase 1
Reactive, fighting fires
- Up/down availability
- Individual pages and APIs
Phase 2
Establishing Benchmarks and Trends
- “Slow” is the new “down”
- Tracking performance metrics
- Monitoring “business flows”
- Trends across all users
Phase 3
Performance and UX as Release Criteria
- A/B testing impact of changes
- Tracking UX/performance alongside business outcomes
Want to level up?
Simple steps like establishing baselines for user-experience, standardizing on Core Web Vitals, and tracking the performance of new features and improvements, can result in less abandonment, increased usage, and higher revenues.
Take the next step in your performance maturity with a free trial of Splunk Synthetic Monitoring today.
Free Trial
The Benefits of Having Both RUM and Synthetic Monitoring
Real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring offer different views of web performance. RUM helps teams understand long-term trends, and synthetic monitoring helps diagnose and solve shorter-term performance problems.
Real User Monitoring
- Field data, actual user experience
- Benchmark page performance
- Segment customer groups (users, devices, browsers, geographies)
Synthetic Monitoring
- Lab data, optimal page performance
- Benchmark page performance
- Proactively monitor user experience
Benefits of Real User Monitoring
- Understand how your application is being used
- Gain visibility into real geographic user distribution and how it affects their experience
- Understand network or channel distribution and user flow
- Ensure full visibility of application usage and performance
- Correlates real-world performance with KPIs, such as eCommerce revenue gains or losses
Benefits of Synthetic Monitoring
- Quick and easy setup that doesn’t require adding any extra code to your site
- Gain visibility into all front-end content, including third-party content
- Continuous monitoring provides insights into site performance — even during off-hours or period of low traffic
- Test performance in pre-production to confidently deploy updates
- Easily measure your performance KPIs against your competition
CASE STUDY
Blue Apron Improves Page Load Time by 30%
In order to improve site performance, Blue Apron’s development teams needed a simple way to see what was broken, why it was broken and what should be done to fix it.
With Splunk Synthetic Monitoring, Blue Apron improved site performance by responding to defects quickly and accurately. And with its knowledge base, which includes how-to guides and best practices, Blue Apron elevated performance as a skill set within the team.
From testing new features to identifying easy performance wins, Splunk Synthetic Monitoring helps embed performance across our development life cycle. We’ve decreased load time by 30% with Splunk Synthetic Monitoring, which helps eliminate customer-facing issues and optimize web performance.
Web Optimization:
Driving Value With a Performance-Focused Culture
Synthetic monitoring becomes even more powerful when it’s paired with Splunk Web Optimization, which provides the deepest optimization and performance improvement capabilities of any observability or APM platform.
Prioritize and reslove performance defects with Splunk Web Optimization
Like an automated performance consultant, Splunk Web Optimization automatically and proactively guides engineers to more than 300 improvement recommendations. Solutions are automatically prioritized and triaged, and include action items for a quick resolution. Video replay and filmstrips help developers view website experience through the eyes of users.
The commitment to collaboration extends to integrations with Jira, Jenkins, PagerDuty and Slack. When you have a culture of performance, everyone works together to create the best customer experience. Not only do front-end engineers and back-end developers collaborate, but business managers have access to performance data that helps drive decision-making and success in the new world of retail.
Integrate Splunk products with
Why Splunk Synthetic Monitoring Delivers Superior Web Performance:
Industry’s only solution that auto-updates commercial browsers as new versions are released
Industry’s only solution that automatically identifies and provides instruction for remediating 300+ performance problems
Open source scripting
Out-of-box alert integrations with several systems
Slack, ServiceNow, Splunk On-Call, OpsGenie
48 + UX metrics, including web vitals
Easily push raw data into other BI systems
Waterfall, video and filmstrip of every monitor
Strong CI integrations for shifting left into dev/QA workflow
End-to-End Testing for the Best Digital Experiences
Splunk Synthetic Monitoring makes sure user experiences are issue-free and integrates seamlessly with Splunk Observability so front-end and back-end development teams can work together to deliver best-in-class web performance.
