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. 

10 Reasons for Site Crashes

by Louis Kingston

In the classic movie The Sound of Music, the whimsical governess Maria and the Von Trapp children sing about their favorite things — like raindrops and roses and whiskers on kittens. It’s joyful, it’s inspiring, and it’s in perfect harmony backed by a full orchestra. Isn’t Austria lovely?

Well, if Maria and co. were running a website (perhaps something to do with selling lederhosen or offering hiking tours in the hills), here are 10 things that absolutely wouldn’t be among their favorite things since they cause sites to crash:

1. Coding errors, usually after a maintenance or an upgrade.
2. Bugs in the programming that, alas, should have been spotted and destroyed long ago.
3. Incompatible plugins and extensions. This is a BIG problem with WordPress sites!
4. Traffic surges, which may require upgrading the hosting package to get more disk space and/or implementing a content delivery network (CDN).
5. Malware attacks, which not only lead to site crashes, but can land businesses on blacklists that block legitimate emails from getting through.
6. Hacker attacks, such as DDoS. Sometimes businesses are targeted directly by bad actors or unhappy ex-customers, and sometimes businesses are caught up in the net as part of a large scale campaign.
7. Service provider and host errors, which are probably the most frustrating of all reasons for site crashes. There is virtually nothing that a business can do but wait for a third party to get their act together.
8. Domain expiry. Yes, sometimes sites crash simply because the domain wasn’t renewed.
9. Google blacklists, which happen when Google decides that a site is deceptive (note: this technically doesn’t cause a site to crash, but it effectively does the same thing since it blocks traffic).
10. Data center shutdowns, which happens during an emergency such as a fire or flood, or sometimes even by accident. For example, back in 2017 Amazon’s web host crashed due to an employee taking more servers offline than he intended (wonder what that guy’s next performance review was like?).

First, the Bad News…

AlertBot’s acclaimed technology cannot prevent these dreadful things from crashing your site — although now that you know what you’re up against, you can be proactive. For example, you should test all plugins/extensions before adding them to your site; make sure that you have the right hosting package, and so on.

…now, the Good News!

AlertBot’s acclaimed technology CAN make sure that your team is immediately notified whenever your site crashes, so that you can take switch action and resolve the problem before your visitors get frustrated and head to the competition.

Try AlertBot free and discover why it will quickly become one of your business’s favorite things. Heck, you might even start singing about it in the halls.  

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:

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…

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 —

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:

> ]]> https://www.alertbot.com/blog/index.php/2017/04/25/the-most-important-pages-and-processes-to-monitor-on-a-website/ Tue, 25 Apr 2017 12:25:25 +0000 https://alertbot.wordpress.com/?p=410

The Most Important Pages and Processes to Monitor on a Website

Most companies take advantage of third party website monitoring services to monitor their websites 24/7 for performance issues and downtime. These services alert them immediately when problems arise, equipping them with the necessary knowledge to pinpoint the problem so their team can resolve it.

Companies rely on their website for many things.  Whether their website is used to generate leads, drive business, or keep customers engaged, essential processes and pages on their website are often the lifeblood of their business and online presence.

In the same way that a routine doctor or dentist appointment evaluates your health and checks for any potential impairments or issues that need improvement or fixing, using website monitoring to routinely check your site’s performance is crucial to the success of your company’s online presence.

Here are some important processes and webpages to evaluate and monitor on your website:

The Landing Page

Your landing page is the page that is supposed to hook your visitor, draw them in and get them interested in your product or service.  Making sure these pages are always reachable by potential new customers is of utmost importance.  It may seem like a no-brainer to monitor this vital page, but a lot of people who own small businesses do not think to apply website monitoring to their landing pages.

Page Loading Speed

Once the user gets past your landing page, they become keenly aware of your website’s speed; particularly if it’s sluggish.  With the competition being fierce, one of the major website processes to monitor is each of your page’s loading speed. You cannot afford to have a home page that takes 10 seconds or more to load. The new generation of internet users is not patient enough to sit through a sluggish download or stare at a spinning “loading” icon. If you have a page that takes time to load, you may need to make some design alterations, incorporating minimalistic design that is both attractive and loads faster. A lot of web designers have taken this into account and have adopted new techniques to make the webpages load faster while retaining a fresh and respectable look.  Website monitoring can help you identify if your page load time is negatively affecting your bottom line.

Geographic Performance

Monitoring your website traffic and performance from different countries is extremely important. Knowing where most of your customers come from and enhancing the performance from that geographic area the most can make all the difference for your business. If you cater to a certain state or province, then monitoring the specific geographical location or district that fuels your business is recommended.

Your Shopping Carts

E-commerce driven websites must monitor their shopping carts very closely. For example, if a customer placed products in a cart but did not buy them, it could mean that there are issues with the checkout process. However, if you were not monitoring your cart, you would never know about it and might just assume they lost interest. Poor shopping cart performance will directly affect your company’s sales, which makes monitoring your shopping cart processes that much more important.

Your Signup Pages

Any page on your website that prompts a customer to sign up or register for a service needs to be up and running 24/7. Statistics show that in cases where the signup pages of a website are not working optimally, visitors often abandon the signup process due to a loss in confidence.  Since these pages are directly involved with registering new customers or providing new service to existing customers, they are some of the most crucial to monitor on your website.

Login Pages

Customer frustrations over not being able to access members-only areas of your website can cost you not only customers, but also support hours dealing with the problem. Getting ahead of the problem by monitoring these areas can save your company a lot of time and money.

These are just some of the top areas of your website to ensure are running smoothly 24/7. Start monitoring your most crucial pages today with a no-risk, 14-day FREE trial of AlertBot and start saving your company time, money and unnecessary headaches.

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!

Web developers know browser compatibility can be a real headache, however, browser compatibility doesn’t just affect web developers. Recently, one AlertBot customer received an alert that their site had failed. When investigating the failure, they found that their site was actually not completely down, but that AlertBot had discovered that their site had stopped working in just one browser. Their website was working fine with Chrome, Internet Explorer (IE), Safari, etc, but had stopped loading with Firefox. Thanks to AlertBot’s TrueBrowser™ Monitoring options, which allowed them to test their website in multiple browsers, they were able to identify the problem with that one browser quickly and fix it.

For web developers, it’s easy to simply open your site in each of the popular web browsers to check it for compatibility, find that it’s working smoothly, and then never follow-up on it again. However, websites, servers and backend resources change often. AlertBot’s TrueBrowser™ Monitors can be set up to check your site regularly with each of the popular web browsers and make sure nothing has changed. So, for example, with AlertBot, you can set up a Test Scenario to check your website with Chrome, another one to check it with Firefox, then another with IE, etc. This way, you’ll know the very instant your site stops functioning within one of these popular browsers.

It’s also just a super easy way to not have to worry about browser compatibility as often. Think about it; these days, web browsers are constantly auto-updating to new versions and web masters are constantly updating their websites. It’s a lot to keep up with–testing your site’s performance with each browser every time this happens–so having something as simple as an automatic browser monitor frequently testing your site’s reliability is one less worry for website owners.

Take the AlertBot TrueBrowser™ Monitor for a spin with a completely free trial and let us start watching your back for you!