Mouse in the House

Posted by mark on February 17th, 2011

Ever wonder how fast your website (or any other website) loads from different locations around the world? Especially if your site relies in part on third party content, the user experience at various cities can be very different indeed!

Using our WatchMouse Performance Monitoring service API, Loads.in is a convenient webmaster tool that allows you to measure just how fast a website loads in a real browser from over 50 locations worldwide – on every continent except Antarctica!

Websites can be particularly susceptible to slow page load speeds when they need to load a high amount of components (images, JavaScript, third party content) to render the complete page.

The free, Loads.in tool checks your site utilizing a real browser, and provides snapshots and waterfall charts for each check.  A selection of browser profiles is available too, and include Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox

Simply enter the full URL of the page you want to check in Loads.in, and the page is retrieved by a browser at a random location. For each subsequent check you can choose a specific location*.

The Loads.in results presented include:

• The page load time of the website
• Snapshots at different times during the loading of the page
• Errors or warnings if they occur
• A complete timing breakdown of all elements of your page in a “waterfall chart”
• The option to download the timing results in the HTTP Archive (HAR) format

*Locations include: Amsterdam, Antwerp, Cologne, Copenhagen, Dublin, Glasgow, Groningen, Lille, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Manchester, Munich, Oslo, Padova, Paris, Stockholm, Zurich, Bucharest, Kharkov (Ukraine), Krakow, Moscow, Vilnius (Lithuania), Melbourne, Sydney, Cape Town, Bangkok, Haifa (Israel), Jakarta, Kuala Lampur, Mumbai, Nagano, Shanghai, Singapore, Guadalajara, Vancouver, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Florida and NYC.

Check it out and let us know what you think. We value your feedback and hope you find Loads.In to be a useful tool and resource.

Happy Monitoring,

Mark Pors
CTO & co-founder

Posted by stan on November 8th, 2010

We’re pleased to announce a new addition to our monitoring services today (drum roll, please) – Real Browser Monitoring!

What is Real Browser Monitoring?

Real Browser Monitoring accurately measures the performance of real browser visits. By pinpointing performance issues using an actual browser, this service enables businesses to verify that their site and web applications are delivering the best possible user experience.

Traditional site monitoring tools emulate browsers to check a site’s availability and performance. That is perfectly suitable to get the performance and uptime under ideal conditions. Real Browser Monitoring however, allows you to verify a site’s performance as perceived by the end-user using a real browser.

Why should you care?

Today’s sites commonly use Web 2.0 technologies (Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and Flash) to allow collaboration between the components of a site from their different global locations. Sure, your site may load perfectly and swiftly from the office, and from other locations in your area, but how about other cities or other countries? If your site attracts more than a regional community of users, you should be thinking about using real browsers to monitor your website’s speed. Your own content may be optimized locally, but are all of your other components optimal as well? And, how optimized is your website for the international visitors you wish to reach?

The actual performance of your website (as your visitors experience it) is affected by:

• Third-party content (Google ads, Facebook applets, Twitter feeds, Discus forums, widgets, etc.)
• Dynamic content executed in the browser (JavaScript, AJAX, CSS)
• Effective use of a content distribution network
• The (network) distance between your site and your visitors, i.e. the UK, France, and Germany are close, but Australia and Brazil may be far away

Real Browser Monitoring checks that each component of a Web 2.0 site is correctly responding, and functionally verifies that your composite sites or sites are working – from the web server right through to the end-user’s browser. It benchmarks a website, reports the true end-user’s experience, and offers insight above and beyond regular website monitoring tools that synthetically emulate browsers to check a site’s availability and performance

Along with regular monitoring, we advise that you monitor full page load times with a real browser on an ongoing basis, and from all the regions and countries where your (potential) customers may reside.

The only way to accurately monitor the performance of each component of a Web 2.0 site is to use a real browser to execute the JavaScript.

You can start right now!

Already a WatchMouse client? If you are subscribed to one of our current plans you’re al set to use this new type of monitoring: Each of the plans included ‘scripting monitors’ which can now be used for either scripts or for real browser monitors. And you can extend your plan with extra real browser monitors here. Your first time? Then sign up for a free 30-day trial to experience real browser monitoring yourself right now!

Feel free to contact us if you have questions.

Happy Monitoring!

The WatchMouse Team

More on Real Browser Monitoring…