Unleashing the Web Guru: How Website Monitoring Boosts Traffic

by Louis Kingston

In the vast, mystical realm of the internet, where websites come to life and cat videos rule the land, there resides a hidden hero – Website Monitoring. Armed with lightning-fast reflexes and a vigilante’s keen eye, this unsung champion is the secret sauce to soaring traffic.

Picture this: your website is a thriving carnival, with merry-go-rounds of content and rollercoasters of creativity. But, alas, like an absent-minded wizard, you’ve forgotten to keep an eye on the gates. Enter Website Monitoring, the loyal gatekeeper who ensures no trolls sneak in to mess up your virtual fiesta. With a mischievous grin, it sends you real-time alerts the moment any gremlins try to mess with your website’s uptime. Your website’s downtime days are numbered!

Now, let’s journey into the realm of speed. In a world where every second counts, your website’s performance is its very heartbeat. But fret not, dear web adventurers, for Website Monitoring is the swiftest hare in the web-jungle. Armed with its trusty stopwatch, it tracks your page loading times like a hyperactive roadrunner, shouting, “Faster! Faster!” before your visitors can even say, “Are we there yet?” Voilà! Your website now zooms like a caffeine-fueled cheetah on the digital savannah.

Oh, but the fickle web travelers; they change their minds like chameleons change colors. Fear not, for Website Monitoring is here to unravel this enigma. With its mystical analytics, it becomes your crystal ball, revealing the mysteries of visitor preferences and behaviors. You’ll know what they like, what they loathe, and what they yearn for more than a lifetime supply of authentic New York style pizza. Armed with this newfound wisdom, you’ll sprinkle enchanting content like fairy dust, keeping your visitors spellbound and coming back for more.

Behold the battlefield of the mighty search engines, where websites engage in an epic struggle for visibility. But alas, valiant webmasters, Website Monitoring dons its armor of SEO prowess. It crawls through the darkest corners of the interwebs, sniffing out broken links and bad keywords like a digital bloodhound. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll climb the search engine ranks like a warrior scaling Mount Everest – and trust me, you won’t need oxygen!

In this whimsical tale of website wonders, we’ve unveiled the magical powers of Website Monitoring – the tireless protector of uptime, the guardian of speed, the oracle of analytics, and the knight of SEO. So, dear webmasters, heed this advice: with Website Monitoring by your side, you’ll wield the mighty sword of traffic-increase like a modern-day King Arthur.

Embrace the power of Website Monitoring and may your website’s journey throughout your site be filled with joy, triumphs, and an army of loyal visitors marching towards your digital domain!

Say goodbye to web nightmares and embrace the hero you deserve: AlertBot! Our supercharged website monitoring service is the ultimate sidekick you need to keep your online kingdom running smoothly. With AlertBot by your side, you’ll enjoy 24/7 vigilance, lightning-fast alerts, and more data than you can shake a unicorn horn at. So, what are you waiting for? Join the epic quest for flawless websites and unleash the power of AlertBot today – because even Gandalf would agree, “You shall not pass…without website monitoring!”

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

Just How Bad is a Down, Slow, or Dysfunctional Website? It’s Worse than You Think!

Have you ever watched a movie (*cough* Godfather III) and said to yourself: “wow, this is so incredibly bad — I don’t think this can get worse!” But then it does. Much, much worse.

Well, having a down, slow, or dysfunctional website is similarly nightmarish — just when you think the reputation devastation is finally over, there’s more on the horizon. With apologies to Shakespeare: hell hath no fury like a customer scorned.

Not convinced? Here’s what happens to companies that get on the wrong side of their customers:

• 61% of customers say they will switch to a new brand after one bad experience. (Zendesk)
• 13% of customers who have a negative experience will tell 15+ people. (Esteban Kolsky)
• $289 is the average value of every lost business relationship in the U.S. per year. (Neil Patel)

Scary stuff, huh? “But wait — there’s more!”

These days, many unhappy customers publish reviews to punish companies that fail to meet their expectations. But guess what? These eviscerating appraisals are not just seen by other potential customers (many of whom quickly decide not to move into becoming actual customers). They are also seen by potential job candidates who are not enthusiastic about joining an organization that is used as target practice by denizens of the interwebs (everyone from THE ALL CAPS BRIGADE to the “tl;dr” force to the League of Extraordinary Grammarians).

However, just as all nightmares eventually come to an end (hey, even Godfather III mercifully rolls credits at the 2-hour-42-minute mark), there is something that companies can do to dial back — or better yet, eliminate — customer outrage caused by a down, slow, or dysfunctional website: get AlertBot.

AlertBot’s fully integrated monitoring platform monitors all your websites, web applications, mobile sites and services — all in one place. Unlike many other products in the marketplace, AlertBot doesn’t merely monitor a URL’s basic availability. It dives much deeper and monitors full page functionality using real web browsers in order to verify every page element, script, and interactive feature. As a result, you can proactively scan for errors, track and optimize load times, pinpoint issues, and get alerted to problems and failures.

The bottom line? A down, slow, or dysfunctional website can be so catastrophic that it makes Godfather III look like, well, Godfather I or Godfather II. Don’t hope for an Oscar just to win a Razzie. Get AlertBot and inspire your target audience to cheer vs. churn.

Start a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes.

The 3-Step Communication Game Plan for a Site Outage (One of Our LEAST Favorite Things)

If those von Trapp Family singers from The Sound of Music collectively woke up in a really, really bad mood and decided to write a song about their least favorite things, then it’s a safe bet that not being able to connect to a website would make the list (alongside airline passengers who tilt their seat back, and clam shell plastic packaging).

Indeed, the level of rage that many people experience when their browser presents them with a “cannot connect to that website” message is enough to trigger a blood pressure monitoring app alarm on a smartwatch. It’s the equivalent of going to a store, only to find out that the door is locked. Actually, it may be worse than that, because at least there could be some therapeutic comfort in commiserating with other disappointed customers. But in the virtual world, the journey is usually solo — and so is the misery.

The bad news is that there is no way to absolutely, completely, and ultimately prevent site outages from happening. However, the good news is that companies can — actually, scratch that: they must — be proactive to mitigate the pain and suffering; both across their site visitors, and for themselves. To that end, here is a three-step communication game plan:

Step 1: Tell the story.

Without delay (not even for lunch), companies should leap into their operational digital properties — e.g. social media, email, SMS, chat, widget, etc. — and clearly describe:

• What’s going on and why the site is down.
• When the outage started.
• What is being done.
• When the outage is likely to end based on all available information and best estimates.
• Options and workarounds (if they exist).
• Relevant policy or process changes (e.g. “due to this unforeseen event we are extending our normal 30-day return window, to ensure that customers who are affected can return items without any inconvenience”).

Step 2: Update the status page.

All of the information shared through social media and other channels should be published to a dedicated status page, which — as the name suggests — exists for one purpose only: to highlight and describe the status of a website (or possibly multiple websites that are part of the same brand or portfolio). It is vital to keep the status page updated to reflect the current phase: investigating, fixing, resolving, and resolved.

In addition, the status page should invite visitors to subscribe, so that they can receive real-time notifications when things change — and ultimately, when they get back to normal.

Step 3: Conduct a postmortem and share the findings.

Once the outage is history, companies should figure out precisely what went wrong. Using a top-rated site uptime monitoring tool, like AlertBot, can provide helpful clues, and just as valuably, ensure that there isn’t a repeat performance. This information should be shared with the customer community and all other stakeholders, such as suppliers and strategic partners.

Typically, this information is shared through a blog post, which all social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (etc.) point to. Even if the company is not technically at fault (after all, nobody wants to be assailed by a DDoS attack), the fact remains that visitors were inconvenienced. An authentic apology goes a long way to easing frayed nerves and restoring trust.

The Bottom Line

Site outages are dreadful. Yet, they happen, and companies need to have a communication game plan to minimize the frustration for visitors, and the adverse impact on their reputation. The von Trapp Family singers would approve (and probably turn it into a song that you can’t get out of your head, no matter how hard you try).

Why Website UX “Edge Cases” Lead to Visitor Frustration — and What to Do About It

The year was 1993. Beanie Babies invaded the planet. Dinosaurs dominated cinemas worldwide when they escaped from Jurassic Park. Seinfeld won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series (you might say that Jerry & co. were masters of their domain). And righteous rockers Aerosmith extolled the virtues of “living on the edge.”

A lot — and we are talking A LOT — has changed since 1993; especially that advice about living on the edge. Frankly, the last thing that companies want is for their website visitors to go anywhere near the edge, because they may fall off.

Edge Cases
What we are talking about here are “edge cases,” which refer to website UX pitfalls that are unlikely — but nevertheless possible. And when visitors experience one of these edge cases, it is not a matter of whether they will get mad: it is a question of how enraged they will become. Hell hath no fury like visitors thrust into a nasty edge case. Here are some examples:

• A visitor incorrectly inputs their credit card data into a form, which causes the form to crash.
• A visitor clicks or taps the search function, but without putting anything in the search field, which causes the website to hang.
• A new website is launched and everything seems fine (there are a lot of fist bumps and “WE DID IT!” cheers among the development team), but there are sections of bad core that manifest hours, days, weeks, or even months down the road.

As a result of these negative experiences, visitors cannot move forward as both they and the company desire — or to use a term from the UX world, their momentum on “The Happy Path” — is thwarted.  Fortunately, that is where synthetic monitoring enters the picture.

The Role of Synthetic Monitoring
Synthetic monitoring (sometimes referred to as journey monitoring) is a method of simulating and evaluating the various journeys that visitors take on a website: where they go, what they do, what buttons they press, what forms they fill out, and so on.

With synthetic monitoring, companies can proactively identify and address edge case scenarios, but without having to rely on excessive manual testing or live user monitoring. This is not only more efficient, but it exposes edge cases that would otherwise go undetected.

Ideally, addressing edge case scenarios means eliminating them entirely — such as fixing bad code. But at the very least, companies can put up signposts that point visitors in the right direction. For example, since there is no way to 100% guarantee that every visitor will correctly input their credit card number, a form can be modified to tell visitors when an input error has occurred.

AlertBot: Avoiding the Edge
AlertBot supports advanced and easy-to-use synthetic monitoring that helps companies run and evaluate various UX scenarios before their visitors do — and ultimately reduce edge cases. Hey, Aerosmith is welcome to live on the edge (who are we to criticize the group that brought us Guitar Hero?). But companies that want to drive visitor engagement — and prevent frustration — should live as far away from the edge as possible.

Start a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. 

We all know the pleasure we feel when we dig into an old pair of jeans and pull out a crumpled $5 bill, or when we finally get around to vacuuming our car (“Hey, I don’t remember eating onion rings in here”) and find a few bucks in loose change. It’s as if the universe has taken a moment to smile on us.

Now imagine that, instead of finding enough money to buy some more onion rings (“Oh yeah, I remember when I ate onion rings in here — wow, that was a long time ago”), you get your hands on a cool $1.85 million. Pleasure isn’t the word for that. Euphoria is.

Well, in a sense, that is what owners, investors, and anyone else who has a financial stake in your organization could feel if you choose a superior site uptime monitoring solution. Why? Because new research has revealed that $1.85 million is the average price tag that organizations pay to recover from a ransomware attack — a figure that has more than doubled in the last year. Let’s unpack this by taking a look at ransomware, and then explaining the link to site uptime monitoring.

What is Ransomware?

Essentially, ransomware is a type of malware that infects a computer, and blocks access to it unless victims pay a fee (a.k.a. a ransom). And if that was not nefarious enough, there are two other things about ransomware that need to be part of the story.

The first is that victims are given a very limited amount of time to pay up. If they fail to do so, then the threat — which is often carried out — is they will permanently lose access to their data, or their data will end up being disclosed on the dark web or elsewhere. The second is that even after they pay the ransom in full, only 8% of victims get 100% of their data back, and 29% get up to 50% of their data back. In the legitimate business world, this kind of chronic non-fulfilment would lead to excessive customer loss, and probably lawsuits and investigations. But on the cybercrime landscape, it’s standard operating procedure. There is no complaints department or review site (“We were very disappointed in this hacker who failed to return all of our data, but we are adding a star because communication was prompt”).

Where a Site Uptime Monitoring Solution Enters the Picture

A superior site uptime monitoring solution cannot block ransomware attacks. For strategies and tactics on that front, we recommend this helpful article at eSecurityPlanet.com, and this site by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

However, a superior site monitoring solutions CAN do something that hackers earnestly hope that potential victims do not realize: immediately alert them to a ransomware attack — even if it’s at 3:00am — so they can rapidly roll-out an uncorrupted back-up and carry on without disruption or (and here is the euphoric part) having to pay $1.85 million or more in ransom/recovery costs.

Then, the organization can move to fortify cybersecurity defenses and reduce the size of the attack surface (probably by deploying many of the recommendations highlighted by the sources listed above), ultimately reducing the likelihood of future ransomware attacks.

The Bottom Line

Ransomware is on the rise, with the number of reported incidents surging 183% between the first two quarters of 2021. A superior site uptime monitoring solution won’t stop these attacks or frankly even slow them down. Hackers are notorious for doing things over and over again until they stop working — and unfortunately, ransomware is quite profitable. But it can give organizations the warning and time they need to strengthen their defenses, and in the process potentially save an average of $1.85 million.

Launch a free trial of AlertBot’s superior site uptime monitoring solution. No credit card. Nothing to download. Setup in minutes.  

What Exactly is a Website Monitoring “False Alarm”
and Why You Should Care About It

by Louis Kingston

You know what falsehoods are. You know what false teeth are. You may even know some falsehoods about false teeth. But do you know what a website monitoring false alarm (also known as a “false positive”) is? If not, then please keep reading to find out — because it’s a very big deal.

What is a False Alarm?

Remember back in grade school, when the fire bell suddenly went off in class and you were instructed to exit the class single-file and march outside? As you rose from your desk, heart racing, you wondered if you’d ever see your Trapper Keeper, Real Ghostbusters lunchbox and JanSport backpack ever again. But after you and your classmates were wrangled into the parking lot to stand in the brisk autumn air for what felt like an eternity, you soon learn it was just some older kid who thought it’d be funny to pull that shiny red lever on the hallway wall.

Well, that’s essentially what a false alarm is: a result that incorrectly indicates that a particular condition or attribute is present (i.e. it wasn’t a real fire consuming your place of education; it was merely a “false alarm” thanks to that jerk in the grade above yours).

What is a Website Monitoring False Alarm?

What you need and expect from a website monitoring tool is to know precisely when your website goes down. Why? Because research has found that the average cost of site downtime is $5,600 per minute. And remember, we are just talking about the average cost here. Some site downtime fiascos are much more costly. Just ask Amazon, which lost an estimated $99 million after going down for 63 minutes during Prime week in 2018. Granted, most businesses (including yours, unless you happen to be Jeff Bezos) won’t have to shell out $1.65 million a minute due to website downtime, but the basic point should be clear: site downtime is costly, and false alarms are supposed to minimize this financial damage.

But what happens when a website monitoring downtime alarm goes off, but nothing is actually wrong? It gets chalked up to a false alarm.

Why Website Monitoring False Alarms Are So Common

Many website monitoring tools — and virtually all of the free kind — have a test server in one location. If that test server detects that a website is not available, it does the only thing it can: sound the alarm. And that seems to be the correct thing to do, right? Well, not exactly.

Let’s say that that the website in this example is only down for a few seconds due to an isolated power outage. The test server has no way of knowing this (i.e. that the website is back up). And so, it is going to generate a false alarm.

The Solution: Multiple Testing Server Locations

Now, imagine that there are multiple test servers spread out across the country — say, one in New York and one in Los Angeles. The test server in New York detects that a website has gone down, and triggers a red alert (this test server is a big Star Trek fan). But it doesn’t sound the alarm. Instead, 60 seconds later the test server in Los Angeles checks in. If the website is up, then it cancels the red alert. If the website is down, then it confirms the initial diagnosis by the test server in New York, and the alarm goes off.

The AlertBot Advantage

At AlertBot, we hate false alarms even more than our customers. That’s why unlike many other website monitoring tools — and again, virtually all of the free ones — we have test servers located across the U.S. and worldwide. We don’t guess whether our customer’s website is down. We know.

Plus, when it is necessary to send out an alert, our system automatically and immediately contacts key people — such as network administrators, SysAdmins, CIOs, etc. — through email, SMS/text message, or phone (or any combination).

What’s more, our test servers keep checking for website site availability, and provide an update (again, in the preferred method) if it goes back up. We also highlight the amount of time that the website — or a specific portion/page of the website — was down. Our customers use this information to keep an eye on overall website performance, proactively detect problems, and ensure that their web host is consistently meeting uptime standards.

Ready to bid false alarms a true farewell? Then start a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. Click here.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and their German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

6 Tips to Prepare Your E-Commerce Site for the Biggest Holiday Traffic Surge Ever

by Louis Kingston

So it begins.

No, we are not talking about the school year, the football season, or a dizzying array of television shows about zombies, detectives, and of course: zombie detectives (seriously, it’s a thing).

Rather, we are talking about the beginning of what for most ecommerce businesses is the make-or-break race to the end of the year called “gift buying season.” Except this year, things are going to be different.

To understand why, let’s zoom in on what, for most ecommerce businesses, is the most critical period of the gift buying season — Cyber Week — which starts on Thanksgiving, and runs through to Cyber Monday. According to research by BigCommerce.com, during Cyber Week 2019 same-store sales across all verticals increased by a whopping 21% compared to Cyber Week 2018, and the average order value jumped by 10%.

And now, we come to 2020, a year in which billions of people are either obligated or advised to stay at home. These folks aren’t going to even consider hopping into their car to navigate the mall jungle. Instead, they’re going to pause Fortnite, minimize Reddit, crack their knuckles, replace the battery in their mouse, and BUY all kinds of stuff online: from toaster ovens to 60” 4K TVs to luxury sneakers to mounted singing bass fish (remember those?).

Simply put: 2020 is not just going to break e-commerce sales records, but it is going to obliterate them. In fact, in terms of how many people buy stuff online and how much they buy, there may never be another year quite like it in terms of year-over-year surges in volume and value.

For e-commerce businesses, this makes the 2020 gift buying season absolutely critical — which in turn means that crashed or slow websites are NOT OK. In fact, the mere idea of their possible existence is horrifying and just plain unacceptable, like a floating island of fire ants (which, unfortunately, is also a thing).

To prevent a catastrophe worse than anything the Griswold Family might experience, here are six essential things do to:

1. Anticipate how much traffic is likely to arrive — keeping in mind that it’s probably going to be much higher than in past years during Cyber Week and throughout the remainder of 2020 — and proactively ensure that the host can handle the load. For more insight and advice, read our article on how to prevent traffic spikes from crashing your website.

2. Assess site speed, and if necessary dial up the velocity (and then dial it up some more). If you have any doubts about this, read our article on the 3 reasons why website speed is more important than ever.

3. Eliminate the 4 common causes of cart abandonment: unexpected costs, forcing customers to create an account, a long and winding checkout process, and bugs.

4. Optimize the mobile shopping and purchasing experience. During Cyber Week in 2019, mobile orders were responsible for 49% of all online sales.

5. Analyze and address security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, shoppers aren’t the only people who love e-commerce sites — hackers do too, and they demonstrate their affection by deploying malware and launching DDoS attacks.

6. Use a reputable and proven site uptime and availability monitoring solution like AlertBot, which will instantly notify authorized individuals (e.g. webmasters, sysadmins, etc.) if something goes wrong.

The Bottom Line

There aren’t many things that can be said with certainty about 2020. However, two things make the list: we will hear the phrase “new normal” at least a thousand more times before the year is up, and the gift buying season for e-commerce businesses is going to be colossal.

Whether that is colossal good (think Avengers) or colossal bad (think the Death Star) will largely be determined by the six essential factors described above. Which epic story do you want your e-commerce business to tell in the months ahead?

Try AlertBot today and see why it’s trusted and recommended by some of the world’s biggest enterprises. There’s no billing information to provide, nothing to download, and you’ll be completely set up in minutes — click here.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

How To Keep Traffic Spikes from Crashing Your Website

by Louis Kingston

At first glance — and probably second and third as well — having too much traffic seems like a really nice problem to have; like when billionaires struggle to decide which yacht to buy (“I say Thurston, the one with the tennis courts is quite lovely, but the one with the outdoor cinema is so charming”).

However, too much traffic really is a problem, because it causes websites to either dramatically s-l-o-w down (which is terrible) or crash (which is worse than terrible). And right now, as hundreds of millions of people are advised or obliged to stay at home, there are a bunch of e-commerce businesses around the world that are experiencing this harsh, costly reality.

The good news is that your business can — and should — take proactive steps to keep traffic spikes from impaling your website, and causing revenue losses and reputation damage.  Here is the to-do list:

1. Use a content delivery network (CDN), which is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and data centers. A CDN helps ensure that visitors — regardless of where they’re located — enjoy fast-loading pages, images, videos and other content, and it also leverages a network of servers to manage traffic spikes. Instead of a single server struggling to handle the load, multiple servers share the burden.

2. Check, double-check, and while you’re at it, triple-check whether your current server is capable of handling a traffic surge (pay particular attention to any data caps). This assessment is especially important if your business’s website has expanded over the years, but your server capacity has remained the same since day one.

3. Make sure that all of your software is up-to-date. In addition to patching vulnerabilities, updates can help lower the risk of a virtual traffic jam.

4. Run a daily backup. No, this won’t prevent traffic-induced website crashes. But yes, it’s a lifeline back to normalcy if a crash is on the horizon.

5. Use a reliable 24/7 website uptime monitoring solution like AlertBot, which proactively and immediately informs designated individuals (e.g. system administrators, CTO, CSO, etc.) if your website goes down, and can also check to make sure specific scripts and pages are working correctly. What’s more, if required you can use AlertBot’s logs as evidence to inform your host that they need to do a much better job of keeping your website online — or else you’ll head elsewhere.

The Bottom Line
More potential customers than ever before are using the web to find products and services — everything from digital gadgets to financial advisors to home repairs, and the list goes on. When the surge reaches your virtual address, you want to definitively know — and not just hope — that your website is ready, willing and able to handle the traffic.

Give AlertBot a try for FREE. There’s no billing information, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. Click here

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

Word (and Warning) to the Wise: Site Downtime isn’t Just a Technical Issue — it’s a Customer Experience Problem

by Louis Kingston

Businesses of all sizes — from small startups to large enterprises — are spending an enormous amount of money and time to deliver outstanding customer experience (CX). For example, they’re deploying contact centers, implementing customer-friendly return and warranty policies, training their workforce to be customer-centric, and the list goes on. And now, according to research by Walker Insights, CX is poised to overtake price and product as the most influential brand differentiator. To put this another way: customers are happily willing to pay a higher price, and for a more limited selection, if they’re getting the attention, performance, respect and results they expect — and frankly, demand.

The CX Gap that is Swallowing Customers

However, despite the fact that the CX party has been going on for a while and there’s no slowdown in sight, there’s a gap that many businesses are overlooking — one that is swallowing up their current and future customers, and transporting them directly to the competition: site downtime.

Here’s the thing: traditionally, site downtime has been primarily, if not exclusively, viewed through a technical lens, similar to a car breaking down or a roof springing a leak. And there is obviously truth in this perception. But it’s not the whole story, because customers out there on the virtual landscape equate site experience with customer experience. As such, when a site goes dark, they don’t think: “This customer-centric business has a technical problem with their website, and are surely going to fix it ASAP.” Instead, they think: “Wow, if this is what their website is like, then the rest of the business must be just as dysfunctional.”

Now, is this perception fair? Frankly, no. The vast majority of businesses — let’s say 99% of them — with site downtime truly care about delivering good (if not great) CX. These are the same businesses that, as noted above, are spending plenty of money and time on CX-related investments and training. They seriously and urgently want to get CX right.

But when their website breaks down or blows a virtual tire, this legitimate, longstanding investment and CX commitment is undermined — and customers react accordingly. Here are some of the grizzly numbers:

• 50% of customers say they have abandoned a transaction or purchase due to poor customer service.
• 51% of customers say they will never do business with a company again after one instance of poor customer service.
• 74% of customers say they are likely to switch brands if the purchasing process is too difficult.
• 95% of customers tell others about poor customer service.

The Bottom Line 

The takeaway here isn’t that businesses need to care more about CX — because they know this already, and (hopefully) are acting on this understanding. Rather, it’s that businesses need to see the direct, immediate link between poor CX and site downtime. It’s not just a technical issue. For current and future customers, it’s the difference between whether they move forward on the buyer’s journey and serve as a profitable brand advisor, or whether they head for the exit and never look back.

Protect Your Reputation + Impress Your Customers 

AlertBot delivers world-class, surprisingly affordable monitoring that immediately notifies you when your site is not operational. You can then take rapid, focused action and solve the problem before your customers form the wrong impression — and never give you a second chance to make it right. Launch your free trial of AlertBot today.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

The (Not-So-Magnificent) 7 HTTPS Errors that Infuriate Customers and Ruin Reputations

by Louis Kingston

In the classic flick The Magnificent Seven, a pack of essentially decent but “don’t you dare park your horse in my spot or else you’ll get your spurs blasted” gunslingers come together to rid a village of some nasty bandits. There’s action. There’s drama. There’s tragedy. There’s humor. There’s romance. There’s Steve freakin’ McQueen. What’s not to love?

Well, on the dusty and dangerous internet landscape, instead of a magnificent seven to save the day, there exists seven not-so-magnificent HTTPS errors that are impossible to like, let alone love. Why? Because their purpose is to block visitors from reaching websites — which leads to lost customers and wrecked reputations.

Here’s a look at the reprehensible HTTPS errors that have their picture on Most Wanted Lists in every post office from Tombstone to Dodge City:

403 Forbidden: The 403 Forbidden error means that the server is absolutely refusing — no ifs, ands or buts — to grant permission to access a resource, despite the fact that a request is valid. Common causes include missing index files, and incorrect .htaccess configuration.

404 Not Found: The 404 Not Found error means that a web page or other resource can’t be found because they simply don’t exist. Common reasons for this include a broken link, mistyped URL, or that someone moved or deleted a page and didn’t update the server (which happens a lot).

408 Request Time Out: The 408 Request Time Out error means that the server can’t find the target or resource that it’s searching for, and after a while, just throws in the towel. Often, this is because the server is overloaded.

410 Gone: Whereas (as noted above) a 404 error implies that there might be some hope — i.e. the target file might be somewhere, just not where it’s supposed to be — the 410 Gone error snuffs out any possible optimism. It’s totally, completely and permanently gone.

500 Internal Server Error: The 500 Internal Server Error means that the server cannot process a request for any number of reasons, such as missing packages, misconfiguration, and overload.

503 Service Unavailable: The 503 Service Unavailable error means that the server is either down because of maintenance, or because it’s overloaded. Either way, the server is conjuring up its inner Gandalf and screaming: “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”

504 Gateway Time-Out: The 504 Gateway Time-Out error means that a higher-level upstream server isn’t working and playing well with a lower-level downstream server. After a while, the downstream server gets the message that it’s not wanted, and says “Oh yeah? Well, I don’t need you either!”

Calling in the Marshall
The bad news is that these reprehensible HTTPS errors, if left unchecked, can cause a lot of damage. Indeed, few things irk and offend website visitors more than seeing an error code. But the good news is that you can call in the Marshall— a.k.a. AlertBot — to restore law and order.

AlertBot constantly scans your site’s pages to watch out for these and other HTTP errors. If and when they are detected, authorized employees (e.g. webmasters, sysadmins, etc.) are proactively notified so they can take swift action and fix the problem.

It’s lightening fast, always reliable, and as smooth as Steve McQueen. Dastardly, good-fer-nuthin’ HTTPS errors don’t stand a chance!

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

Shopping for clothes in person is an entirely different experience than shopping online (and only being able to guestimate how their purchase may look or fit in real life), but we wanted to evaluate the online shopping reliability of two of these brands when it comes to the world wide web and their own individual website performance.

To test their web performance quality, we used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both GAP.com and Aeropostale.com from August 4th through August 18, 2019. (We originally planned to evaluate Abercrombie.com instead of Aero, at first, but the site produced so many errors that we decided to choose a different company’s site to monitor.)

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Both Aero’s and GAP’s sites achieved 99% uptime. Neither saw significant downtime, which is expected, but each one experienced some sluggish speeds and even load time timeouts on a couple occasions.

Aeropostale.com experienced 99.64% uptime, with over 20 errors recorded due to slow load times or brief periods of unresponsiveness. None of these events lasted longer than a couple minutes, however, and none of them amounted to any significant downtime. Because of this, we still consider their performance to be pretty good.  (Aeropostale.com 8/10)

GAP.com experienced fewer issues, but struggled with some significant slowness on August 9th, resulting in 99.50% uptime. Otherwise, they would have an overall stronger performance during this time period than Aero. (GAP.com 8/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser™ monitoring. We calculate the speed as an overall average across all locations during the time span selected for this Showdown.

When it comes to page load times, Aeropostale performed respectably, but at about twice the load time as GAP’s site. Their best day, on average, was Monday, August 5^th with 6.1 seconds. Their worst day, on average, was Thursday, August 15^th, with 6.8 seconds. The site’s overall average speed across the entire test period was 6.97 seconds, which isn’t terrible, but it also isn’t much to brag about. However, one thing certainly gleaned from these results is that Aero’s site is relatively consistent across the board, in regards to their speed.  (Aeropostale.com 7/10)

As teased above, GAP.com performed about twice as fast as Aeropostale.com did. Their best day, on average, was Sunday, August 4^th with 2.4 seconds. That’s a pretty decent load time. GAP.com’s worst averaged day was Friday, August 9^th, at 3.35 seconds, which is still almost half the time of Aero’s best day. The site’s overall average speed across the entire test period was 2.8 seconds, which is rather impressive.     (GAP.com 8.5/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others. For this portion of the test, we compare the overall average speeds of each individual location captured during the selected period of time for this Showdown.

When it comes to geographic performance, it seems safe to say that Aero’s site is all over the map. They performed best in North Carolina at an average of 2.6 seconds, with Nevada in second at 3 seconds and Oregon third at 3.1 seconds. Those times are not bad at all. However, their slowest time was a dismal 13.3 seconds (ouch!) in Missouri, followed by 13 seconds in California, and Washington DC in third place at 12.1 seconds. (Aeropostale.com 7/10)

GAP.com also saw some drastic differences on either side of the scale, but not nearly as substantial a difference as Aero’s. Their fastest average performance was seen in Nevada, at 1.7 seconds. Oregon came in second at 1.7 seconds, and Virginia was third at 1.8 seconds. Missouri was once again at the bottom of the proverbially bargain bin with 6.3 seconds, followed by Colorado at 5.21 seconds and Texas at 5.17 seconds. Still, GAP’s geographically slowest times look like Aero’s overall fastest times, which is rather disappointing.  (GAP.com 8.5/10)

Usability

For evaluating a site’s usability, we always select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater or simply adding a similar item to both sites’ shopping carts. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to see if we can find a nice sweater (since we’d love to cozy up in this fall weather) and add it to our cart.

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.GAP.com into our Chrome browser, it took 39.10 seconds and 8 clicks to get a sweater into the shopping card and begin the checkout process. GAP had two pop-ups about coupons and joining their mailing list, and it took a few clicks to get around those. Then we navigated to the Men’s section, selected the first long sleeve crewneck we found and added it to the cart. (And hey, it’s 40% off, too. Woohoo!)

For www.aeropostale.com, it took 6 clicks and 35 seconds to browse their fall collection, snag a thermal hoodie tee, add it to the cart, and click checkout (and hey, the price was about half-off, too!).

Honestly, both sites are pretty nice, easy to use, and straightforward. The pop-ups on GAP.com were a bit annoying, especially with there being two of them, but it’s tough to gripe about getting offered coupons to save money when you’re shopping. Aero’s site felt just a smidge more inviting, like you’re browsing a tangible catalog, and it seemed to offer quite a few options up front.

All things considered, our Usability scores are:

(Aeropostale.com 9/10)
(GAP.com 9/10)

Verdict

Both sites performed respectably, but when it comes to speed, one definitely outperformed the other—and the positive usability experience is just gravy. So, we’re pleased to announce this Showdown champion to be…

Winner:

4 Common Causes of Cart Abandonment — and How to Solve Them

by Louis Kingston

It’s a sad story that has become so common, that it just kind of blends into the background — like that awful elevator jazz that some coffee shops play (Thelonious Monk would NOT approve), or economy class in-flight meals (there’s less sodium on a salt lick, and you don’t get rammed in the ankle by a cabin trolley). Alas, we’re talking about the cart abandonment epidemic.

And epidemic is indeed the right word, because this problem is not local or limited. Forrester Research pegs the number of customers who bid adios to their cart at 87%, with 70% of them choosing to do so just before checkout. Overall, $18 billion worth of products each year are left to languish in digital trolleys.

Here are four common and costly cart-based reasons why customers flee the sales funnel, rather than triumphantly complete the buyer’s journey:

1. Unexpected costs.

Customers don’t merely dislike unexpected costs like shipping, or nebulous “handling” fees (what, are people buying plutonium or something?). They absolutely hate them. There might even be a clinical psychological aversion to this called “unexpectedcostphobia.”

The solution: be transparent about all automatic or potential costs by advertising a clear and realistic estimate, providing a delivery calculator on the home page (not buried at the end of the checkout process), and if possible, offering free shipping for a minimum purchase.

2. Obliging customers to create an account.

A decade or two ago, customers didn’t mind creating an account to purchase something online, simply because they didn’t know there was any other way. It was part of the deal, like the turning of the earth or standing in line for longer than you should at the post office. It’s going to happen.

But now, customers have enjoyed a taste of the guest checkout experience — and many of them love it; especially if they’re suffering from security fatigue and wince at the idea of remembering more login credentials. Naturally, e-commerce sites that fail to cater to this preference set themselves up for plenty of cart abandonment.

The solution: if creating an account is mandatory, make the process as simple and fast as possible (and then make it even simpler and faster). In addition, give customers an incentive to create an account such as a discount offer, special gift, or anything else that has value and isn’t going to lead to a bankruptcy filing.

3. Long and winding checkout process.

In 1970, The Beatles sang about the “Long and Winding Road” and scored yet another U.S. Billboard #1 hit. However, e-commerce sites that have a long and winding checkout process aren’t going to be certified platinum. They’re going to be certified terrified, because cart abandonment rates will be far higher than their competition.

The solution: ruthlessly streamline down the checkout process to the bare minimum, and use as few fields as possible. Yes, getting as much glorious customer data is important — but it’s not as important as getting customers on the roster in the first place.

4. Bugs, bugs and more bugs.

Even entomologists don’t like website bugs and other completely preventable technical errors that make online shopping irritating instead of enjoyable. Even one of these bugs is enough to trigger cart (and brand) abandonment — let alone a bunch of them.

The solution: use a reputable third-party platform to constantly monitor all important web pages and multi-step processes — such as login, signup, checkout and so on — to proactively detect and destroy bugs, or anything else that makes customers miserable like slow page loading. Learn more about this here.

The Bottom Line
Completely eliminating cart abandonment isn’t possible, because there will always be customers who pause or stop the purchase process. But solving all of the problems described above significantly increases the chances that both carts and customers will get to the finish line, and be inspired to come back for more. And isn’t that the whole point?

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

If You Build It, They Won’t Come: 5 Big, Scary and Costly e-Commerce Site Mistakes

by Louis Kingston

In the 1989 flick Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner turns his Iowa cornfield into a baseball field because a voice tells him: if you build it, he will come. The “he” in question is his late father, and the movie has a magical, uplifting ending that makes us want to dream again (and possibly, play baseball or eat some corn).

Well, many folks who launch e-commerce sites also believe that: if I build it, they will come. This time, “they” means throngs of happy, profitable customers. Except…they don’t. And before long, the site is forced to scale down or shut down. Even writing to Kevin Costner doesn’t help — even if you promise to watch a double feature of The Postman and Waterworld (not recommended without a physician’s approval).

The bad news is that this kind of misery happens all the time. The good news — actually, make that the amazing, glorious, Field-of-Dreams-ending-like news — is that preventing this doom and gloom is largely a matter of avoiding these five big, scary and costly e-commerce site mistakes:

1. Lousy UX

Tiny buttons that are impossible to click on a mobile device without a magnifying glass and hands the size of a Ken doll. Search functions that neither search nor function. Elusive top level categories. Gigantic banners that pop open and chase customers around from page to page, like a kind of online shopping Terminator (“I’ll be baaaaaack!”). These are just some of the many ways that lousy UX destroys e-commerce sites.

The remedy? Monitor all pages and multi-step processes (e.g. login areas, signups, checkout, etc.), to identify bottlenecks where customers routinely encounter errors or unresponsive behavior, and fix any gaps and leaks right away. Learn more about doing this here.

2. S…l…o…w…n…e…s…s

Just how vital is speed? Behold these grizzly statistics:

• A one-second delay in load time can send conversion rates plunging by seven percent. (Source: Kissmetrics)
• 70% of customers say that a website’s loading time affects their willingness to purchase. (Source: Unbounce)
• As page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds the probability of bounce increases by 32%; from 1 second to 5 seconds the probability of bounce increases by 90%; and from 1 second to 10 seconds the probability of bounce increases by 123% (source: Google)

The remedy? Be ruthless about making your e-commerce site as fast as possible (and then make it even faster). Here are the usual suspects: bloated HTML, ad network code, images not optimized, and using public networks to transmit private data. There are other culprits, but look here first — you’ll be amazed at how much speed you unleash.

3. Not Focusing on SEO — or Focusing too Much on SEO

Let’s talk about health. Some people have poor health because they don’t exercise at all. Their daily calisthenic routine involves digging in the couch for the remote. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are people who work out too much — like, we’re talking to extremely, unhealthy levels. You know the type.

The same phenomenon occurs in the e-commerce world when it comes to SEO. Some sites don’t focus on SEO, which means they aren’t going to get found by the 35% of customers who start their buyer’s journey from Google. And some focus too much on SEO, that they neglect other channels and tactics — including good, old fashioned pure promotion.

The remedy? Definitely make SEO part of the visibility strategy. But don’t make it the end-all-and-be-all of online existence. It’s important, but it’s not everything.

4. Bad Customer Service

 Customer service is as important in the online world as the brick-and-mortar world, and in some cases it’s even more important, because exiting the buyer’s journey is so simple — as is writing a scathing zero-star review that would have made Roger Ebert wince. Unfortunately, many e-commerce sites treat customer service as an afterthought or a necessary evil, rather than an asset that should be leveraged to optimize customer experience and generate loyalty.

The remedy? Make customer service — characterized by the ease, speed, and quality of responsiveness and resolution — a big part of the plan. It’s not an expense, but an investment.

5. Lack of Original, Compelling Content

E-commerce sites aren’t vending machines, yet many of them seem to take their inspiration from these handy contraptions that dispense candy and soda in exchange for money and the push of a button (be careful you don’t press the wrong one — you might end up with that oatmeal cookie that has been there since 2007, and not the Snickers bar that you’re craving).

However, most customers — even those who are very focused on getting a specific item, like a pair of sneakers, a smartphone, or a hotel room — want and expect to access relevant information to help them make a safer, smarter purchase decision. This could be videos, infographics, social proof (e.g. testimonials, reviews, case studies, etc.), articles, blog posts, and downloadable assets like ebooks,  checklists, and so on.

The remedy? Don’t skimp on creating original, compelling content. As a bonus, this will help with SEO and can connect you with profitable customers who are not in your primary target market.

The Bottom Line

Competition on the e-commerce landscape for the hearts, minds, and indeed, wallets of customers is ferocious. Avoiding these mistakes will go a long, long way to helping your e-commerce site survive and thrive.

You may even make enough profit to retire early, buy a cornfield in Iowa, and then turn it into a baseball field that inspires the feel-good movie of the year. Hey, it worked once before, right?

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and their German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

As technology continues to morph change with the times, the virtual reality experience keeps becoming more widespread and immersive. Two of the leading brands in the VR game are unmistakably VIVE (HTC) and Oculus. Both companies are leaders in the ever-expanding digital world of virtual reality, with both having released or having plans to release new headset models this summer.

While these brands may corner the market on connecting to the virtual realm, we wondered how they stack up when it comes to the world wide web and their own individual website performance.

To test their web performance quality, we used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both VIVE.com and Oculus.com from May 1^st through May 22, 2019. Given the high regard in which these companies are held because of their products, we expected their web performance to be strong.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Both VIVE’s and Oculus’s sites did perform quite well. Neither saw significant downtime, but each one experienced some sluggish speeds and even load time timeouts on a couple rare occasions.

VIVE.com experienced 99.91% uptime, with just a few errors recorded due to slow load times. None of these events lasted longer than a couple minutes, and none of them amounted to any significant downtime. Because of this, we still consider their performance to be quite solid.  (VIVE.com 8/10)

Oculus.com performed similarly with 99.98% uptime and similar slow page load errors that didn’t amount to significant downtime but at least put a minor hiccup in their performance. They experienced four times fewer of these errors than VIVE, so they ended up coming out just a tiny bit more on top. (Oculus.com 8.5/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser™ monitoring. We calculate the speed as an overall average across all locations during the time span selected for this Showdown.

The speed for both websites were also relatively close to each other. VIVE.com’s best speed, on average, was seen on Monday, May 13 at 3.2 seconds, which isn’t bad. Their best time of day, however, was on Tuesday, May 21 at 5am with 1.6 seconds. It’s definitely better, although it’s doubtful that they usually see a high number of traffic on a given morning. VIVE.com’s worst averaged day was Thursday, May 23^rd at just 5.1 seconds. However, their worst time was on Wednesday, May 22nd at 2pm with a much less admirable 8.8 seconds. The site’s overall average speed across the entire test period was 3.78 seconds.  (VIVE.com 8/10)

Oculus.com performed very similarly. Their best day on average was Thursday, May 2^nd with 3.7 seconds. Their best response time was at 9am on Wednesday, May 15 with 2.05 seconds. Oculus.com’s worst averaged day was also (like VIVE’s) Thursday, May 23^rd at just 4.37 seconds (although that’s slightly better than VIVE’s worst). However, their worst time of day was on Wednesday, May 1^st at 6am with 7.49 seconds (making their slowest time a full second faster than VIVE’s slowest). The site’s overall average speed across the entire test period was 3.96 seconds (Just a smidge slower than VIVE’s).     (Oculus.com 8/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others. For this portion of the test, we compare the overall average speeds of each individual location captured during the selected period of time for this Showdown.

Previously, California had reigned supreme as the fastest state in the U.S. But lately, other states have been stepping up, dethroning The Golden State. This time, North Carolina wins (for both sites), with VIVE.com moving at a breezy 1.69 seconds in The Old North State. Oregon came in second at 1.8 seconds, with Arizona at 2 seconds. Comparatively, Washington state saw the slowest speed, coming in at a shameful 10.9 seconds, with Washington DC in second at 7.55 seconds and Texas in third at 7.43 seconds. (VIVE.com 8/10)

Oculus.com was also under two seconds with 1.9 seconds in North Carolina. Their second fastest was 2.2 seconds in Nevada and 2.3 seconds in Oregon. Overall, they were pretty close to VIVE. However, while Oculus saw a better overall “slowest” location, the second and third slowest were a little worse. Washington, DC came in at 8.66 seconds, then Washington state at 8.65 seconds, and Texas at 8.55 seconds. For the most part, though, the sites performed rather closely.  (Oculus.com 8/10)

Usability

For evaluating a site’s usability, we always select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater or simply adding a similar item to both sites’ shopping carts. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to see if we can order their latest VR headset.

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.VIVE.com into our Chrome browser, it took 1 minute and 36 seconds (and a wealth of clicks) to come to the conclusion that you cannot order anything from their website (at least not easily, even though there’s a shopping cart icon on their menu bar), and that viewing a map to “Try VIVE Today” tells us that we have to live in Livingston, UK if we want to visit a store.

For www.Oculus.com, it took 3 clicks and 16 seconds to add the Oculus Quest 64 GB headset to our cart and be ready to checkout.

For these tests, we attempt to go into them without much prior knowledge of the site’s user side functionality to give it an unbiased test, so we’re pretty surprised at how drastically different the user experience was here. To give VIVE a fighting chance – even before trying Oculus’s site – we tried choosing a different headset in the event that maybe the most recent one isn’t available yet, and it still didn’t help. Perhaps the problem is that we’re performing the test from the US and VIVE’s parent company, HTC, appears to be UK-based. After further investigation, however, it appears that the only way to get to a purchasing option on VIVE’s site is to look at the “comparison” portion of the products page. Still, it seems odd that they wouldn’t make it easier and clearer to order their products. (Also, it appears that the webpage ends when you’re scrolling through, but it merely eventually changes the panel you’re “stopped” on as you scroll down, and then it moves you down the page to the next panel before stopping you again. It’s a neat design, perhaps, but no doubt a little confusing at first.)

With that in mind, here are the Usability scores:

(VIVE.com 5.5/10)
(Oculus.com 9/10)

Verdict

Both sites performed respectably, but when it comes to usability and speed, one unexpectedly outperformed the other—especially when it came to usability. So, we’re pleased to announce this Showdown champion to be…

Winner:

If there’s one snack shop you’re likely to find on any given street corner in your city, there’s a good chance it’s either a Dunkin Donuts or a Starbucks (and in some cases, they’re on either sides of the street from each other). Both chains serve up steaming hot caffeinated goodness – at varying affordability in pricing – as well as other sweet treats. And while different areas of the globe may have more common chains than these two, we East Coast natives have regular access to the fresh beans of these common coffee connoisseurs.

It’s no secret that those who rely on a warm, fresh cup of java to get their day started also know these bean beverages affect their daily performance. So we wanted to pose the question – what about the web performance of these respective coffee shops?

To test their website performance, we used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both DunkinDonuts.com and Starbucks.com from December 1^st through Christmas Day, 2018. Given the notoriety of both establishments, we expected their performance to be as strong as their brews, and we weren’t disappointed.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Both Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks’ sites performed quite well. Neither saw significant downtime, but each one experienced some sluggish speeds and even load time timeouts on a couple rare occasions.

DunkinDonuts.com experienced 99.96% uptime, with just a few errors recorded due to slow load times. None of these events lasted longer than a couple minutes, and none amounted to any significant downtime. Because of this, we still consider their performance to be quite solid.  (DunkinDonuts.com 8.5/10)

Starbucks.com performed similarly with 99.87% uptime and similar slow page load errors that didn’t amount to significant downtime but at least put a wrinkle in their performance. They experienced four times as many of these errors as Dunkin, so we have to take that into consideration with our rating. (Starbucks.com 8/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser™ monitoring.

The speed for both sites were relatively close to each other. DunkinDonuts.com’s best speed, on average, was seen on Sunday, Dec. 2 at 4.8 seconds, which isn’t stellar by any means, but not the worst either. Their best time of day, however, was on Wednesday, Dec. 19^th at 4am with 2.1 seconds. It’s considerably better, but 4am isn’t exactly prime web traffic time. Dunkin’s worst averaged day was Monday, Dec. 17^th at 6.2 seconds. However, their worst time was on Saturday Dec. 22 at 9am with a crawling 10.5 seconds. The site’s overall average speed across the entire test period was 5.6 seconds.  (DunkinDonuts.com 7.5/10)

Starbucks.com didn’t fare too much better in comparison. Their best day on average was Saturday, Dec. 1^st with 5.2 seconds. Their best response time was at 7am on Monday, Dec. 17 with 2 seconds. (It’s interesting that their best average time was on Dunkin’s worst averaged day.) Starbucks’ worst day on average was the previous day, Dec. 16, with 6.9 seconds, with their worst response time on average being at 9pm on Friday, Dec. 7^th with a slightly-slower-than-Dunkin’s-speed of 10.7 seconds. But, as you can see, both sites performed pretty close to one another. Starbucks.com’s overall average speed during the entire test period was a tad slower, at 6.3 seconds.   (Starbucks.com 7/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

If you’ve been following these competitions at all, you’ll know that no one beats California in website load time speed. However, lately, we’ve been seeing more variety when it comes to which state in the U.S. has the faster speeds. This time around, Nevada wins (for both sites), with DunkinDonuts.com moving at a swift 1.79 seconds in The Silver State. Oregon came in second at 1.8 seconds, with Ohio at 2 seconds. Comparatively, Washington state saw the slowest speed, coming in at 10.8 seconds, with Colorado in second at 9.2 seconds and Texas in third at 9.1 seconds. (DunkinDonuts.com 8/10)

Starbucks.com loaded at 1.4 seconds in Nevada, which was faster than Dunkin’s best time. Their second fastest was 1.5 seconds in Oregon and 1.7 seconds in Ohio – all better than Dunkin’s best (1.79 seconds). However, Starbucks saw significantly slower load times than Dunkin, with all of their slowest load times being worse than Dunkin’s slowest. Washington came in at 12.5 seconds, then Colorado at 11.6 seconds, and Texas at 11.4 seconds. While they were a little faster than DunkinDonuts.com, they were also considerably slower, which is unfortunate.  (Starbucks.com 7.5/10)

Usability

For evaluating a site’s usability, we always select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater or simply adding a similar item to both sites’ shopping carts. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to find their rewards program and get ready to sign up for it. (And we’re writing about it as we’re performing the test.)

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.DunkinDonuts.com into our Chrome browser, it took 15 seconds and 1 click to find the signup page for their rewards program. (OK, maybe this is too easy?)

For www.Starbucks.com, it took one click and 10 seconds to get to the rewards signup page.

For these tests, we attempt to go into them without much prior knowledge of the site’s user side functionality to give it an unbiased test, but this one probably calls for a retest with a different approach.

Let’s try navigating their respective menus and trying to find out about their coffee items.

With this in mind, from the point of typing in DunkinDonuts.com and navigating through their menu to their coffee options, it took 4 clicks and 23 seconds to get to the page with their regular drip coffee and its nutrition info. It’s a nice website and an enjoyable one to navigate.

With the same goal in mind, for Starbucks.com, it took 5 clicks and over 35 seconds to find the brewed coffee, but the confusing menu setup made it tough to find just plain, hot drip coffee. The Dunkin menu has images for all their options, but Starbucks drops most of the images once you get to the menu, so we ended up on the cold brew menu instead. (As it turns out, it was the fifth option, “Freshly Brewed Coffee” that we actually were looking for… you’d think it’d be one of the first options, though… right?)

Given that the first test was inconclusive, the second one was a clear one for us (albeit unexpected). DunkinDonuts.com was quicker and easier to navigate, and much more user friendly.

With that in mind, here are the Usability scores:

(DunkinDonuts.com 9.5/10)
(Starbucks.com 8/10)

Verdict

Both sites performed respectably, but when it comes to usability and speed, one unexpectedly outperformed the other—even if just by a little bit. So, we’re pleased to announce this Showdown champion to be…

Winner:

While we’re still recovering from full bellies and empty wallets from the Thanksgiving celebratory weekend, we poured over the performance results for each site to drill in to see how they compared to last year’s event.

As usual, we used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor all three sites from Thanksgiving Day through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, spanning from November 22, 2018 to November 26, 2018. We expected strong, reliable performance again during the entire run and we were not disappointed. The results were nothing short of impressive. In fact, we were impressed to mostly see improvement this year over last year.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Last year, in an unusual feat, each site experienced not a single error or failure event. The same mostly held true for 2018, but both Walmart.com and Target.com struggled with a few slow file load times (which can cause a page to load slower), but it was never enough to cause any actual site downtime. With that in mind, we think it’s still fine to award 10’s across the board.

(Amazon 10/10)
(Walmart 10/10)
(Target 10/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

Last year was the first time we ran this event, so it was interesting to be able to compare last year’s results with this year’s. Ecommerce sites tend to have very graphics-heavy designs, and especially with sale events like these, the graphics are often big, frequently changing, and sometimes even animated or video-driven. (Amazon even had live video streaming at one point throughout the purchasing frenzy!)

With that said, through Amazon.com’s 5-day run, they saw the fastest day, on average, to be Sunday, November 25^th with 4.2 seconds—which is almost exactly what last year was (Their fastest was also a Sunday at 4.3 seconds). Their slowest day, on average, was actually on Black Friday itself at 4.5 seconds, which, admittedly, still isn’t too bad. When looking at specific times of day for performance, the best hour was 7AM on Sunday with an impressive 2.6 seconds (an improvement over last year by almost a full second), while the day before saw the slowest hour at noon with a dismal 9.3 seconds (which was significantly worse than last year).
(Amazon 9/10)

Walmart.com was the fastest last year and proved not only to hold that title again this year, but they also showed improvement! Their best average day was Cyber Monday, November 26th at 3.8 seconds. Their worst day on average was Sunday, November 25^th,  at 4.1 seconds (Coincidentally, it was also Nov. 25^th last year, but this year it was almost a full second faster). Finally, their best hour on average was on Cyber Monday at an impressive 1.8 seconds at 6PM. Their worst time on average was 6.9 seconds at 5PM on Black Friday, which is not when you want to be experiencing your slowest web speed.
(Walmart 9.5/10)

Last, but certainly not least, Target.com performed respectably, but once again underperformed in comparison to the other two. Their best day for speed, on average, was Black Friday at 5.4 seconds, which is not only worse than both Amazon and Walmart’s worst days, but it’s .2 seconds slower than their performance last year. Target’s slowest day on average was Cyber Monday, November 26 at 6.3 seconds, almost a full second slower than last year. Their fastest hour turned out to be on Black Friday at 5AM with 3.1 seconds, which is a slight improvement, with their slowest time being on Monday at 3PM with 8.9 seconds, over a second longer than last year, and sadly during mid-day on Cyber Monday.
(Target 8.5/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

California has almost always come out on top as the fastest state, but this year they were consistently dethroned by none other than Oregon! For Amazon.com, the ecommerce mega-site saw average load times of 1.4 seconds in the The Beaver State, with their next-fastest location being Ohio at 1.6 seconds and Nevada at 1.8 seconds. When it came to their slowest locations, Washington, D.C. took the prize at a sluggish 7.5 seconds and Washington state clocking in at 7.3 seconds.
(Amazon 9/10)

Just like in 2017, Walmart.com was faster, but by a mere millisecond, seeing an average load time of 1.3 seconds in Oregon. Nevada and Ohio followed at Amazon’s fastest time, 1.4 seconds. Washington state saw the site’s slowest load time at 6.8 seconds, with Colorado coming in at 6.5 seconds and Texas at 6.3 seconds – all of them being faster than Amazon’s worst locations.
(Walmart 9.5/10)

Target actually saw some improvement this year with its average load time being fastest in Nevada at 2.3 seconds in (last year’s was 2.7 in California), while Oregon came in second at 2.5 seconds and Ohio third at 2.7 seconds. And like last year, Target’s fastest speeds proved to be slower than their competitors. The slowest average speed that Target saw in the U.S. was sadly worse than last year. Washington state clocked in at a truly dismal 10.7-second average load time, with Colorado a second behind at 9.6 seconds, and Texas at 9.3 seconds. It’s unfortunate that Target continues to miss the mark for website speed.
(Target 8.5/10)

Usability

For usability, we always select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites we’re testing and replicate it. For last year’s Showdown, we decided to see what the experience would be like to use these three different websites to add a common product to the shopping cart. To do this, we selected one item to search for and add to our cart, and this year we decided to do the same again.

For each of these processes, we picked an easy item to search for, and sought to add a Blu-Ray copy of Disney and Pixar’s Incredibles 2 to our shopping cart. To begin each process, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.amazon.com into our Chrome browser, typing “Incredibles 2 blu-ray” into the store’s search box, and adding it to the cart, it took 34 seconds. From the front page, it took about 5 clicks (including having to log in to get to the final checkout) to get to the “Place your order” window.

From the point of typing www.walmart.com into Chrome and going through the same process, it took about 6 clicks and 32 seconds to log in and get to the final cart checkout page.

And from the point of typing www.target.com into our Chrome browser, it also took about 6 clicks and 32 seconds to log in and get to the checkout window.

Each site was a good experience to use, although each one has a different feel and approach. It’s a tough call to say which user experience we found to be better, but each one was straightforward and easy to use. If we judge the sites based on search results, Amazon tried suggesting a few things unrelated to the specific search of the “blu-ray” disc first (like a Jurassic Park daily deal and a preorder for Venom), while both Target and Walmart have more direct and accurate results (even though Walmart suggests the DVD and 4K before the actual blu-ray). In that case, we’d have to give Walmart and Target a little more props for accuracy in their product search.

(Amazon 9.5/10)
(Walmart 9.5/10)
(Target 10/10)

Verdict

With stakes this high once again, you would only expect the best from the leaders in ecommerce, so it comes as no surprise that the results were so good and so close.

With all things accounted for – reliability, speed, geographical performance, and the site’s usability – we’ve reached our verdict, and it surprises even us for a second year in a row:

Winner:

Even though our world continues to creep ever closer to being paper-free—trading our paper tablets for iPads, office supply stores have had to reinvent the way they do business and what their focus is. Staples and OfficeDepotTh are two mega-chain retailers who’ve long been in the fight, regularly providing printing services, as well as day-to-day necessities for the workplace, like pens, calendars, computer accessories, and so much more. And with the all-in-one ecommerce solutions monopolizing the public’s needs (we’re looking at you, Amazon), the desire to shop at these niche market leaders—who typically charge more for the same products—is becoming less and less.

So, for our latest, Showdown, we looked at these two office supply bigwigs and used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both sites for a couple weeks, spanning from August 26 to September 16, 2018. After engaging in this different kind of “Office Olympics,” we were expecting the usual quiet response from two reliable websites (i.e. good performance), but instead found what was equivalent to, well, a fun office chair race gone horribly wrong.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Both Staples and OfficeDepot’s sites seemed to perform satisfactorily, with neither site ever really seeing significant downtime, but one of them really seemed to struggle with its load time.

AlertBot ended up returning over 800 alerts from Staples.com in the evaluated time span, with half of them being slow files bogging down the page, and the other half being page load timeouts. This doesn’t necessarily mean the site crashes, just that it’s taking unusually long to load. Their site regularly had a pop-up window during this time period promoting signing up for their email list, which seemed to play a part in disrupting the site’s load time and process.  (Staples.com 5/10)

On the flip side, OfficeDepot.com performed much better (despite also having a pop-up on its page), but while it seemed to see problems less often, it did experience two failure events, experiencing 98% uptime (compared to Staples’ 100%). The majority of the errors OfficeDepot experienced were slow files or longer load times. Despite this, however, it seems as though its worst times were in the middle of the night (a frequent site maintenance time), which is common for most sites. (OfficeDepot.com 7/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser™ monitoring.

Staples.com’s speed tests proved that load times were a regular issue. Its best day, on average, was Monday, September 17^th with 7.9 seconds. It’s not the worst load time, but given that most sites are expected to load in 2 to 3 seconds these days, it’s almost three times that. Their best time of day was on Thursday, September 6 at 10am with 3.3 seconds. The worst day, on average, was Friday, September 7^th with 10.3 seconds, while the worst time of day was at 1am on Sunday, September 9^th with a sluggish 13.8 seconds.  (Staples.com 7/10)

OfficeDepot.com actually fared worse, comparatively. Their best day proved to be Thursday, September 6 with 9.9 seconds for the page to load. Their best time of day was at 6pm on Wednesday, September 5^th at 6.4 seconds. Their worst is significantly worse, with Monday, August 27^th seeing an average of 12.5 seconds, and the worst time of day being on the same day at 3am with 16.8 seconds! (OfficeDepot.com 6/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

Typically, for the geographic tests, California is king, always turning in the fastest response time. For Staples, it’s actually North Carolina, who saw an average of 3.7 seconds of page load time. Washington, DC was second at 4.7 seconds, and New York was third at 5.2 seconds. The state with the slowest results was Missouri with 15.1 seconds and New Jersey with 15 seconds. Oddly enough, California, Florida, Colorado and Virginia all averaged 15 seconds—which is unusual. (Staples.com 6.5/10)

Things were the norm for OfficeDepot, however. They saw their fastest speeds in California, at 7.5 seconds, with Virginia being second fastest at 7.7 seconds. Their slowest performance was Missouri with a crawl of 19.9 seconds, and Utah followed it up at 15.6 seconds. (OfficeDepot.com 6/10)

These aren’t the worst website load times we’ve seen, but they also weren’t anything to brag about either.

Usability

For evaluating a site’s usability, we always select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater or simply adding a similar item to both sites’ shopping carts. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to find an office executive chair and add it to our shopping cart.

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.staples.com into our Chrome browser, it took 30 seconds and 5 clicks to search for “office executive chair,” click on one to view its product page, add it to the cart, and click “checkout.” (It had us thinking “That was easy!”)

For OfficeDepot.com, it took about 40 seconds and 6 clicks to get to the checkout process. OfficeDepot had a pop-up as soon as we got to the site which added one click, and then clicking on the cart and going to the checkout seemed to be a clunkier experience.

It’s a tough call for usability, but we did find the Staples checkout process to be a tad smoother.

All things considered, here are the Usability scores:

(Staples.com 9/10)
(OfficeDepot.com 8/10)

Verdict

It’s surprising how closely these two office supply giants performed – and how disappointing each did as well.  Still, neither were so bad that they experienced many full-on website failures, but both could benefit from some serious attention paid to increasing their website speed. Neither site really stands out above the other with its performance, because the good and the bad often balanced each other out, but when it comes down to considering the sheer usability as a tie breaker, we feel the verdict is…

3 Reasons Why Website Speed is More Important than Ever

by Louis Kingston

Today’s business environment is relentlessly fast-paced. Today’s startups blast into tomorrow’s enterprises. And just as rapidly, today’s unicorns take a one-way journey into “hey, whatever happened to…” country. However, there’s another critical piece of the velocity puzzle that many businesses are missing, and it’s costing them customers and profits: the speed of their website.

Speed Kills Lives 

Nearly 50 years ago, the government introduced the phrase “speed kills” to warn drivers that going too fast from point A to point B could result in a detour to point C (the police station), point D (the hospital) or point E (the morgue). It was good advice then, and it’s still good advice now.

But when the scene shifts from the asphalt freeway to the information superhighway, speed doesn’t kill anything. On the contrary, it keeps websites alive as far as visitors are concerned. Here are the 3 reasons why:

1. Speed Makes Websites Sticky

The word “bouncy” has a happy and positive feel to it, while the word “sticky”…well, it doesn’t. Nobody shows up to a birthday party excited to jump around in the sticky castle, and swimming pool diving boards wouldn’t be doing their job if people stuck to them (although it would be kind of hilarious).

But when it comes to websites, sticky is glorious and bouncy is dreadful — and that’s where speed makes a massive difference. A study by Kissmetrics found that a one second delay in load time can send conversion rates plunging by seven percent! Think about that. Actually, don’t think about that. Just read this sentence. That took a whopping two (!) seconds.

2. Speed is SEO Rocket Fuel

An old joke in the SEO world goes like this: “Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? Page two of Google.” (And in related news, an old conversation among psychologists is: “Why do SEO people make jokes about hiding dead bodies?”)

Macabre humor aside, the point is simple to understand: for most (if not all) of their keywords, businesses either need to be on page one of Google — and preferably in the top three positions — or they might as well be advertising in the Yellow Pages (ask your grandparents).

Once again, speed is a big part of the SEO story. Google — which is obsessively secretive about how its algorithm works (the first rule of Google Search Club is that you don’t talk about Google Search Club) —has actually gone ahead and formally confirmed that page speed is a significant SEO ranking factor for mobile and desktop searches.

The moral to this story? All else being equal, a website that loads faster will rank higher than a website that loads relatively slower. And in the long-run that could mean the difference between surviving or shutting down.

3. Speed Influences Perception

Einstein revealed that time, quite literally, is relative. But you don’t have to become a physicist or get yourself on a million memes to experience the deep truth of this in your bones. Here’s a fun little experiment:

Imagine that your favorite football team is losing a very important game. It’s late in the fourth quarter, and your beloved team is behind by six points. Although the clock is ticking down one second at a time, in your view the time is racing by. Surely, the clock must be rigged!

Now, imagine that your team is ahead vs. behind. The clock is still ticking down one second a time, but to you it’s not racing — it’s grinding slowly and painfully. Yet again: the clock must be rigged!

What this simple example demonstrates is what psychologists dub the perception of speed. Essentially, this means that our emotions influence how we grasp the velocity of passing time. Just a few seconds can seem like the “blink of an eye,” or a tedious wait — as we all know from toiling at the (not-so) express line in the grocery store.

The direct link to website speed here is unmistakable: visitors dislike waiting for websites to load. Actually, they hate it. Each extra second exponentially adds to their unhappiness, and makes it more likely that they’ll exact revenge by smacking the back button on their browser — never to return.

No, this doesn’t mean that websites must load instantaneously, like flipping channels on a TV. Technology isn’t there yet, and visitors aren’t unreasonable or unrealistic. But yes, it does mean that speed is connected UX, and ultimately, with brand: fast loading times creative a positive experience and emotions that are associated with the brand, while slow loading times do the opposite.

The Bottom Line

Website speed has always been important. But these days, it’s crucial — and in many cases, it’s THE MOST IMPORTANT factor. After all, it really doesn’t matter how amazing a website is and what it offers, if visitors never get there in the first place.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and their German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

We used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both sites for a couple weeks, spanning from July 1 to July 22, 2018. As both sites and services are continuing to grow and change (Heaven knows MoviePass will probably change their rules and operations again before you finish reading this sentence), we weren’t surprised to see how similar the sites for each service performed.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Both MoviePass and Sinemia performed well here, but one did seem to struggle a little more than the other.

MoviePass.com experienced a 98.2% average uptime due to several days where the site seemed to perform slower than usual, causing the pages to not load fully – even triggering a strange account lookup error on the front page for several hours on July 14^th. This resulted in 18 failure events cataloged by AlertBot, with an average failure time of 32 minutes. This doesn’t mean downtime, per say, but the details did show that the site was struggling with its speed and load times. (MoviePass.com 7/10)

Comparatively, Sinemia.com saw 99.98% uptime with 1 failure event, although it wasn’t anything that spelled major downtime. At worst, it appeared to be a slow page / busy error that didn’t last long enough to qualify as site downtime. Overall, Sinemia proved to be pretty reliable. (Sinemia.com 9/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser™ monitoring.

MoviePass.com saw acceptable page load speeds overall, with their best average day being Wednesday, July 4^th with 3.9 seconds. The best time of day was 1am on Friday, July 20^th (which isn’t a popular time to even be using a site like theirs) at an average of just 1.6 seconds. On the other side of the proverbial coin, the slowest day was Saturday, July 14 with an average time of 8.9 seconds, and the worst time of day was also on the same day at noon (yikes!) with an embarrassing 14.1 seconds.  (MoviePass.com 7.5/10)

Sinemia actually didn’t perform too much better, with their best average speed for a single day being Saturday, July 21 with 5.4 seconds and their best time of day being Wednesday, July 4^th at 5pm with 2.7 seconds. Their slowest day was Monday, July 23^rd with 7.3 seconds, with the slowest time being on July 2^nd at 10pm with 10.2 seconds. (Sinemia.com 8/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

MoviePass.com performed the fastest in California with 1.8 seconds, with Florida coming in second at 2.4 seconds. The site performed slowest in Missouri with a sluggish 10.2 seconds, with Utah coming in second at 8.5 seconds. (MoviePass.com 8/10)

For Sinemia.com, California was also the fastest at 2.9 seconds, and Virginia was second fastest at 3.5 seconds. Missouri was also the slowest, at 11.3 seconds, with Utah being second slowest at 9.1 seconds. (Sinemia.com 7.5/10)

Neither site was all that impressive in the nature of speed – which is interesting considering there isn’t a whole lot of content on their websites to slow them down.

Usability

For usability, we select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater or simply adding a similar item to both sites’ shopping carts. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to start the service signup process (but not complete any forms).

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.moviepass.com into our Chrome browser, it took a mere 18 seconds and 2 clicks to see their plans and get to the signup form. It was a piece of cake.

For Sinemia.com, it was actually just as smooth. In 17 seconds and 2 clicks, we were able to select a plan and get to the signup page.

It’s a tough call for usability. They’re simple processes, but they get the job done and we have no complaints.

All things considered, here are the Usability scores:

(MoviePass.com 10/10)
(Sinemia.com 10/10)

Verdict

The usability usually isn’t this straightforward and clear for both sites, so it leaves us to look almost exclusively at the other categories to draw a conclusion.

Without assuming MoviePass may have more hiccups in speed due to a greater deal of traffic, Sinemia.com seems to be a clearer choice for reliability as a whole, but the sites are quite close. That bad day on July 14 also really hurt MoviePass’s performance during this evaluation period, but it can’t be ignored. So, with that said, we believe the verdict is…

Winner:

Whether it’s designing a centerpiece for home or an event, perusing the aisles for tools for a school project, or locating a frame for that beloved photograph, it’s likely you’ve found yourself inside an arts and crafts store at some point. From cloth patterns to drawing pencils to blank canvases and custom framing, these craft supply stores are just what creative people  look for in a retailer.

With the rise of ecommerce, arts and crafts stores are just as accessible from the comfort of your computer or mobile device. For artists and crafters, something is undoubtedly lost when shopping online for these kinds of supplies, but the ease of online shopping is undeniable. Two of the biggest players in the market are Michael’s and A.C. Moore, so for this, our ninth, Showdown, we’ve pit the web performance of these two leading crafty retailers against each other.

We used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both sites for a couple weeks, spanning from March 25, 2018 to April 8, 2018. As expected, both sites performed quite well, but as in most cases like this, one site saw better results than the other.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Both websites did really well here, with neither site seeing any significant, true downtime.

Michaels.com experienced 99.9% average uptime due to 2 page load timeout failure events (where something on the page takes a bit longer to load, slowing the page’s overall performance down). When drilling down to see what errors Michaels.com returned, it signaled 17 instances where the page took longer to load than expected, and 15 times where something on the page took too long to load and slowed the page down. Still, despite the 2 timeouts, Michaels did well overall. (Michaels.com 8.5/10)

Comparatively, ACMoore.com saw 100% uptime with no significant failure events. However, there were still 4 recorded moments where there was a slow file and 4 occurrences of when the page itself took longer to load than expected. Still, ACMoore.com never actually went down, so we have to give them high marks for that.
(ACMoore.com 9.5/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

Michaels.com saw pretty decent page load speeds overall, with their best average day being Wednesday, April 4^th with 3.5 seconds. The best time of day was 6pm on Friday, April 6^th at an average of just 2.1 seconds. On the flip side, the slowest day was Sunday, March 25 with an average time of 6.8 seconds, and the worst time of day was Sunday, April 8 at 8pm with 6.7 seconds.  (Michaels.com 8.5/10)

ACMoore.com was truly impressive with their load time. Their best day—Tuesday, March 27 with an average of just 1.5 seconds! A.C. Moore’s best time was even faster with Wednesday, April 4^th, at 10pm seeing a load time of just 1.2 seconds. Even more amazing was the fact that ACMoore.com’s worst day—Thursday, March 29–saw an average load time of 1.8 seconds! Their worst time, however, was significantly longer (in comparison) at 3.8 seconds on Thursday, April 5 at 3pm. (It’s interesting that both slower speeds were on a Thursday.) It was really a rarity that ACMoore.com went over 2 seconds in load time, and for that, we have to applaud their excellent web performance. (ACMoore.com 10/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

California continues to reign supreme as the leading location in speed. Michaels.com loaded within 2 seconds (on average) in California, with Florida seeing the second fastest speed of 2.5 seconds. Missouri turned out to have the slowest load time of 7.1 seconds, while Utah came in second-to-last at 4.9 seconds. (Michaels.com 8.5/10)

For ACMoore.com, California is the fastest, once again, at an average of just 1.9 seconds. The second fastest, again, is Florida with 2.4 seconds. The slowest speed time is also seen in Missouri at an average of 8.2 seconds, with NJ coming in second-to-last at 5.5 seconds. It’s interesting to note that ACMoore.com proved to have faster speeds than Michaels, but also slower speeds (when it comes to loading in specific locations). (ACMoore.com 8.5/10)

Usability

For usability, we select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater or simply adding a similar item to both sites’ shopping carts. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to find some paint brushes, add them to the shopping cart and start the checkout process.

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Mozilla Firefox and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.michaels.com into our Firefox browser and searching “paintbrushes” in the product search box, it took 30 seconds and 4 clicks to select a pack of brushes, add them to the cart and view the cart.  It was definitely a smooth experience.

ACMoore.com was, unfortunately, a far more frustrating experience. Upon visiting the site, we were hit with a pop-up asking for us to signup for their email list to get a coupon. Plus, their signup box at the top of the page is typically where a site search would go, so it’s easy to mix them up (despite the “Sign Up for Offers” label next to it). It didn’t take long to discover that their site also doesn’t seem to specialize in craft materials, as a search for something as basic as “paintbrushes” returned nothing. We tried altering the wording in our search a bit but gave up after reaching a minute and a half.

To be fair, we decided to run the usability process again with different search criteria. ACMoore.com seems organized by craft project ideas, without any real discernable things you can purchase from their site (and yet, they have a shopping cart), which makes the sites quite different from each other (and gives Michaels.com an edge over ACMoore.com in sheer product availability and variety). In the end, while the brick and mortar stores are very similar, their online presences are not. So we decided to run it again to see how fast we can get to, and briefly look around, their individual Weekly Ads.

For Michaels.com, it took about 2 clicks and roughly 10 seconds to get to the Weekly Ad for May 6 and start clicking around. It offered two choices for ads, but we chose the basic ad for the week to browse. It was a very easy experience.

For ACMoore.com, it took 20 seconds, 3 clicks and typing in our zip code to get to our local area A.C. Moore store’s ad before we could start clicking around. The ad isn’t nearly as thorough or as nice as Michael’s is, either.

All things considered, here are the Usability scores:

(Michaels.com 10/10)
(ACMoore.com 3/10)

Verdict

When it comes to speed, ACMoore.com bested their competitor, Michaels.com, but given the lack of substance and actual storefront of ACMoore.com, it may not be too fair to compare them. However, a quick lap through the aisles of both brick-and-mortar stores for each brand will show just how similar each store is. So, with taking everything into consideration, and both sites performing very well when it comes to the actual site reliability, it’s hard not to give weight to the user experience when making the final conclusion…

It may have been squashing a goomba while punching a coin out of a brick, dodging barrels being thrown by a grumpy gorilla, sorting oddly shaped falling blocks into interlocking patterns or simply catapulting miffed fowl at a group of defenseless pigs on your mobile phone, but chances are high that everyone has played a video game at one point in their life.

Poor web performance is no game any self-respecting owner of a website should play. We recently aimed our sights at the gaming industry and picked out two heavy hitters to evaluate: Xbox and Playstation. While their websites may not be the main point of interest for gamers, they’re relied upon for information, updates and even online digital game sales. Their online gaming servers may be the most important thing to keep running smoothly in gamers’ minds, but these top players in the industry will want to make sure their website stays up and always accessible.

We used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both sites for a couple weeks, spanning from February 4, 2018 to February 25, 2018. Both sites performed well—as can be expected from parent companies Microsoft (Xbox) and Sony (PlayStation)—but, as usual, one performed just slightly ahead of the other, even if not by much.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Both websites experienced 100% uptime, but both sites encountered minor errors that served as a few speedbumps along the way. Still, it wasn’t enough to qualify as downtime.

Xbox.com, despite its 100% uptime, experienced around 50 “slow page” warnings and over 20 page load timeouts (where something on the page takes a bit longer to load, slowing the page’s overall performance down). Xbox.com also returned an SSL Certificate expiration notice. However, none of these qualified as significant outages, and for that we still have to give them props. (Xbox 9/10)

Playstation fared the same with 100% uptime and a lot better when it came to the little errors. They only registered 7 timeouts and 5 slow page loads, and for that we give them slightly higher marks.  (Playstation 9.5/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

Speed is crucial to the gamer – be it game load times (who else hates waiting for spinning icons to finish to get us past a cut scene or moving on to a new map in a game?) or server responsiveness – so a speedy game company website is key. Xbox.com experienced pretty quick load times, with its best day being February 24^th with an average of 4.6 seconds. Its best response time, however, was on February 23^rd at noon with 2.2 seconds. On the flipside, its worst day was February 12 with 6.7 seconds (which isn’t all that bad), but their worst hour proved to be on February 11^th at 11pm with a sluggish 13.1 seconds. (Xbox 8.5/10)

Surprisingly, Playstation turned out to be just a little bit slower, with their best day average being 6 seconds on February 22^nd. Their best time by the hour was on the same day at noon with 2.3 seconds, just a hair slower than Xbox’s best time. Their worst day was a full second longer on February 11^th with 11.7 seconds, and their worst time by the hour was also 13.1 seconds, but on February 10^th at 7am. (Playstation 8/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

California seems to win out most of the time as the fastest location for load times and for Xbox.com, it was no different. California saw load speeds of 2.1 seconds on average, with Florida coming in second at 2.2 seconds. Georgia, however, saw an average worst time of 10.3 seconds with Missouri coming in second at 9.2 seconds. (Xbox 8.5/10)

Playstation.com actually turned in slightly more sluggish results geographically, too. Their best location was California, as well, but it was 2.5 seconds, and Florida was a close second at 2.7 seconds. Playstation’s slowest spots were also in Georgia and Missouri, at 12.6 seconds and 11.2 seconds, respectively. It’s not the worst we’ve seen, but Xbox clearly performed better. (Playstation 7.5/10)

Usability

For usability, we select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater or simply adding a similar item to both sites’ shopping carts. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to add a digital download of a popular video game to the shopping cart and start the checkout process.

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.xbox.com into our Chrome browser and clicking around to find the Xbox One games, choosing the featured one (which, in this case was Dragonball FighterZ), clicking “Buy Now” and getting to the account login screen, it took 1 minute and 10 seconds. From the homepage, it took 7 clicks to get to the checkout process. It’s been a while since we’ve last visited their site, so our experience was fresh, but we encountered some significant slow loading times when getting to the product page. We actually added an additional click to the process because the “Buy Now” button didn’t load properly at first (and did nothing upon its first click). Overall, we got to do what we set out to do, but the process could have gone a lot smoother.

We were hoping for a better experience from Playstation, and we got one. From the point of typing www.playstation.com into our Chrome browser, it took 4 mouse clicks and 35 seconds to find a featured video game (in this case, Bravo Team), and get to the checkout stage (which was also an account login screen). There was some delay on first clicking on the game title, but it still loaded quickly and allowed us to get to the end of the process fast.

Both sites allowed us to get the job done in a rather speedy manner, but Playstation’s site gave us a much more positive experience.

With that said, here are the Usability scores:

(Xbox 8/10)          (Playstation 9.5/10)

Verdict

Both sites performed very well, but that positive user experience helped push one over the other, albeit only slightly. So while it was a tough call to make, we have come to a conclusion —

Whether you’re hitting the gym or the trails, you’re likely to be lacing up with some active footwear that helps you burn calories and exercise in comfort and style. When it comes to activewear, there are many companies these days who contribute their accessories and gear to our daily workout regiments, however, two major players come to the front of our minds when it comes to popular footwear brands.

For our latest AlertBot Showdown, we picked frontrunners Nike and Reebok to evaluate the website performance for each athletic wear’s online persona.

We used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both sites for a couple weeks, spanning from October 1, 2017 to October 22, 2017. While both sporty sites performed well, it became pretty clear after a significant trip-up that one site left the other in the dust.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

For the first time in our experience of tracking sites for a Showdown, one of the sites in the running went down while we were actually in the office. That gave us the ability to watch the event as it unfolded while AlertBot performed its tests against the failing site. Reebok.com hit a snag on October 13 around 3:30pm EST. It took nearly a full hour for their site to recover. We manually checked their site from our desks at 4pm, and the site was still down. We checked again at 4:15 and the site was back up, however, only text was loading – no images. By 4:30pm, when we checked one more time, the Reebok.com was back up in its entirety. It was the only failure event that Reebok.com encountered during the weeks it was tested for this Showdown, but it was definitely a doozy. During this time period, their average downtime was just 99.85%, but it’s proof that “99% uptime” can still contain an hour of critical downtime. And for a retail site, this could truly prove costly. (Reebok 7/10)

On the other hand, Nike.com experienced no significant failure events and only occasionally experienced minor issues like a slow page file or a “timed out” error. From the starting line, Nike is already on the fast track to success between the two brands. (Nike 9.5/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

Speed is everything for the image of brands like these, which makes it a bit ironic that both sites seem to struggle a little in this area. Reebok’s fastest average speed was on October 4^th with 6.4 seconds load time. Their worst average speed was October 23 at 7.9 seconds. They’re not drastically different, but that’s not an impressive load time.  (Reebok 7/10)

At this point, one might expect Nike to sprint past Reebok in the load time category, but Nike didn’t fair much better, with 6.3 seconds being their fastest average speed on October 23 (which is coincidentally the day of Reebok’s slowest average), and Nike’s slowest average speed was 7.5 seconds. Again, they’re not great speeds, but in this case, Nike edges out Reebok, even if it is only by a slight skip rather than a jump. (Nike 7/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

Looking at site response time geographically tells a different story. First off, Reebok shows that they had the fastest load time in Texas with an average of 3.7 seconds. Their second fastest time was in New Jersey at 4.8 seconds. Virginia produced the slowest return, with an average of 6.9 seconds. (Reebok 7.5/10)

Yet again, Nike only performed slightly better, with California showing the fastest average speed of 3.2 seconds and Texas showing the second fastest at 4.5 seconds. However, Nike performed worse than Reebok when it came to slowest location, with Illinois taking the cake for worst average speed, at 9.7 seconds! (Nike 7/10)

Usability

For usability, we select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like visiting a site for nutritional information or going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater, or simply adding a similar item to both sites’ shopping carts. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to add their latest running shoe to the shopping cart and start the checkout process.

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.reebok.com into our Chrome browser and clicking around to find a Men’s Running Shoe, choosing the first one, choosing a size, adding it to the cart and clicking “checkout,” it took 36 seconds. From the homepage, it took 5 clicks to get to the checkout process. At first glance at the homepage of the site, it seemed like it might be a challenge to actually find what we’re looking for, but it was a pretty easy shopping experience.

From the point of typing www.nike.com into our Chrome browser, it took 8 mouse clicks and 48 seconds to find a men’s running shoe and get to the checkout stage. Upon first visiting the site, the visitor is hit with an ultra closeup of a bunch of kids in gray Nike hoodies and it takes most of the page hostage. We scrolled down to the first running shoe advertised and clicked on it, only to find that it was only a women’s shoe (which is not mentioned on the image on the homepage). We then had to click around to the men’s department, for this task’s purpose, in order to find a shoe and continue the process. Both sites get the job done, but Reebok was a more pleasant shopping experience.

With that said, here are the Usability scores:

(Reebok 9/10)        (Nike 8/10)

Verdict

Both sites performed respectably, but we can’t ignore that failure that Reebok experienced on the 13^th. Other than that, the sites performed quite similarly (and we actually preferred Reebok’s shopping experience a little more than Nike’s). Still, since we’re really weighing in here on web performance, the winner is rather clear —

It’s that time of year again, where sales conscious bargain chasers brave the throngs of other sale hunters in the frigid November early morning air on that most dreaded of retail shopping days: BLACK FRIDAY. Just hours earlier, many of these same credit-card-wielding warriors were huddled around a table with family, giving thanks once again while stuffing themselves to their waistline’s discontent with mashed potatoes, roasted turkey and homemade pie. The juxtaposition of these two contradicting practices is staggering, but it’s no less the holiday tradition year after year.

As we approach another Christmas holiday, the world of ecommerce continues to ramp up the way they approach Black Friday–and its younger electronic sibling, Cyber Monday–with many now starting their sales right after Halloween. Accordingly, we decided to do something special for our next Website Showdown: a Black Friday / Cyber Monday edition that pits the ecommerce colossus Amazon against the websites for brick-and-mortar retail mega-stores Walmart and Target. It’s a truly epic battle royale to see how each site performs during the biggest shopping days of the year.

So, as usual, we used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor all three sites from Thanksgiving through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, spanning from November 23, 2017 to November 27, 2017. We expected strong, reliable performance during the entire run and we were not disappointed. The results were nothing short of impressive.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Usually for this section, we evaluate each site’s performance in detail, drilling down to specific errors each one faced, and the different types of errors we usually see (like Slow Page Files, Timeouts, etc). It’s unusual for the sites in a two-site Showdown to not return a single error, much less a three-site Showdown. In this special evaluation of three sites, not one single, solitary error was found between them. All three sites avoided any kind of failure event or significant error. With the stakes so high for three of the biggest retailers on the most significant sale days of the year, one would expect nothing less. So, with that said, each site earns a perfect score for Reliability.

(Amazon 10/10)
(Walmart 10/10)
(Target 10/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

Sites like Amazon, Walmart and Target boast very graphics-driven designs, and especially with monstrous sale event days like these, the graphics are often big, bold, and frequently changing.

With that said, of Amazon.com’s 5-day run, they saw the fastest day, on average, to be Sunday, November 26^th with 4.3 seconds. It’s not the slickest speed a site can have, but it’s certainly not bad. On their slowest day, on average, Amazon still clocked in at 5 seconds on Cyber Monday, which is still not too shabby. When looking at specific times of day for performance, the best hour was at 5AM on Sunday with an impressive 3.4 seconds, while Cyber Monday also saw the slowest hour at 7AM with 6.7 seconds.
(Amazon 9/10)

Walmart.com held their own surprisingly well during this time, too. Their best average day was Thanksgiving Day, November 23^rd at 4.2 seconds, just barely edging ahead of Amazon. Their worst day on average was Saturday, November 25^th, also at 5 seconds. Finally, their best hour on average was on Thanksgiving at a remarkable 2.7 seconds at 5PM. Their worst time on average was 6.4 seconds at 2AM on Sunday, November 26.
(Walmart 9.5/10)

Last, but certainly not least, Target.com didn’t perform quite as well as the other two, but they still performed respectably, especially considering the fact their site avoided any failure events. Their best day for speed, on average, was Thanksgiving Day at 5.2 seconds, which is worse than both Amazon and Walmart’s worst days. Target’s slowest day on average was Sunday, November 26 at 5.4 seconds, which at the very least, shows a great consistency for the performance of the retail chain’s online presence. Their fastest hour turned out to be on Black Friday at 9AM with 3.9 seconds, with their slowest being on Cyber Monday at 4AM with 7.6 seconds.
(Target 8.5/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

California tends to prove to see the fastest web transaction speeds in the country, and in this test scenario, they once again come out on top for each website. For Amazon.com, the titan of ecommerce saw average load times of 2 seconds in the The Golden State, with their next-fastest location being Texas at 3.2 seconds. When it came to their slowest locations, Illinois came in at the bottom with 6.6 seconds, with Georgia just above them with 6.3 seconds.
(Amazon 9/10)

Walmart.com was only a millisecond faster, seeing an average load time of 1.9 seconds in California, also coming in faster in Texas at 2.7 seconds. But Walmart saw a placement swap for which state was the slowest, with Georgia coming in at the bottom at 6.6 seconds and Illinois right above them at 6.5 seconds.
(Walmart 9.5/10)

Target loaded on average at 2.7 seconds in California, with Texas coming in next at 3.5 seconds. Again, Target’s fastest speeds proved to be slower than their competitors. The slowest average speed that Target saw in the U.S. was also Georgia, at 7.2 seconds, but Washington stepped in as their second slowest, at 7 seconds flat.
(Target 8.5/10)

Usability

For usability, we always select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites we’re testing and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like visiting a site for nutritional information or going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater. Like with the most recent Showdown for Lowes and Home Depot, we decided to see what the experience would be like to use these three different websites to add a common product to the shopping cart.

For each of these processes, let’s see about adding the PS4 version of new video game Star Wars: Battlefront II to our shopping cart. To begin each process, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.amazon.com into our Chrome browser, typing “Star Wars Battlefront 2” into the store’s search box and adding it to the cart, it took 30 seconds. From the front page, it took about 5 clicks (including selecting the autocomplete suggestion in the search bar) to get to the final “Place Order” window.

From the point of typing www.walmart.com into our Chrome browser, it took about 4 clicks and 35 seconds to get to the Cart Checkout window. The autocomplete was a little clumsy to deal with (it was tough to tell if the browser was really proceeding to load the site), but overall, it was a decent experience.

From the point of typing www.target.com into our Chrome browser, it took about 5 clicks and 27 seconds to get to the Cart Checkout window.

All three sites were good experiences, although each one has a very different feel. It’s a tough call to say which user experience we found to be better, so we decided to try a second test. This time, we chose something different, like Wonder Woman on Blu-Ray. We also decided to try Mozilla Firefox this time.

The process of finding the Blu-Ray disc and getting to the checkout process on Amazon took about 4 clicks and 25 seconds. The process on Walmart.com took 26 seconds and 5 clicks. On Target.com, it took roughly 24 seconds and 4 clicks. This time, we noticed that in the search results, there’s a convenient “Add to cart” option next to the items on Target’s site that Walmart and Amazon both DON’T have. This definitely gives Target a slight edge over their competitors. And with that being the only real significant difference, outside of its slightly faster completion time, we’ll have to say Target wins the Usability portion of this Showdown.

(Amazon 9.5/10)
(Walmart 9.5/10)
(Target 10/10)

Verdict

With stakes this high, you would only expect the best from the leaders in the retail industry, so it comes as no surprise that the results were so good and so close. This may be the toughest Showdown we’ve had to score yet, especially with three hats in the ring this time around.

But, with all things accounted for – reliability, speed, geographical performance, and the site’s usability – we’ve reached our verdict:

WINNER:

Living in an age where nearly every industry is driven by ecommerce, it should come as no surprise that this includes the home improvement world. Home Depot and Lowes are titans in their industry, and both have a strong online presence. But when it comes to who may have the better performing site, we set out to nail down one true winner.

For our fifth website Showdown, the AlertBot team got out their proverbial measuring tape and slipped on a stylish apron to dig in to the performance of HomeDepot.com vs Lowes.com.

We used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both sites for a couple weeks, spanning from August 11, 2017 to August 31, 2017. Not surprisingly, the performance for these heavy lifters proved to be rather resilient for both sites. Neither service’s site experienced significant downtime, but as usual, one did prove to perform a little better the other.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

HomeDepot.com performed quite well over the tested time period, experiencing no failure events. At most, it had a couple hiccups, like a short-lived Timed Out error or a Slow Page File notice, but none of these occurrences caused any amount of significant downtime. (HomeDepot 9/10)

On the other hand, Lowes’ site experienced one failure event on August 21^st when the site was not responding for roughly three minutes around 12:21 in the afternoon. When errors like these occur, AlertBot tests them from a second location to confirm if the error is widespread or just a brief localized outage. In this instance, the error persisted after a few tests in different locations, qualifying it for actual site downtime, before the issue resolved.    (Lowes 8/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. These tests are performed from the perspective of a first-time visitor with no prior cache of the website’s content. AlertBot runs the tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

HomeDepot.com has a great deal of graphics on the front page, which typically slows sites down considerably. However, it didn’t seem to slow this site down much. HomeDepot.com’s best day, on average, was Tuesday, August 29^th  with an impressive load time of 1.1 seconds. The “worst” day average was still an impressive 1.9 seconds.  When evaluating the site’s speed by hour, the site loaded in just 0.8 seconds at 1AM on Sunday August 20^th. The worst hour was also on August 20^th, at 2PM with 5.1 seconds. Overall, HomeDepot.com’s speed is quite good.  (HomeDepot 9.5/10)

Lowes.com has drastically less content on its front page, but it performed considerably slower than HomeDepot.com did. Sadly, Lowes best day was actually slower than HomeDepot’s worst, with an average of 6 seconds on Sunday, August 13^th. Lowes.com’s worst day was Monday, August 26^th with 7.1 seconds. That’s not horrendous, but with sites being expected to perform faster and faster these days, a respected retail giant like Lowes needs to up their speed game. On an hourly average basis, their best time was 11PM on Wednesday, August 23^rd with 7.1 seconds (Again, their fastest time is slower than HomeDepot’s slowest). Their worst load time by hour was Sunday, August 27^th at 1PM with a sluggish 10.1 seconds. (Lowes 8/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

Usually when we look at site speeds across the United States, sites tend to perform better in California than anywhere else. This isn’t the case for HomeDepot.com, however. For Home Depot, Florida appeared to experience the fastest web transaction (less than one second), while it experienced the slowest transaction test in California (But it’s still only 2.3 seconds). After Florida, however, it experienced the next fastest web transactions in New Jersey and North Carolina (both at 1 second). (HomeDepot 9/10)

Lowes.com had the fastest web transaction in California at 3 seconds. The next fastest was North Carolina, already up to 4.3 seconds. The slowest performance occurred in New York at a whopping 9.4 seconds (with the second-slowest being Georgia with 9.3 seconds). (Lowes 7.5/10)

Usability

For usability, we select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdowns, we tested things like visiting a site for nutritional information or going through the motions of ordering movie tickets from a local theater. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to add a common product to the shopping cart.

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.homedepot.com into our Chrome browser and entering “leather gloves” into the search box, choosing one and adding it to the cart, it took 25 seconds. From the front page, it took 5 clicks to get to the “Checkout now” process. It wasn’t bad, but we found the Lowes process just a bit smoother.

From the point of typing www.lowes.com into our Chrome browser, it took 4 mouse clicks and 20 seconds to get the gloves into the shopping cart and view the cart. The “Add to cart” button is much more obvious and visible on Lowes’ site, where it took a moment to locate it on Home Depot’s site. And while both sites offer a “compare” option so you can look at product features side by side, it wasn’t very noticeable on HomeDepot’s site, while it was more prominent on Lowes.com.

The aesthetic of both websites isn’t bad, but Lowes has a crisper and more streamlined appearance and functionality. Both sites get the job done pretty quickly, but we had a slightly smoother experience with Lowes. With that said, here are the Usability scores:

(HomeDepot 9/10)       (Lowes 10/10)

Final Verdict

Both sites performed respectably, but HomeDepot.com clearly performed faster and was more reliable than Lowes.com. Despite the fact that we may have preferred the shopping experience on Lowes.com just a little bit more, one cannot ignore the slower site performance.

So, for the fifth AlertBot Showdown, the site that gets to join the ranks of previous winners Apple, FedEx, and Burger King is…

WINNER:

Whether you’re picking up a Kids meal for your littlest picky eater or satisfying a hankering for greasy and salty French fries, chances are you’ve found yourself in line at a drive-thru for McDonald’s or Burger King at some point in your life. But these two massive burger chains also have an online presence, and while you’re not exactly going to try to order a single or double patty to be shipped to your home, you might find yourself visiting the websites for either fast food giant to look up their menus or latest promotions.

So for this, our fourth website Showdown, the AlertBot team rolled up their sleeves, grabbed a handful of ketchup packets, and sat down to take the wax paper wrap off of these two websites to see just how the sites for BK and Mickey D’s performed in comparison to one another.

We used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both sites for three weeks, spanning from June 5, 2017 to June 26, 2017. Not surprisingly, the performance proved to be reliable for both sites. Neither service’s site went down, but as usual, one did prove to perform a little faster than the other.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

Both sites performed quite well during the time period, but McDonald’s site experienced a hiccup on the first day of the test, June 5. It was a timed-out warning (meaning the site failed to load in the expected time period), but it didn’t last longer than a couple minutes, and didn’t seem to affect the site for very long. Otherwise, their site was pretty stable. (McDonald’s 9/10)

On the other hand, Burger King’s site didn’t experience any confirmed failure events at all and experiencing complete uptime during the test time. However, it did see two transient errors—one a slow page notice and one a brief timed-out notice—for less than a minute that affected the site’s overall performance from a single location. When errors like these occur, AlertBot tests them from a second location to confirm if the error is widespread or just a brief localized blip. In these instances, the error only occurred from just one test location and didn’t qualify as a downtime event.    (Burger King 9.5/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user.  We run these tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

Both sites are quite graphics-heavy, so it doesn’t surprise me that they may experience some slowness at times.

McDonalds’ loading speeds averaged around 9.5 seconds per day, with its best time being 10 AM on   Monday, June 12 at 5 seconds and its best day being Monday, June 26^th with an average of 8.8 seconds. Its worst day was Monday, June 5^th, when the load time crawled to an average of 12.7 seconds, while the worst time was on Wednesday June 7^th at 11 PM with a pitiful 17.6 seconds. (McDonald’s 8.5/10)

Burger King performed significantly better by comparison. Overall, the site averaged 3.6 seconds for its load time, which is pretty good. Its best day was Wednesday, June 19^th when it averaged 3.5 seconds, with its best load time being on Wednesday, June 14^th with a speedy 1.8 seconds load time at 6 AM. Monday, June 5 was the worst day, seeing a 6.1 seconds load time (which was still better than McDonald’s BEST day), and their worst time being Saturday, June 17^th at 10 AM with 8.5 seconds. (Burger King 9.5/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

It seems to be the norm for California to record the fastest speeds, and the same holds true for McDonald’s. However, surprisingly, New Jersey was the next fastest state on the list. Comparatively, the fast food chain legends saw the slowest load times in Georgia and Utah.  (McDonald’s 9/10)

Burger King, for the most part, saw stronger returns across the board, with California, Colorado, Virginia, Missouri, Washington and Texas all pinging approximately 1 msec. Their slowest locations were North Carolina and also Utah. (Burger King 10/10)

Usability

For usability, we select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdown, we tested out how the experience of tracking a real package might look when using two popular parcel services. For this Showdown, we’ll see what the experience is like to use their respective websites to look up the menu and nutritional information on each company’s signature burgers.

For each of these processes, we started by opening a new tab in Google Chrome and typing in the site’s URL.

From the point of typing www.mcdonalds.com into our Chrome browser and navigating until we could find the Big Mac nutritional info, it took 26 seconds. We were held up at first by a prompt on the front page that asked us to join their email list. The browser also wanted to access our location. From closing out the pop-up on down to finding the Big Mac info, it took five mouse clicks.

Now, from the point of typing www.burgerking.com into our Chrome browser, it took four mouse clicks and 18 seconds to get to the Whopper’s nutritional info. BK’s design is much simpler, so we see why their load times were faster.

We liked the aesthetic of both websites, but McDonalds has a slightly more modern feel in its design. However, their graphics are all-around larger and they have more going on on the page, which could be why their overall load times are slower than Burger King’s.

So, with all things considered, with the goal being able to find the nutritional info on each chain’s most popular burger, here are the Usability scores:

(McDonalds 9/10)       (Burger King 10/10)

Final Verdict

Neither site performed exceptionally well over the other, but it’s safe to say that Burger King edges out McDonalds in speed and overall performance. (Just for fun, we should follow this up with a who-has-the-better-French-Fries competition!)

So, for the fourth AlertBot Showdown, the site that gets to join the ranks of previous winners Apple, FedEx and Fandango is…

WINNER:

One of the most appealing things about ordering items online is receiving packages in the mail. Not only is it convenient for the fruits of your shopping toils to be brought directly to your door, but you can do your shopping from anywhere at any time of the day or night (and in your pajamas if you so desire). Two well-known, worldwide services that nearly everyone who has sent or received a parcel has used are UPS and FedEx. Both services are easily accessible for sending packages, and both are frequently used for receiving them. Both services also have websites that enable users to track their packages (if they’ve been given a tracking number), while also helping to provide resources for sending them out.

For our third Showdown, we set out to track the performance of these two services, trucking along until we could wrap up the results for delivery to you.

We used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both parcel service sites for three weeks, spanning from March 27, 2017 to April 17, 2017. Not surprisingly, the performance proved to be reliable for both sites. Neither service’s site went down, but one did prove to perform a little faster than the other.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for what caused those failures.

FedEx’s website experienced not a single, solitary failure event. At the very worst, it may have experienced some slight slowness for a short period of time, but it didn’t affect their overall reliability results. (FedEx 10/10)

UPS’s website was a different story, but there were also no failure events or periods of actual downtime either. The most UPS’s site saw were a handful of warnings that the site was performing a little slower than usual, and a little slower than the average expected load time. These periods of minor slowness only lasted for about 3 to 5 minutes each.   (UPS 9.5/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user.  We run these tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

Both websites have pretty basic homepages, so the load times for customers should be fairly quick (even on a slow internet connection) if the sites aren’t experiencing any server issues.

FedEx’s site speed is fantastic, averaging less than 1 second on most occasions. Its response time was recorded on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 at 0.5 seconds, while its slowest response time was on Monday, April 17, 2016 at just over 2 seconds (which is still very good). (FedEx 10/10)

UPS was also pretty good, but their best response time was about the same as FedEx’s worst response time. UPS’s best response time was 2 seconds on Tuesday, April 11, while their worst was on Monday, April 10^th with just a hair under 6 seconds. The standard used to be 7 seconds, but these days, users expect sites to load in roughly 2 seconds.  (UPS 8/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others.

It’s also interesting to note that in most of these tests we’ve done for these Showdowns so far, California seems to frequently come out on top when it comes to website speed. With that said, FedEx seemed to perform best in California – at just under half a second, and performed the “worst” in Virginia, which still averaged around an impressive 1.1 seconds.  (FedEx 10/10)

UPS also saw its best results in California, but clocked in at around 1.4 seconds there. Texas returned the slowest results, however, averaging around 5.6 seconds. (UPS 8/10)

Usability

For usability, we select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdown, we went through the motions of ordering tickets for a recent movie on MovieTickets.com and Fandango.com, For this evaluation of FedEx and UPS, we’ll see how the experience of tracking a real package goes.

For each package tracking process, we started with having the tracking number copied onto our clipboard and then typed the URL of the test site into our browser.

From the point of typing www.FedEx.com into our Firefox browser, selecting the tracking tab at the top, pasting the tracking number into the search field on the left sidebar and clicking “Track,” it took only 15 seconds to get to the tracking results. That’s really fast! We then tried the same process again using the Google Chrome browser, for which the “region” needed to be selected first this time, it took only a second longer to complete!

Now, from the point of typing www.UPS.com into our Firefox browser, selecting the region, pasting the tracking number into the search field on the left sidebar and clicking “Track,” it took roughly 22 seconds to get to the tracking results. That’s not bad, but it’s clearly slower than our FedEx experience. We then tried the same process again using the Google Chrome browser and it took an impressive 12 seconds to complete!

So, with all things considered, with the goal being to track a package as quickly as possible, here are the Usability scores:

(FedEx 10/10)        (UPS 9/10)

Final Verdict

It’s a close match, to be honest, but we’d have to say that FedEx.com still outperformed UPS.com in the speed factor, delivering more than just highly anticipated parcels to its customers, but reliable website performance swiftly as well.

So, for the third AlertBot Showdown, the site that gets to join the ranks of previous winners Apple and Fandango is…

WINNER:

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Last fall, AlertBot debuted its first website “Showdown,” pitting cell phone giants Apple and Samsung against each other in an epic web performance death match (of sorts) to see whose website performed the best. (For those results – and to see who won – check out that blog here.)

For our second Showdown, we decided to grab an oversized bucket of popcorn, an unreasonably large cup of soda, and a pair of cheap, plastic 3D glasses and plopped down into the comfiest of chairs to evaluate two of the premiere movie ticket buying sites: Fandango and MovieTickets.com.

If you’re a movie buff who loves a night out reclining in front of ceiling-high silver screens to watch the latest Hollywood has to offer, chances are you’ve purchased tickets online before. And what would be more frustrating than website failure while you’re trying to combat the masses to secure your entry into an anticipated film’s opening night?
We used AlertBot’s external website monitoring system and its TrueBrowser™ technology to monitor both sites from December 26, 2016 to January 16, 2017. Not surprisingly, the performance proved to be pretty good overall, although one of the sites experienced some pretty significant issues on one of the days. Both sites saw some minor “Slow Page” warnings, but MovieTickets.com took a hit right after Christmas with a dreaded “Server Too Busy” error, meaning their website couldn’t withstand the weight of the traffic it was getting.

Reliability

For the reliability evaluation of a website, we look for failure events (like when a page doesn’t fully load or it is completely down), and we look for the causes of those failures.
Fandango’s website experienced not one single failure event. The worst things seemed to get for Fandango in this time period was a handful of minor “Slow Page” warnings on Dec. 29th and after the new year on the 2nd and 5th. (Fandango 10/10)

Meanwhile, MovieTickets.com experienced what AlertBot considered to be 13 failure events. While most of them were only 3 to 5-minute-long for slow page loads, on Dec. 27th (a Tuesday), the site saw some significant outages where the site was down and reporting a “Server Too Busy” error for nearly 6 hours! When visiting the site during this stretch of time, chances are users were met with the dreaded “Server Too Busy” error message in their web browser instead of the actual site. This would have been super frustrating for visitors (especially if you’re trying to order tickets in a jiffy). (MovieTickets.com 7/10)

Speed

When evaluating a website’s speed, we look at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive by the user. We run these tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.
Both websites have pretty busy front pages, but both tend to change often and feature videos or Flash-driven ads and some graphic-heavy content – all of which can really compromise a website’s load time.

Fandango’s speed is solid, averaging less than 2 seconds. Its fastest day was Friday, Jan. 13, 2017 at 1.7 seconds and its slowest was Thursday, Dec. 29, 2016 at just over 2 seconds. (Fandango 9/10)

MovieTickets.com didn’t fare quite as well, unfortunately. On its best day, Tuesday Jan. 3, the front page took almost 4 seconds to load. On its worst day, Dec. 27 (also a Tuesday), it took almost 7 seconds to load – which is definitely below the current online industry’s website load time standards. (MovieTickets.com 7/10)

Geographic

It’s always interesting to see how sites perform differently across the world. If we look exclusively at the United States, it’s intriguing to see which states regularly see faster or slower times than others. Fandango saw the fastest load times in California (I suppose that makes sense, given the movie industry being centered there), with the slowest happening in Texas. Still, the slowest times were typically still under 2 seconds of load time, with Washington, Virginia and Texas all seeing load times around 2 seconds or pushing 3 seconds. (Fandango 10/10)

For MovieTickets.com, it’s a different story. We already know they struggled with speed, but the question here is – where? California is also the best location for MovieTickets.com, with load times around 2.7 seconds. The worst, again, is Texas, with almost 6.5 seconds. Florida and North Carolina also performed well, while Washington joined Texas as one of the slower locations. (MovieTickets.com 8/10)

Usability

For usability, we select a common task a user might typically try to accomplish when visiting the sites and replicate it. For our previous Showdown, we chose the task of ordering the latest cellphone from the respective sites of Apple and Samsung. For these sites, we’ll see how the experience of ordering movie tickets compares to one another.

Starting with selecting a movie to buy tickets for, we approached each site with the goal of ordering two tickets for the recently released The LEGO Batman Movie.

By selecting a brand new film, it was easy to find the film on the homepage of Fandango.com and start clicking through to order tickets. From the point of typing www.Fandango.com into our Firefox browser, clicking on the LEGO Batman Movie poster, putting in our zip code, selecting the next available time and number of tickets, it took roughly 40 seconds to get to the Fandango checkout. That’s not bad. If this were for real, we would have probably spent extra time checking our show time options a bit more, choosing 2D over 3D, etc. But for this task, we figured it’s best to keep it simple. The whole process took about 4 clicks of the mouse with a little typing to put my zip code in.

For MovieTickets.com, we found the experience to be mostly the same. Except, when we put our zip code in, it seemed like MovieTickets.com gave more options right off the bat. Fandango suggests the closest theater for your zip code and the first batch of showings it finds (in this case, it’s a 3D showing), while MovieTickets gives you the full list of showings and format options. Our experience felt more thorough with MovieTickets, getting more choices right away. But we also feel like more options delayed our browsing experience because we had to read and think more. Still, the browsing time for MovieTickets.com – to complete the same process – was the same 4 clicks and around the same 40 seconds.
We tried both again from Google Chrome, and not even factoring in our newfound familiarity with the process for both sites, we found both processes to take 30 seconds each this time. They’re easy sites to navigate and their load times were swift.

So, with all things considered, with the goal being to get tickets for one of the most recent films released ordered, here are the Usability scores:
(Fandango 9/10)      (MovieTickets.com 10/10)

Final Verdict

We’d say Fandango won by quite a bit, given their better web performance over MovieTickets.com, but I think I enjoyed the usability of MovieTickets.com over that of Fandango’s. The fact that Fandango doesn’t present show time options upfront is a little unfortunate.

Still, one cannot ignore good web performance, and I have to hand it to Fandango for achieving impressive site speed and reliability. So, with that said, the result of the second AlertBot Showdown is…

WINNER:

How Much Impact Does an Hour of Website Downtime Have on a Business?

So, your business website is offline again and your IT team has sprung into action, trying to pinpoint the issue and fix it as soon as possible. Sure, it’s good that your IT experts are handling the problem responsibly, but do you know how much money your business may have lost during your website’s downtime? Well, if you are a major player in the ecommerce industry, chances are you could have lost millions of dollars by now. And that is not an overstatement.

Like it or not, even an hour of downtime can do a great deal of damage to your online business. Did you know that in 2014, Google experienced downtime which was caused by a virus and all Gmail, Google+ and Google Drive were affected by it? This downtime lasted for an hour, which decreased Google stocks by 2.4 percent.

But that’s not all! Amazon, the e-shopping giant, experienced 2 hours of downtime, presenting site visitors with cryptic HTTP messages. In just 2 hours, Amazon lost an estimated total of $3.48 million. That’s huge!

So, if you wish to estimate the true cost of an hour of website downtime has to your business, then you’ve come to the right place. Here are some of the more important variables you must consider when calculating this cost:

§  Impact on Business Sales

To figure out exactly how much an episode of website downtime costs in terms of sales lost, you’d need to determine what your average profits per minute are during the time period the downtime occurred. You can then multiply that average profit per minute times the number of downtime minutes to determine your total lost sales profits. If the downtime occurs at 2 in the afternoon, for example, it is most likely going to cost your business more sales than if the outage had happened at, say, 2 in the morning, when web traffic is typically much lighter.

§  Damage Done to Your Business Reputation

Downtime (especially if it’s frequent or at a crucial time) can scar your business’s reputation, losing the trust and loyalty of customers in your brand. Just like many businesses, you too have invested good money and a great deal of time in brand building. Your time and money can go to waste if you experience downtime—even if it is for just an hour. When considering the true cost of your site’s downtime, it is important that you keep in mind the resources you’ll need to spend to repair your tainted brand image going forward.

§  Money Wasted in Marketing Campaigns

Another factor to consider when determining the cost is the money you have invested in your marketing efforts, like PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. You need to figure out the amount of money that was spent on marketing while your site was experiencing downtime. This is important to calculate, because let’s face it – you literally didn’t reap any benefits from the invested money, because your site was inaccessible when prospects clicked on the PPC link or advertisement.

Prevention is Always Best!

Calculating the cost you might have incurred due to an hour of website downtime is essential, but there are precautions you can take to avoid unplanned downtime and keep your business up and running ’round the clock (and be a hero!). AlertBot is an intuitive web-based website monitoring service that can alert your team about website errors and slowness within seconds, and also help you keep track of your site performance. All of this is much needed to mitigate downtime issues significantly. Start the AlertBot 14-day free trial today!

Given the fact that we live in a highly-digitized world today, websites, blogs and web-stores are now an essential component of any business and brand. While waiting for a site’s content to load can be annoying for a user, it can also be potentially disastrous for business.

That, however, is only one reason to monitor the performance of your website. Here are four more:

1.     Loss of Sales and Web-Traffic

First and foremost, businesses maintain websites and have web-stores to promote commercial growth. Now, imagine a situation where you’ve gone to a store and the service is impossibly slow. The salesmen and women are hardly making an effort to engage or help you and you just decide to take your business elsewhere. The same happens to a shopper when they visit a website that takes ages to load. Instead of making a sale, you lose web-traffic and potential customers. You can prevent this by monitoring how your website is performing.

2.     Potential Damage to Brand Image

Customers talk, and they are interested in what others like them have to say. While most brands depend on marketing ploys to promote sales, the importance of word-of-mouth advertisement cannot be discounted. If you leave a bad impression on one customer, chances are that word will spread about it, tainting- if not tarnishing- your hard earned reputation and brand image. Who wants that?

3.     Error Detection

Website performance monitoring is the best way to prevent errors. It’s all too common for ecommerce sites to hit a snag and run into trouble.  If your site is regularly maintained and monitored, you’ll not only be able to fix a problem sooner; you might even be able to detect it beforehand and prevent it completely.

4.     Quality Maintenance

Just as quality assurance is essential for a physical store, it’s equally important for a website and web store. By using a performance testing and maintenance tool, software or application, you will be able to standardize and retain the quality of your website. Not only will that help preserve the website’s ranking on Google, it will also contribute to drive online traffic.  As it is, Google ranking is affected by the minutest change in website speed and downtime. This is the whole reason why websites are search engine optimized in the first place.

So, if you’re even partially convinced that your website needs performance monitoring, why not start the AlertBot 14-day free trial, today?

If website performance is important to you, then you’ll know just how vital it is to the success of your business’s website. To AlertBot, web performance is everything. This topic is of great interest to us, as we live and breathe web performance on a daily basis. It got us thinking – we all love a good head-to-head, mano-a-mano rivalry: Tyson vs Holyfield. The Hatfields vs The McCoys. The Jets vs The Sharks. Prego vs Ragu. Luke vs Vader. So we thought, what if we tracked the performance of two websites within a certain genre and pit them against each other. Who has the better website performance? Who will come out on top?

Every Fall, Apple releases a new iPhone like clockwork. But Apple isn’t the only game in town. With Apple celebrating the recent release of the iPhone 7, Samsung has their Galaxy S7 (which released in March). So we decided it was fitting to have Apple.com go toe-to-toe with Samsung.com. The results were not unexpected. (Well… most of the results.)

When you have companies as serious about their products and innovation as these two, you’d expect their websites to perform impeccably. And, honestly, they did.

We tracked the sites and examined three weeks in September – the 1^st through the 22^nd – to see how these sites performed.  During this timeframe, we tested the websites around the clock from 17 different locations across the United States using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser Monitoring.  The tests were performed by loading their homepages inside real Firefox browsers and giving them a maximum of 7 seconds to render and become fully interactive.  Anything beyond 7 seconds (which is well above the average expected page load time) was considered a failure.  After compiling all the data, this is what we found:

Reliability

When we examine the reliability of a website, we’re looking for failure events – like when pages don’t fully load or go down completely – and try to identify the cause of the failure. Some common causes are slow third-party code used on pages, incomplete page content, actual web server failures, etc.

For Samsung, their website experienced no failure events during our test period, and achieved 100% uptime. This is definitely above the norm for website performance, but not unexpected for a company like Samsung.  We would have loved to find some juicy failure-generated data to talk about, but Samsung’s website was as clean as a whistle on this front. (Samsung Score 10/10)

Similarly, Apple.com experienced no failure events and achieved 100% uptime. While I’d expect nothing less from a juggernaut like Apple, it’s still impressive when you consider other retailers that experience frequent website issues. (Apple Score 10/10)

Speed

When we evaluate a website’s speed, we’re looking at the time it takes the site’s homepage to render and load to the point of being fully interactive.  We run these tests inside real Firefox web browsers using AlertBot’s TrueBrowser ™ monitoring.

While evaluating the speed of the websites specifically, Samsung.com’s fastest day was Friday, Sept. 2^nd, with its slowest day being Saturday, Sept. 3^rd. On average, the site’s homepage took  around 1.7 seconds to load. That’s not bad at all! Some recent studies have shown that the expected load time for sites in ecommerce to be 2 seconds or less, so Samsung definitely fits the bill here. Some online studies have determined that if an ecommerce site is making $100,000 per day in sales, just a 1-second page delay could potentially cost the company $2.5 million in lost sales per year.  (Ouch!) On its slowest day (Sept 3^rd), Samsung.com saw some load times in the range of over 7 seconds at times during the day.     (Samsung Score 9/10)

While evaluating Apple.com’s speed, its fastest day was also a Friday, on Sept. 9^th, with its slowest day being a Friday, Sept. 2 (coincidentally, the same day Samsung experienced its fastest load time), in which the site took 10 seconds to load at times (due to a slow page file error). However, on average, the site’s homepage took  around 1.3 seconds to load. It’s a hair faster than Samsung’s, but they’re close to each other.    (Apple Score 9/10)

One major mistake a lot of websites make is utilizing large graphic file sizes or third party code on their home page, and it’s things like that that can really bog down a website’s speed. It’s not surprising that both Apple and Samsung avoid this mistake. While both of them display large, beautiful images on their front page, they optimize their file sizes well.

Geographic

When we looked at Samsung.com’s performance at various locations around the United States, we found that the site consistently took longer to load in Texas, with its slowest time occurring in Washington, DC, but was the fastest in Florida, North Carolina and Georgia. Samsung.com had just a handful of minor site hiccups during this three-week period, but only at specific locations. For example, AlertBot registered 5 instances of slower load times: once in New York, twice in Florida, once in Washington DC and once in Washington state. Still, it managed to perform more than adequately at these locations overall.  It wouldn’t be uncommon for websites to experience significant trouble in certain areas of the country on a regular basis, but we expect only the best from Samsung.   (Samsung Score 9/10)

When we looked at Apple.com’s website performance from various locations around the U.S, we found that the site consistently took the longest to load in Utah and Texas, but was the fastest in Florida and North Carolina. It’s intriguing to note that both Florida and North Carolina saw the best load times for both websites, while Texas was one of the slowest for both.  AlertBot did catch two instances of slower load times and a slow javascript file in Illinois, but neither problem caused the site to go completely down.   (Apple Score 9/10)

Usability

For usability, we select a common task that a typical user might want to perform on sites like these. Then, using hands-on testing, we perform the same task on each website while timing how long it takes to complete and how many mouse clicks it takes to get the job done.  This time, we decided to approach each site with the intention of purchasing their latest phone.  We timed how long it would take from the point of entering the URL into the browser on through to getting the phone into the online shopping cart.

From the point of typing in “Apple.com” and clicking through their site from the phone product pages all the way to the shopping cart, it took 45 seconds (and 7 clicks of the mouse) for us to add a SIM-free 256GB “jet black” iPhone 7 to the online “shopping bag.” (There’s an additional click, however, to view the cart when you’re done adding the phone to it.)

From typing “Samsung.com” into our browser and clicking through to add a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge 32GB “unlocked” phone into our shopping cart and viewing the virtual bag, it took a shocking 1 minute and 30 seconds (in 5 mouse clicks)! We used Google Chrome as our browser for both websites and the Samsung site froze up twice during the process (in fact, we accidentally added TWO of the same phone to our cart because we were trying to click through to the cart and it was unresponsive). Just to be fair, we tried it again, and it hung up yet again during the ordering process, but this time it was a little under a minute to get to the shopping bag. All of this happened on Chrome’s latest version, too. We know web browsers can be super fickle, though, so we decided to try it a third time, this time with Mozilla Firefox, and it took 20 seconds to get the same phone into the shopping cart. On Apple’s site, for the iPhone, there are a lot more choices – from storage space to phone color – to choose from, so it makes sense as to why that process might take longer. But it is rather alarming that Samsung’s site experienced THAT much trouble while just trying to add their phone to the shopping cart.

Just to compare via Firefox, then, we re-performed the timed test for Apple.com. One could argue that re-tests don’t account for newfound familiarity with either site, but it took 25 second to add the same iPhone 7 to the shopping cart. While that’s a few seconds slower than Samsung, we also didn’t experience any problems on either browser with Apple’s site.

All things considered, here are the Usability scores:

(Samsung Score 7/10)          (Apple Score 9/10)

Final Verdict

The performance of both sites were very, very good and quite close to one another. Apple’s site just barely edged out Samsung’s on speed and geographic performance, while both matched each other on reliability. Despite their slight differences, they both performed at the top of their game in online performance. However, after factoring in our usability testing, where Apple’s site performed much more consistently, the winner for the very first AlertBot Showdown is clear:

WINNER:

The report examined several sites that had experienced minor to substantial down times over the course of Friday thru Sunday, including NeimanMarcus.com and Staples.com. Our report, however, did not take into account Cyber Monday or the sales-heavy weeks that have followed.

On Cyber Monday, Neiman Marcus seemed to right the ship, while only a few sites appeared to experience no more than about 10-minute failures–including NewEgg.com and Staples–with Gap’s site registering 19 minutes of being unresponsive.

Throughout this month of December, Staples has continued to struggle with short outages; Walmart experienced some brief HTTP errors; while Footlocker, PC Mall, Crate & Barrel and Peapod all experienced just a couple few-minute hiccups (which in some cases could simply just be sluggish load times).

With online sales outperforming brick and mortar sales this Black Friday for the first time, it’s imperative now more than ever to make sure your site stays up and working, error-free. Sign up for a free 14-day trial with AlertBot.com today and start working towards a more successful ecommerce site!

While websites like Walmart, Fanatics and QVC experienced a couple several-minute outages on Thanksgiving Day, one of the sites that seemed to struggle the most on Black Friday this year was the online destination for department store Neiman Marcus. The site even experienced a downtime of two hours in the morning.

Second only to NeimanMarcus.com, however, is online tech retailer Newegg.com, who experienced some slow page load times no doubt due to the heightened traffic. Finally, Staples.com also experienced some short outages, but nothing more than a few minutes each.

Through Saturday and Sunday, it was much of the same with Neiman Marcus, Staples and Newegg, with Walmart seeing a few hiccups and Shutterfly.com experiencing a 45-minute outage due to the server being overloaded with traffic. Sony’s Playstation Network also experienced some significant downtime on Saturday, which also affected their online store.

Downtime of any length can be costly for any online retailer. According to this article by Evolven.com, “The average cost of data center downtime across industries was $5,600 per minute.” Clearly, that would add up real quick – especially on a major shopping day.

With AlertBot’s monitoring services, not only can you be alerted the moment your site experiences an outage or slow load times, but you’ll be able to use the AlertBot charts and reports to find potential hang-ups and future problems that will result in unnecessary downtime.

Give AlertBot a try with our totally free trial period and start seeing how AlertBot can look out for your business to help you prevent serious financial loss and online disasters.