Monitoring your site for performance is critical.

We walk you through all the reasoning behind monitoring your website with GTmetrix, complete with real-world examples and data.

If you haven’t monitored your site already, this article will show you why you should.

Why Should I Monitor my Website for Performance?

You may think that one performance analysis and one round of optimization/fixes is sufficient to ensure your website is fast forever – but unfortunately this isn’t the case for most websites.

There are many reasons why constant monitoring of your website performance is recommended:
 
 

The Internet is complex

Your website is composed of many moving parts; Front-end/back-end code, servers it’s hosted on, content (including images, videos, etc), third-party widgets (like social media integration, marketing trackers, etc) and possibly more. Any one of these things can change unexpectedly – and with it, your page load time.
 

Network variances, server load or any number of reasons could impact the delivery of your site resources, impacting your performance.

It’s prudent to have a second set of eyes on your site to ensure that it’s performing the way you expect it to – and when it doesn’t…
 
 

Be the first to know when something goes wrong

The performance of your website may change due to any of the factors above – and it’s best you know about it before your visitors complain, or you lose revenue. Some more stats:
  

• Nearly 70% of consumers admit that site speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.
• The first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates.
• Retailers have lost massive amounts of revenue just by taking 1 second longer in page load.
• 79% of users are less likely to buy again from a website if they’re dissatisfied with its performance.

Customers can be quite vocal about a slow performing website as well.

Macy’s received many complaints when their website performed poorly on Black Friday.

In the example above, Macy’s had experienced heavy load on one of the busiest online shopping days of the year – but it goes to show that customers have come to expect peak performance at all times.

If your website is slow, even without being heavily trafficked, you’ve got a problem that you must be proactive about.

Your website may be up, but is it usable?

The difference between uptime monitoring and performance monitoring is that uptime monitoring only tells you if your website is up, not if it’s actually usable.

Most uptime monitors stop checks after the first request.

Your website may respond to a check saying that it’s up, but an actual user may have a sluggish experience navigating your site.

This is why we recommend performance monitoring – actually loading the entirety of your page in a real browser and recording results.

GTmetrix tests your entire page, so you have the whole picture of your performance

Knowing your page load time, as well as, whether your site is underperforming in a variety of metrics is a lot more valuable than knowing if it’s merely up.

Performance is always a “Work in Progress”

You may have optimized your page performance one time – perhaps right before launch or after analyzing it with GTmetrix (or another tool) – but due to the ever changing nature of the internet and your site content, it may not stay optimized.

“Optimizing your page performance is not a one-time task.”

Optimization by nature is constant – you should always be striving for optimal performance – or at least performance acceptable to you within your constraints.

Performance monitoring can help you stay vigilant and lets you be proactive to ensure your website loads fast consistently for all your users.

Performance Monitoring Can Save You

Here are some real examples from GTmetrix customers on how our monitoring and alerts helped them detect performance issues : (Note that some of these examples reference the legacy version of GTmetrix)

• A website pushed out a content update and turned off caching by mistake
  • A GTmetrix alert was sent after Fully Loaded Time was above set criteria
• A website discovered they were hacked with multiple ads placed on their page
  • A GTmetrix alert was sent after PageSpeed/YSlow scores dipped and Total Page Size was above set criteria
• A government agency had a software license expire, causing their site to display only a product registration screen
  • A GTmetrix alert was sent after Total Requests was below set criteria
• A website with an international audience found that their CDN was turned off accidentally
  • A GTmetrix alert was sent after YSlow score dipped
• A website realized their site was consistently running out of server resources
  • A GTmetrix alert was sent after Time to First Byte (TTFB) was above set criteria
• A website had a third-party social widget cause massive redirects in their site
  • A GTmetrix alert was sent after PageSpeed scores dipped
• A responsive website had updated their design and broke performance on mobile screen sizes
  • A GTmetrix alert was sent after PageSpeed/YSlow scores dipped on their monitored iPhone report

Monitoring your site performance can make you aware of various issues and ensure that you know about them before it’s too late.

Monitor Your Page’s Performance with GTmetrix

Be sure that all your visitors are getting consistent performance – regardless of location or device.

Not only can GTmetrix help you get your page performing optimally, it can also ensure your website is continually performing the way you expect it to with monitoring and alerts.