I’ve been a long time fan and reader of High Scalability, a blog about building bigger, faster, more reliable websites. Yesterday, I was honored to get the chance to write a guest post for them titled, Averages, Web Performance Data, And How Your Analytics Product Is Lying To You. I wrote about the importance of looking beyond averages when looking at your performance data.
Did you know that 5% of the pageviews on Walmart.com take over 20 seconds to load? Walmart discovered this recently after adding real user measurement (RUM) to analyze their web performance for every single visitor to their site. Walmart used JavaScript to measure their median load time as well as key metrics like their 95th percentile. While 20 seconds is a long time to wait for a website to load, the Walmart story is actually not that uncommon.
In the article, I also talked about the importance of using Real User Measurement (RUM) to get an accurate picture of what’s happening on your site. Not only do you have to make sure you are looking at the right metrics, you have to make sure your methodology for collecting your data is correct too.
There’s a big shift happening on the web right now in the way that people measure their websites. People are searching for the truth. People want to look at the real performance numbers from their actual users. Misleading metrics and synthetic tests won’t cut it anymore. You can check out the full article here.