3 Ways Site Uptime Monitoring Boosts SEO

About 25 years ago, if someone told you to “Google” something, you’d probably smile, nod politely, and walk (or perhaps run) away. But now, Googling is the unofficial international pastime. Consider these statistics:

• 53% of all trackable website traffic comes from search engines — primarily Google, which commands 91.75% of total worldwide search engine market share.
• Google handles around 2 trillion (that’s 12 zeroes) searches per year.
• 39% of customers were influenced by a relevant search.

Clearly, the ability to show up for relevant search queries — a.k.a. search engine optimization (SEO) — matters enormously. In fact, it’s beyond enormous at this point. It’s ridiculous. And there’s no slowdown on the horizon. On the contrary, SEO will only play a bigger part in the digital role in the marketing mix going forward, for two simple and satisfying reasons: it’s much more affordable than conventional marketing and advertising, and it works. And you don’t need to have an MBA or have a Bloomberg terminal on your desk to know that affordable + works = popular. But less clear is the connection between site uptime monitoring and SEO. In fact, at first glance (and second and third as well), there may seem to be no connection at all. However, as any SEO expert worth their Google Search Console will attest, there is a significant link — positive or negative. Below we highlight three ways that site uptime monitoring can boost SEO:

1. Keep Visitors from Bouncing to the Competition

Would-be visitors aren’t the only ones who are frustrated when sites are not accessible — Google takes a dim view of this as well. Now, to avoid triggering paranoia, be assured that Google has said that occasional, short-lived downtime typically won’t negatively impact search rankings. However, ongoing or prolonged downtime is another matter entirely, and will lead to a major downgrade. Site uptime monitoring automatically alerts your SysAdmins, CTOs, and other relevant individuals when a site goes down, so that immediate steps can be taken to get things back online — and make both visitors, and (especially) Google, happy.

2. Identify and Fix Broken Elements

Google wants to provide searchers with relevant and quality site recommendations. The first part of that equation is largely determined by elements like keyword optimization, page rank and domain authority. But the second is determined by what visitors actually experience once they arrive on a site. Site uptime monitoring helps you proactively identify broken elements like links and buttons, so that they can be fixed before Google’s web crawler notices them and starts handing out SEO citations.

3. Boost Page Loading Speed

For a long time, SEO experts demanded that Google reveal that page loading speed was a factor in evaluating sites — and consequently in search engine rankings. And for a long time, Google sat back with its arms crossed and silently smiled (when you make north of $300 billion in revenue a year, you get to do fun stuff like that). However, a couple of years ago Google finally revealed the worst kept secret in the SEO kingdom: speed is, indeed, a factor for search. Site uptime monitoring helps you keep a close eye on page loading times, so that you can ensure that your site blazes like a brand new luxury sedan on the Autobahn, and not like a rusted out 1984 Reliant K-car that shouldn’t go faster than a bike and can’t really make left turns. The Bottom Line Site uptime monitoring is not a magic wand that will transport your site (or sites) to the coveted number one spot for relevant keywords. But as discussed above, it will significantly help your business gain an advantage in the search engine jungle — which means more visibility, more clicks, and more customers.

Start your FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now, and discover why it is the trusted site uptime monitoring solution for some of the world’s biggest organizations. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. Click here.

The year was 1995. Michael Jordan returned to the NBA. Amazon sold its first book. Windows 95 unleashed the era of taskbars, long filenames, and the recycle bin. And when people weren’t dancing the Macarena, they were flocking to see Apollo 13 and hear Tom Hanks utter the phrase that would launch millions of (mostly annoying) impersonations: “Houston, we have a problem.”

Thankfully, the eggheads in space and the eggheads on the ground worked tirelessly (and apparently smoked a whole lot of cigarettes) to get the crew home. But it was the pivotal moment when the failure was first reported that triggered the spectacular problem-solving process. If it happened an hour — or maybe even a few minutes — later, then the outcome could have been tragic instead of triumphant.

Admittedly, the brave, intrepid professionals in charge of keeping their organization’s website online and functional DON’T have to deal with life-and-death scenarios. But they DO need to deal with problems that, if left unsolved, will significantly damage competitive advantage, brand reputation and sales (immediately if we’re talking e-commerce, and eventually if we aren’t). And that’s where AlertBot’s failure alerting feature enters the picture.

What is Failure Alerting?

Failure alerting is when designated individuals — such as a SysAdmin, CTO, CIO, CEO, and so on — are proactively notified when something goes wrong with a website, such as downtime, errors, slowness, or unresponsive behavior.

As a result, just like in Apollo 13, the right people can take swift, intelligent action to fix things before visitors/customers sound the alarm bell, or worse, head out the (virtual) door and go straight to a competitor without looking back.

Notification Methods

AlertBot customers can choose any or all of the following methods to notify team members of a website failure event:

• Email
• Text Message
• Phone Call

For example, a SysAdmin could receive an email, a text message, and a phone call the moment something goes wrong.

Automatic Escalation

Now, if we were in NASA Mission Control circa 1970, someone wearing really thick horned-rimmed glasses would rise above the cigarette smoke and ask: What happens if the SysAdmin doesn’t receive the email, text message, and phone call? It’s a good question, and there is an even better answer: don’t worry about it.

AlertBot’s failure reporting feature can be configured to escalate the website failure warning if certain individuals don’t respond within a specific timeframe. For example, if a SysAdmin is indisposed for any reason (driving, sleeping, etc.), then after two minutes the alert can be pushed to another designated team member such as the CTO. And if the CTO doesn’t respond within two minutes, then the alert can be pushed to the CIO, and so on.

Ideally, the individual (or multiple individuals) who are sent the first alert receive it immediately, and take rapid action. But if they don’t or can’t, then the alert is escalated accordingly. It is important to note that all of this happens automatically, so there is no possibility of human error.

Granted, none of this is as entertaining as watching Apollo 13. There’s no rousing soundtrack or Tom Hanks. Heck, there’s not even Kevin Bacon.

But when it comes to fixing website problems as quickly as possible, organizations know that the less drama, the better. That’s precisely what AlertBot’s multi-channel, auto-escalating failure reporting feature delivers. We don’t need an Oscar. We just need extremely satisfied customers — and we have a lot of those.

Next Up: Reviewing Failure Events Online

 In our next blog, we’ll explore reviewing failure events online to pinpoint issues and detect problems. Stay tuned!

Launch a free trial of AlertBot’s acclaimed site uptime monitoring solution. No credit card. Nothing to download. Get started in minutes. And if you decide to purchase our solution, there are NO setup fees!

What is Proactive ScriptAssist and Why is it a Game-Changer?

Sometimes — not often, but every now and then — we come across an invention that is so remarkably useful, that we wonder: how did I survive without this?

High speed internet comes to mind. So do GPS devices. And who wants to imagine a world without the cronut?

Well, it’s time to add one more invention to the list: Proactive ScriptAssist.

The Back Story
Websites are not static things. They change over time; sometimes in minor ways, and other times in major ways (for fun, check out the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to see what some of your favorite websites looked like in the past — like Apple’s home page from 1996 which invites folks to learn about “the future of the Macintosh”).

Now, for visitors, the fact that websites constantly change is not a problem. In fact, it’s often a good thing because the change is an update, addition, or improvement of some kind.

But for IT and InfoSec professionals who are in charge of (among other things) website monitoring in their company, these changes can — and often do — trigger all kinds of bugs and errors. Fields and forms stop working, elements stop loading (or they load v..e..r..y….s..l..o..w..l..y), and there can be security vulnerabilities as well.

Multi-Step Monitoring
Thankfully, there is a way to verify that everything is working before site visitors start sounding the alarm bells — or worse, disappearing never to return.

This method is to implement an easy-to-use web recorder to create scripts of what site visitors actually/ typically do on various web pages, and make sure that everything is working properly. This is highly effective. That’s the good news.

The not-so-good news, is that when changes occur — even fairly small ones — re-scripting monitors can be a complex process that, in some scenarios, may require a level of expertise and experience that some IT/InfoSec professionals don’t have.

What’s the solution to this obstacle? Let’s all say it together: Proactive ScriptAssist!

About Proactive ScriptAssist
Available EXCLUSIVELY from AlertBot, Proactive Script Assist is an optional plan that includes the following:

• Our team watches over an account, and proactively re-scripts any monitors that fail. We do all of the work, and our team has years of experience. After all, we created the technology, and we know how it works!
• Failing monitors are evaluated within 3 hours, and the customer is notified of the situation.
• Failing monitors are re-scripted within 3 to 24 hours (our response time is rapid, but the actual duration depends on the complexity — some re-scripting efforts take longer than others).
• Customers get unlimited re-scripting and configuration updates from our team year-round.

Plus, if needed our team offers advanced support over remote desktop sessions (join.me sessions). This is not always necessary, but it is another layer of help just in case.

The Bottom Line
Inventions that changed our lives: High speed internet. GPS. Cronuts. And now, AlertBot’s Proactive ScriptAssist. It’s an elite list, and one that we’re honored to join.

Learn More
Ready to make your IT/InfoSec teams weep with joy (which is nothing like the weeping they did that time the intern wiped out the backup)?

If you’re a current AlertBot customer, then contact your Account Manager today.

If you haven’t yet experienced AlertBot, then start your free trial today. You’ll be setup in minutes. No billing information, nothing to install, and no hassle.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re going to read about the future of the Macintosh while enjoying a cronut or two (or 5).

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.

Multi-Step Monitoring: Why it’s Essential and How it Works

 The term “essential” is thrown around pretty loosely these days. That new show about the hospital (no, not that one… not that one either… yeah that one) is advertised as essential viewing. A newly-released track by a hip hop artist that describes how little they need to release new tracks in order to live much, much better than the rest of us? That’s essential listening. And how can we forget that new muffin that cannot legally be advertised as a muffin, because is technically more of a candy. That’s essential snacking (“mmmmmm….pseudo muffin”).

But then on the other end of the hype spectrum, there are things that are legitimately essential, because going without them could lead to dire consequences — or maybe even a catastrophe. And for e-commerce companies, one tool that truly qualifies as essential is multi-step monitoring.

What is Multi-Step Monitoring?

In a break with tradition in the complex world of technology, multi-step monitoring is pretty much what it sounds like: a way to track the various steps that customers take as they move through pages on a website. This way, businesses can proactively identify and fix problems such as buttons that don’t work, forms that won’t submit, links that don’t go anywhere, pages that take too long to load, and so on.

Why is Multi-Step Monitoring Essential?

 Most customers who run into problems don’t shrug them off. They get mad. And that compels them to hit the brakes and head for the exit. In fact, a whopping 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after just one bad experience. So, yeah, preventing about 9 in 10 customers from disappearing is important. One might even say that it’s… wait for it… ESSENTIAL!

How Multi-Step Monitoring Works

In AlertBot, configuring multi-step monitoring is remarkably easy, and doesn’t require an advanced degree in Hypercomplex Supergeerkery, with additional specialized certifications in Megaultra Nerdology. Here is how it works (a video tutorial is also available):

• Step 1: Login to AlertBot
• Step 2: Go to “Monitors”
• Step 3: Set up a new monitor.
• Step 4: Select the TrueBrowser® Multi-Step Monitor option.
• Step 5: Download the AlertBot Recorder (available for PC currently — this step only has to be completed once).
• Step 6: Give the monitor a name (e.g. “Amazon 1 Multi-Step Monitor”).
• Step 7: Launch the AlertBot Recorder, input the URL of the site (e.g. Amazon.com), and record a script simply by simulating actions that a customer would take. It is also a good idea to label steps/phases (e.g. “Homepage”, “Add to Cart,” etc.), which can be helpful when analyzing reports later on.
• Step 8: Save the script with a unique name (e.g. “Amazon test”).
• Step 9: Upload the script into TrueBrowser® Multi-Step Monitor (which was launched in Step 4).
• Step 10: Hit the “Test” button.

And that’s all there is to it. When the test is complete (this can take up to two minutes), a report is automatically generated that shows:

• The duration of each phase/step in the process.
• Whether each process was successful or unsuccessful.
• A waterfall chart capturing a breakdown of everything that loads on each individual page (e.g. request times, file transfers, etc.).
• Raw browser request data that reveals anything that is not working, or that could be contributing to a degraded user experience (e.g. loading large files or images that cause slowdowns).

Tests can be run at anytime to verify that problems are fixed and improvements are made. It’s remarkably easy. And yes, it’s essential.

Learn More

Discover the benefits of multi-step monitoring. Start a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. 

It’s Cyber Week! All new AlertBot signups this week get 20% off for the life of their account! Use promo code 2021CW20 when you sign up to claim this deal! https://www.AlertBot.com

Debunking 3 Website Availability Monitoring Myths

by Louis Kingston

Some myths in life are harmless, or even helpful. For example, Santa Claus has come in very, very handy for parents who want to nudge their kids from the naughty list to the nice one. And let’s give a round of applause to the Tooth Fairy, whose promise of nominal financial compensation has turned the prospect of losing a tooth from a meltdown trigger into a motivational factor.

However, other myths are on the opposite end of the spectrum: they lead to stress and costs. The bad news is that there are some rather notorious website availability monitoring myths out there. But the good news is that debunking them is simple. Here we go:

Myth #1: Free website monitoring tools are just as good as paid versions.

The Truth: So-called free website monitoring tools are riddled with gaps and vulnerabilities — simply because they’re free, and the folks who make them aren’t trying to provide a public service or earn some good karma. They’re in business, and that means there’s always (always!) a hook. Here are some of the drawbacks: zero technical support, excessive false positives, reduced test frequencies, limited testing locations, and s-l-o-w product updates. For a deeper dive into these pitfalls, read our article here.

Myth #2: Buying website availability monitoring from your host is a smart idea.

The Truth: Your web host probably offers website availability monitoring, and keeps pestering you to buy it. What’s the harm? Well, here’s the harm: your web host is a web host. That’s their jam. They don’t specialize in website monitoring, which means that customers like you are going to pay for their lack of competence and capacity. And on top of this, your web host has an inherent conflict of interest when it comes to giving you the full picture — because your hosting agreement includes uptime standards. As such, they may be less inclined to be fully transparent if they fall below this standard. Or to put it bluntly: they might lie, and you’ll have a really hard (if not impossible) time trying to detect and prove it. For more insights on why it’s a bad idea to buy website monitoring from your host, read our article here.

Myth #3: Website availability monitoring is just about website availability monitoring.

The Truth: This last myth is especially tricky. Yes, website availability monitoring is about website availability monitoring. But that’s not where it ends. Comprehensive (i.e. the kind your business needs) website monitoring also analyzes key aspects such as website usability, speed and performance — because there are situations where a website can be available, but not accessible or optimized. To learn more about why comprehensive website availability is not just a technical necessity but also a customer experience requirement, read our article here.

The Bottom Line 

Does your kid have a toothache, threatening to go to DEFCON 1? Do a myth tag team of the Tooth Fairy + Santa to avert a meltdown (and hey, you might even enjoy some extras out of the deal like getting them to clear the dishes after dinner or clean out the cat litter — kids are tough negotiators, but see what you can get).

But if you want to keep your business safe and strong, then steer clear of all myths, and equip yourself with the clarifying truths revealed above.

And speaking of clarifying truths: AlertBot TRULY offers world-class, surprisingly affordable and end-to-end comprehensive website availability monitoring — which is why it’s trusted by some of the world’s biggest companies. See for yourself by starting your free trial now.

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.

4 Essential Failure Analysis Reports for Monitoring Website Performance & Uptime

by Louis Kingston

It would be nice if the same commandment held for websites. However, even an infinity of buzz cuts cannot change the fact that, alas, sometimes websites fail. And so, the question then becomes: how do you minimize the likelihood, duration and severity of website failure?

The answer probably isn’t enough to inspire a movie. But it’s more than enough to help businesses detect and remedy underlying problems with their website before they become full-blown catastrophes: use failure analysis reports.

There are four types of failure analysis reports that every business should be generating on a regular basis: Waterfall Reports, Web Page Failure Reports, Downtime Tracking, and Failure Events.

• Waterfall Reports

Waterfall Reports enable businesses to analyze the performance of every object that loads on their web pages (e.g. scripts, stylesheets, images, etc.), in order to identify common sources of bottlenecks, errors and failures. Waterfall Reports also display HTTP response headers, which help track down the source of slowdowns and breakdowns.

• Web Page Failure Reports

Many business websites have dozens of pages, and e-commerce websites can easily have more than 50, 100, or even 1000. Manually hunting for problems can be tedious and futile. That’s where Web Page Failure Reports come to the rescue. They often contain a screenshot of data a page might display during a failure event log. This information can then be used to fix issues before they trigger visitor/ customer rage.

• Downtime Tracking

No, Downtime Tracking isn’t the name of one of those bands that never smile when they sing. Rather, it’s a type of report that contains statistics on website and server downtime. Understanding the size, scope and source of downtime issues is critical to resolving them.  

• Failure Event Logs

Knowing that a web page — or element(s) within a web page — are failing is important, but it’s not the full story. Failure Event Logs fill in the gaps by providing detailed information about what tests were performed, the geographical locations affected, and the errors identified.

The Bottom Line

Are failure analysis reports as gripping and captivating as Apollo 13? No. Are they vital to website performance and business success? Yes. Because while website failure is unfortunately an occasional option, it absolutely cannot become a regular habit.

At AlertBot, we provide our customers with all of these failure analysis reports (and more) so they can get ahead of problems and avoid catastrophes. Start a free trial 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.

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:

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…

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:

10 Ways to Optimize Images to Improve Your Website Performance

by Louis Kingston

“Visuals express ideas in a snackable manner.” – Kim Garst, CEO of Boom Social

Visual imagery on websites is a powerful tool to grab the user’s attention keeping them curious, engaged and interacting on your webpage. Humans are a visual species. Our brains can process an image within 13 milliseconds with over half of the brain devoted to processing the visual information it receives. We show excellent memory capability for remembering pictures that is much higher than retaining text. Over 65% of the population are visual learners. What this means is that our websites must contain a healthy dose of visual images to keep a visitor engaged. Whether it’s on our homepage, service pages, in our blog articles, on our e-commerce sites –images are essential to driving sales, conversions and ultimately company growth.

Are Images Slowing Down Your Load Speed?

However, the images used must be optimized so that they don’t hamper your website’s performance. If they are too large, they are going to slow down your website’s loading speed. The Google algorithm doesn’t like that. More than seven seconds to load and Google’s going to ignore you, and you won’t make it to page one of SERP’s (search engine results page). The search engine’s focus is on organically profiling businesses that offer a great user experience; slow load speed will just have potential visitors clicking away.

Google loves text, and when it crawls your site, it can’t ‘read’ your images unless you have created file names, alt tags, and captions to describe the image. You are losing out on a perfect SEO opportunity if you don’t optimize your images.

Let’s investigate ten ways you can achieve image optimization for your website…

1. Use keywords in the image file name. The file name affords a perfect opportunity to include your primary keywords as well as giving Google enough text, so it knows what it is “looking’ at on your webpage. But make sure you never keyword stuff these descriptions. You don’t have to use descriptions for decorative images (that would be overkill and Google might penalize you).

2. Images must be scaled to fit the size it will be displayed on the site. The mistake many people make is that they think that once they take a large image and put it into a small size display area, it will then not take up so much ‘space.’ But the file size is still enormous and will continue to take a long time to load. The image should first be scaled to the size you want it to be displayed. You can also choose to remove any pictures that are no longer serving your website which will also improve the overall load speed.

3. Always reduce the image file to the lowest possible size without compromising too much quality. Many online tools can assist you to reduce your file size, like JpegMini, io, ImageOptim etc. Aim to keep your image file size below 70kb (if possible).

4. Use responsive Images for a better mobile experience. When you use responsive images plugins that apply the srcset attribute, it allows your pictures to display differently for each device screen width. If you are using WordPress, this function is automated.

5. Add Customer-Centric Captions. According to KissMetric, the captions under images are read 300% more than the body content. Visitors to web pages are scanning information, and a well-captioned image can provide them with a wealth of info at a glance. Remember that the images should always be relevant to the content.

6. Always be visible with alt tags. Proving alt tag text ensures that your images can always be ‘seen.’ If a user is unable to download images or if they are using a screen reader due to being visually impaired, the alt tag will describe the image.

7. Make sure to add image tags to your XML image sitemaps. This helps Google with indexing the images on your site. If you are making use of JavaScript galleries or other flashy pop-ups, let Google know what they are and where they are located on your sitemap so they can crawl these images on the web pages’ source code.

8. Remove metadata from raster images. If you are using raster images, there is often unnecessary info attached to it like geo-location and other information regarding the camera used which only takes up space. You will make the overall file size much smaller when you can get rid of this extra metadata.

9. Where possible use vector images. This format is ideal for multi-device use with high-resolution. Raster should only be used when there are complex scenes with loads of detail and irregular shapes. Then using GIF, PNG, JPEG, JPEG-XR, and WebP will be the right choice. Experiment with the raster settings to reduce the quality to free up more bytes.

10. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) should be minified and compressed. Minifying SVG files will reduce their size and GZIP can be used to compress them.

How is Your Website Performing at the Moment?

Of course, these are just ten basic image optimization pointers. You can drill down even further on image optimization to enhance your website performance. If you would like to find out more about your website’s performance, AlertBot can show you what elements are slowing down your site or what bottlenecks are causing user traffic to click away. We also offer a Free 14-day trial (without collecting any billing info). Give us a try!

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.

Tortoise, Dinosaur or Ostrich?
Proactive vs Reactive Web Monitoring – 3 Metaphors From the Animal Kingdom
by Penny Hoelscher

In February 2017, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) S3 web-based storage service suffered an outage that led to half of the internet “melting down” and costing businesses millions. It was caused by an operator’s typing error when issuing a routine command to take a few S3 servers offline.

What has this got to do with you?

Despite the fact that the entire outage lasted 4 hours and 17 minutes, Amazon came under attack from experts and customers in toe-curling global headline news. AppleInsider reported that even Apple was affected, with a variety of cloud services experiencing outages and slowdowns. Apple relies on Amazon for portions of its cloud infrastructure. Albeit not as a result of the meltdown, rumor has it the company is thought to be gradually shifting away from its dependence on Amazon.

Perhaps you’re not an Amazon or an Apple, but you too may be vulnerable. It all boils down to reliability which has a direct affect on your revenue stream. If your web application or site delivers poor performance, your customers will go to your faster, more modern, more customer-centric competitors where they experience less downtime, fewer outages and faster page loading times, and better service. The result: you will lose sales, money and even your reputation.

How can you tell that it’s time to upgrade your website monitoring tool and get expert assistance? Well, you’ve already dropped the ball when you start noticing a decline in visitors; when once a waterfall, the stream of traffic to your website has slowed to a trickle. An external website monitoring tool like AlertBot can alert you to potential signs of trouble, like:

• Degraded performance, e.g. due to page bloating, inefficient scripts, backend services.
• Cyber attacks, e.g. website defacing and file changes.
• Incompatible website and addons, e.g. by loading and testing site scripts.
• Software and database issues, e.g. overloaded application servers and database bottlenecks.
• Server failures, e.g. SSL, DNS, HTTP, and Ping.

In a nutshell, if your website persona resembles one of the following – tortoise, dinosaur or ostrich – you’re in trouble:

TORTOISE: Outages, high down-times and slow loading times

The internet is not like your local shopping mall which is a convenient one-stop shop for all your household needs. These days, “I want it and I want it now” customers have far more options and if you’re closed for business, they’re not going to go and have a cup of coffee and wait for your door to open again; they’re simply going to mosey over to your competitors. Only one thing hasn’t changed in the digital sphere: some old adages hold true. Thing is, customer loyalty is a fair weather friend in an online environment, and when it comes to affiliate loyalty, frankly, for them, time is money.

Website monitoring tools not only report on outages and high down-times, they help you to identify where (e.g. a particular geographic location), when (e.g. peak hours) and why (e.g. network issues) these are occurring. You may find it is your business model that is at fault, not slow servers or bloated software; for instance, perhaps you’re doing maintenance and performing upgrades at the wrong time in a different time zone to that of your head office.

In addition, page loading speed is one of the ways Google ranks your web pages. This matters because when searching for products and services, customers will click on the matching businesses Google serves first.

DINOSAUR – Being behind the times

Google lowers mobile page rankings for companies who do not have a mobile responsive web design. New website design trends have changed the face of online businesses and today’s tech-savvy generation can spot an old-fashioned, un-cool design in a heartbeat. But, keeping up with new design technologies can have an impact on your website’s performance. Page bloat is much like a beer belly; extraneous code, affiliate advertising and toxic data (storage of unnecessary and dated information) creeps up sneakily but has a huge impact.

One of the main benefits of a professional website monitoring service is that it provides you with an automated artificial intelligence that can manage big data and learn from the information it receives. You don’t have to wait for users to complain or continuously test the site yourself, and, because your business is constantly evolving, it is able to update its algorithm in tandem. These sophisticated technologies not only gather and analyze the data you need to make an informed decision about performance, they provide you with the solutions.

Cyber attacks are a 21^st century bane to which all online businesses – big and small – are vulnerable. Of increasing concern is that at many companies, it can take months before a data breach is detected, giving cyber criminals plenty of time to ravage their victims’ systems. AlertBot can’t prevent a data breach but it can alert you when you’re attacked, e.g. by notifying you that files have been changed or your site has inexplicably gone down.

OSTRICH – Customer complaints

Negative social media posts can be harsh on a business’s reputation. Often, it may appear unfair, especially when the trolls join the battle to bring you down. Sure, you need a team to monitor social media channels and publicly appease customers (including the trolls) who have issues, but that’s not enough. An external website monitoring service can give you advance warning of problems with your system.

Customer Experience (CX) is not just about the latest trends – mobile first, conversational brands, emotional engagement, predictive analytics and personalization, etc.; CX is about serving customer needs and wants (read: demands) BEFORE they start complaining. Once your website starts exhibiting dinosaur or tortoise characteristics because you’ve been acting like an ostrich with its head in the sand, it is too late; all you will have is reminders of your ex-customers’ public vents still floating around on complaints forums and social media channels.

Conclusion

The Amazon debacle should be a wake-up call for businesses to be more proactive with regard to monitoring the uptime and infrastructure of their systems. Imagine how red your company’s face would be if you don’t notice a crisis before your users do and you have to be informed by irate calls and emails from them.

A monitoring tool like AlertBot simulates actual user behaviors and interactions, and runs tests using popular web browsers like Chrome and Firefox in real-time. It’s easy to set up (no installation necessary) and allows you to create scripts for different user experiences across multiple devices, using multiple features and functions, enabling you to be proactive at the best of times, and timeously reactive at the worst (after all, accidents do happen.)

When Does Most Website Downtime Occur?

To become competitive in the global market, it’s crucial for your business to have a strong online presence. One of the best ways to ensure this is to have a user-friendly business website that is accessible ’round the clock. And if your customers rely heavily on your website, you know that any amount of time your site is down could be rather costly.

Frankly, website downtime is inevitable. Even the big online giants like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Amazon and CNN have experienced website downtime at some point.  However, the good news is that you can mitigate the risk and lower the length of time your site remains inactive if you are familiar with some of the likely causes of website downtime.

Let’s dig a little deeper to find out the common causes of site downtime:

§  Server Overload

Server overloads occur when a big wave of online traffic overwhelms a server. Now, there are two situations when this happens. First, it happens if your site is being hosted on a shared server. Resources on shared servers are limited and they have to be stretched to support high volumes of traffic and site-processing needs, which can cause server overload. As a result, your site may be inaccessible to users for hours.

Second, server overloads may also happen on major online shopping days, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or any other occasion for that matter, when you have significant discount deals and special sales running on your website. Such deals draw in heavy traffic, thus increasing the chances of server overload and site downtime.

§  Hardware Failures

Server and network failures can bring a website to a screeching halt in no time flat. This could be caused by things like hard drive failures, power supply failures, circuit board failures, or cabling failures. It can also be caused by more troubling failures like data center infrastructure failures or network peering failures.

§  Webmaster Errors

Your business may experience downtime because of errors caused by the site’s webmaster. For example, your site may not be accessible to your audience if your webmaster forgets to renew the site’s hosting contract or domain name.

§  Coding Errors

Some common coding errors are incorrect syntax, infinite loops and typos. All of these errors can exhaust the resources of the server and yield 500 (Internal Server) error codes, resulting in website downtime.

§  Cyber Attack

With the surge in cyber crime, you need to make sure that your website is well-protected from cybercriminals, hackers and viral infections. Cybercriminals know how to hijack websites and redirect your site visitors to other websites or expose them to malicious content.

All of this can result in lengthy website downtime, which can be detrimental to your business sales, profits and reputation. And that is definitely something that no business owner wants! One way to help prevent cyber attacks is to keep your IT team, and those directly responsible for the health of your website and server, in the know about the latest cyber threats.

§  Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS)

Also known as DDoS, Distributed Denial of Service Attacks can also bring your online business to a standstill. DDoS are planned attacks. In these instances, heavy traffic is deliberately directed from different sources to cause servers to overload and, in some cases, crash entirely.

§  Natural Disasters

Website downtime may also occur when your data center is hit by a natural disaster like floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, etc.

§  Planned Downtime or Server Maintenance

Lastly, if you have a dedicated server, you may need to go offline for server maintenance. This usually involves upgrading hardware components, drivers, operating systems, firmware, and even software applications. With these planned occurrences, you can alert customers ahead of time to the planned outage, which can help combat and minimize the effect it may have on your business.

Knowing the reasons for, and causes of, website downtime is crucial as it will help you devise and implement the right mix of strategies to overcome and avoid it.

AlertBot’s external website monitoring service exists to help businesses like yours to identify and fix website errors when they happen and hopefully prevent future downtime. Visit www.AlertBot.com for more information and to signup for a free, no-risk trial.

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?

Allentown, PA / December 13, 2016 / PR Newswire
InfoGenius.com, Inc., a software company and developer of the leading TrueBrowser®-based web application monitoring solution, AlertBot, is pleased to announce the launch of a new series of AlertBot blogs the team has dubbed ‘Website Showdowns.’ AlertBot’s Showdown blogs will feature monitoring results from competing websites, showcasing AlertBot’s TrueBrowser® technology at work, which combines advanced performance tracking and error detection with real web browser testing to provide customers with best-in-class website monitoring solutions.

The AlertBot Showdown blogs will evaluate each website’s performance based on four categories, including reliability, speed, geographical performance and usability, complete with time-based trends and detailed analytics.

This month’s scrimmage pits rivals Apple.com against Samsung.com. With two titans of industry like these going head to head, the results were, for the most part, not unexpected.  Read the full report here.

AlertBot continues to remain on the cutting edge of website performance. With 85 Global Test Locations operating over 7 Internet Backbones developed during the past decade, AlertBot has established their reputation in real-world private industry applications. AlertBot serves over 10,000 users spanning 6 continents worldwide with 200 million website checks per month. Their Synthetic Monitoring is designed to detect all possible application errors and collect important performance metrics as part of its monitoring routine.

About AlertBot:
Since launching in 2006, AlertBot has provided industry-leading TrueBrowser® web application monitoring. Thousands of companies trust AlertBot to continuously monitor their mission critical websites for errors and performance issues that affect user experience. Visit www.AlertBot.com for more information.

About InfoGenius.com, Inc.:
Founded in 1999 by a group of engineers, InfoGenius prides itself in building and delivering quality enterprise-class services that help businesses, both small and large, realize their greatest potential online. InfoGenius conducts its business through its network of independently branded services including AlertBot, ELayer and UptimeSafe. Visit www.infogenius.com for more information.

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:

Allentown, PA / April 11, 2016 / PR Newswire
InfoGenius.com, Inc., a software company and developer of the leading real-time web application monitoring solution, AlertBot, celebrates a decade of website and server monitoring. Downtime of any length can be costly for any website or online retailer; AlertBot’s Website Monitoring Service provides best-in-class site monitoring using its TrueBrowser® technology to launch real web browsers and test websites inside those browsers, including mission-critical financial transactions conducted on e-commerce-driven websites, login pages and other mission-critical pages. AlertBot serves over 10,000 users with 200 million website checks per month using its network of over 100 locations, spanning 6 continents worldwide.

“AlertBot measures every facet of a website to help our clients improve the user experience; our testing helps clients make adjustments that result in measurable gains – for instance, a major e-commerce player measured gains of $1.4 million for every second of response time their platform improved – that small improvement netted them $18 million in revenue!” states Pedro Pequeno, President of InfoGenius.com, Inc. He continues: “Over the past 10-years, AlertBot has been deployed and proven in countless real-world applications by some of the leading names in the e-commerce space.”

AlertBot’s Synthetic Monitoring is designed to detect all possible application errors and collect important performance metrics as part of its monitoring routine. This data gives businesses including Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Chrysler, Mutual of Omaha, Sony, Microsoft & Dell Computing the information they need to ensure their applications are always running error-free and providing a quality user experience.

About AlertBot:
Since launching in 2006, AlertBot has provided industry-leading TrueBrowser® web application monitoring. Thousands of companies trust AlertBot to continuously monitor their mission critical websites for errors and performance issues that affect user experience. Visit www.AlertBot.com for more information.

About InfoGenius.com, Inc.:
Founded in 1999 by a group of engineers, InfoGenius prides itself in building and delivering quality enterprise-class services that help businesses, both small and large, realize their greatest potential online. InfoGenius conducts its business through its network of independently branded services including AlertBot, ELayer and UptimeSafe. Visit www.infogenius.com for more information.

If you’re not quite sure what that is, third party code is usually any code provided by another company or website to plug in / embed a service on your website. For example, you may have a web stats tracking code, a banner ad rotator, or a couple lines of code that drops your Twitter or Instagram feed onto your website. These pieces of code are considered third party code since they’re provided by another source.

Some of the problems that this kind of code can cause may be:

• Slow page load times
• SSL errors (there could be a non-secure component in the code)
• Unexpected javascript errors of various kinds
• Failure to load some of your website content
• Inaccurate stats tracking

The case of causing inaccurate stats is a particularly interesting one that most people don’t consider. Problems with third party code could render your website’s stats unreliable if the stats code is not fully loading. When this happens, you may only be getting partial information about your visitors or no information at all.  If you make business decisions based on those stats, you may be making the wrong decisions based on misinformation.

In the case of third-party code causing slow page load times or loading errors, it affects your visitors’ experiences on your website.  Unhappy visitors may choose not to buy from you and often times won’t ever return to your website.

So what can you do in this situation? First off, you’ll want to diagnose the problem to make sure it is indeed the third party code causing the problems. AlertBot is an excellent service to use for finding out what is causing a bottleneck in your load time.

Once you know for sure that it is the third party code creating the issue, here are a few things you can do to resolve problems with third-party code:

1. Ask the Third-party provider to resolve the problem – The solution may be as simple as contacting the third party, informing them of the issue(s) you’re having and asking them to fix it. It’s possible that they’re not even aware there’s a problem.
2. Remove the third party code altogether – This may be the quickest and easiest solution, but obviously it doesn’t solve the problem if you really need the code on your site.
3. Look for other third party code providers – This may be your best course of action. While it can be time consuming to search for viable solutions, if you need the code, trying something else out could be the most sensible option. And if you can find reviews on the solution from other users who have tried it out, that’s even better.
4. Move to a purchasable / installable application – Free third-party code is great, and just dropping in a piece of third-party code is a nice time saver, but sometimes taking the high road and paying for an installable solution (with support) could be the best option for your business, especially when your own customers or clients are involved.
5. Ask a web developer to look at it – This might not be possible for every site owner, but it’s an especially good option if your company has a programming department. There’s a good chance that just moving the code to a different location in your page’s HTML (or onto a different page altogether) could drastically improve the situation.

So, as you can see, third party code can greatly impact your website. And if you’re experiencing some web performance issues and you’re utilizing third party code, there’s a pretty good chance that code may be the catalyst for those problems.

Sign up for a risk-free trial of AlertBot today and start down the path to better performance for your website.  AlertBot can track the performance of all your third-party code and lets you know when it’s causing problems.

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.

Get Your Website Ready For Holiday Traffic

It’s that time of year again. As we say farewell to summer and prepare for the coming of autumn next week, online retailers are faced with one harsh reality: Black Friday is a mere two months away. And while that may seem like a long time from now to some, now is really the time for preparation. And just like any brick and mortar retailer needs to have their store ready to go with employees on hand to wrangle the shopping masses, websites need to make sure their site is tuned up and ready for an influx of traffic.

If you’re feeling pretty confident that you’re ready and that this warning may seem premature or unnecessary altogether, let’s take a moment to spotlight last year’s Black Friday festivities and pitfalls.

The biggest name to have experienced major website failures last November was electronics retail chain Best Buy. Issues were recorded and reported on throughout the day on Black Friday and it sent social media abuzz with chatter and complaints about the site’s performance—or lack thereof.

Best Buy wasn’t the only one affected, however. Computer company HP’s webstore also experienced failure, while in the UK, online stores Currys (electronics), Argos (department store) and Tesco (groceries) all went down as well.

So what can we glean from this?

If you’re an online retailer, you’re probably already thinking about the holidays and getting prepared, but now is the most crucial time to not only make sure you have reliable website monitoring, but to evaluate your website’s performance so you can make improvements before the big online sale days. And you’re in luck – AlertBot can assist with your performance evaluation and help you rest assured that your site will perform better in time for the holidays. Try it out for free with our 14-day trial.