SolarWinds® Web Performance Monitor (WPM) is designed to help site admins meet end-user expectations and web-based application SLAs. With WPM, you can monitor how quickly site pages load—including how long it takes individual elements to load—and rapidly identify and troubleshoot performance issues. WPM can help you determine the site components creating performance bottlenecks while also monitoring file size, load times, and front-end components such as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
Monitoring load times from end-user locations is essential for maintaining the performance of critical web-based apps or websites hosted in the cloud, customer-facing web applications hosted on-premises, and internal web-based applications such as company intranet.
WPM website speed testing tools provide the flexibility to monitor site performance from within firewalls, at remote locations where you have a physical presence, or from locations where public cloud providers like Amazon EC2 are present. Simply record the transaction and deploy it to players where your users will be accessing the website.
Downtime occurs on even the most robust websites. If you’re alerted to slow-loading webpage components or downtime as it’s happening, you can determine whether these issues are caused by bottlenecks across your IT infrastructure.
WPM’s proactive alerting system is built to help you detect and track issues more efficiently, so you can determine which methods should be used to troubleshoot performance issues before they affect end users.
While WPM can help you identify slow-loading or unresponsive site elements—including DNS lookup, connection time, send, receive, wait times, and more—it also seamlessly combines with other SolarWinds products to provide an even more powerful, yet affordable solution for testing site performance and load speed.
For example, combining SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor and WPM functionalities can allow you to more easily visualize synthetic web transaction metrics in the context of your application performance.
You can also integrate WPM with SolarWinds Pingdom®. This combination enables you to leverage the real user monitoring (RUM) features in Pingdom to play recordings from a cloud network of probes outside the firewall, which can provide a truer representation of actual external end-user experience, alongside the synthetic user experience monitoring capabilities of WPM to support more holistic user experience monitoring.
When performing a website speed test, there are two common technologies used to measure webpage performance:
Webpage size and site traffic volume can impact the usefulness of the two monitoring technologies. However, because RUM and synthetic monitoring each offer a set of unique advantages and insights, using a combination of the two technologies is ideal for running website performance tests and website speed analysis. Using RUM to monitor core site and application traffic helps establish the common end-user pathways, which can be supplemented with synthetic page load speed tests, allowing admins to quickly identify and troubleshoot specific problems to build a more holistic understanding of application or site performance.
To maximize the accuracy and relevancy of the results of website speed tests, admins should pay attention to several key speed test elements, including:
Many website performance testing tools will also gather data on additional metrics to help improve site speed and performance. Content size, type, and requests by content type can help to reveal the page elements requiring the most resources for browsers to load. Large images, for example, can increase load time for sites and pages, which is well-documented as being directly linked to increased customer or end-user abandonment. Requests by domain is another useful metric, as it can be used to determine how external scripts and services are impacting site performance. Some website speed testing solutions will analyze individual requests to identify the specific elements responsible for creating delays.
To improve the results of a website performance test, here are common ways to improve loading speed:
Website speed testing is a necessary practice, as it helps to identify and troubleshoot site pages and content needing performance optimization. Slow-to-load or underperforming sites are more than just an inconvenience or an indicator of inefficiency within a system—increased load time can have a direct impact on a company’s bottom line.
E-commerce sites especially stand to benefit from routine page load speed tests and performance optimization—the faster web servers can deliver content to client browsers, the faster they can generate more sales.
End users and customers typically perceive site load times as being slower than what the results of a website performance test actually suggest. Brands should therefore prioritize using website speed tests to make load speeds as fast as possible to prevent loss of traffic and customer conversion. Slow site loads can also negatively impact a business in non-monetary, but equally substantial, ways, including how the brand is perceived by customers. A poor website user experience can even reduce customer loyalty, and ultimately drive down visitor engagement. Performing page load speed tests is a necessary and foundational part of optimizing website performance and speed.
Website performance testing is also critical for determining the stability of a site or application. It’s important to know the maximum traffic volume a site and web server can handle before it begins to experience performance issues or crashes, as this enables admins to have a better understanding of when to act, like investing in new software and hardware or deploying necessary updates to improve performance.
In addition to leading to more engaged customers and end users, websites optimized for performance provide back-end benefits to brands and companies. Faster traffic requires less bandwidth consumption, which can allow companies to offload servers and reduce the costs associated with web hosting. This has the added advantage of giving admins the ability to scale site capacity for seasonal increases and sudden spikes in traffic volume.
SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM) provides a useful suite of tools for helping you test, analyze, and optimize webpages and site content. WPM’s web-based application performance monitoring capabilities are built to provide you with quick and actionable insight into web service issues impacting load times and user experience, including for third-party and SaaS applications.
WPM collects performance metrics associated with webpage load times to create detailed TCP waterfall charts to highlight the specific site elements and content contributing to the biggest overall load times. This allows you to more easily keep an eye on HTML, JavaScript, and CSS elements causing site slowdowns, while WPM’s notification and alerting tools make it simple and straightforward to receive updates when the tool detects underperforming or incomplete web transactions.
WPM’s website performance testing capabilities allow you to easily monitor traffic and web interactions from multiple locations—including within network firewalls or from Amazon instances—for deeper understandings of how site performance can vary. WPM installs behind network firewalls, allowing you to safely use the tool’s monitoring functions for tracking the performance of internal web applications, such as help desk, supply chain, and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.
WPM can also be seamlessly integrated with other SolarWinds products for more holistic visibility into critical infrastructure performance like web apps, allowing you to quickly drill down to identify root cause and generate easy-to-understand visualizations like web transaction and application performance metrics.
When performing a website speed test, there are two common technologies used to measure webpage performance:
Webpage size and site traffic volume can impact the usefulness of the two monitoring technologies. However, because RUM and synthetic monitoring each offer a set of unique advantages and insights, using a combination of the two technologies is ideal for running website performance tests and website speed analysis. Using RUM to monitor core site and application traffic helps establish the common end-user pathways, which can be supplemented with synthetic page load speed tests, allowing admins to quickly identify and troubleshoot specific problems to build a more holistic understanding of application or site performance.
To maximize the accuracy and relevancy of the results of website speed tests, admins should pay attention to several key speed test elements, including:
Many website performance testing tools will also gather data on additional metrics to help improve site speed and performance. Content size, type, and requests by content type can help to reveal the page elements requiring the most resources for browsers to load. Large images, for example, can increase load time for sites and pages, which is well-documented as being directly linked to increased customer or end-user abandonment. Requests by domain is another useful metric, as it can be used to determine how external scripts and services are impacting site performance. Some website speed testing solutions will analyze individual requests to identify the specific elements responsible for creating delays.
To improve the results of a website performance test, here are common ways to improve loading speed:
Website speed testing is a necessary practice, as it helps to identify and troubleshoot site pages and content needing performance optimization. Slow-to-load or underperforming sites are more than just an inconvenience or an indicator of inefficiency within a system—increased load time can have a direct impact on a company’s bottom line.
E-commerce sites especially stand to benefit from routine page load speed tests and performance optimization—the faster web servers can deliver content to client browsers, the faster they can generate more sales.
End users and customers typically perceive site load times as being slower than what the results of a website performance test actually suggest. Brands should therefore prioritize using website speed tests to make load speeds as fast as possible to prevent loss of traffic and customer conversion. Slow site loads can also negatively impact a business in non-monetary, but equally substantial, ways, including how the brand is perceived by customers. A poor website user experience can even reduce customer loyalty, and ultimately drive down visitor engagement. Performing page load speed tests is a necessary and foundational part of optimizing website performance and speed.
Website performance testing is also critical for determining the stability of a site or application. It’s important to know the maximum traffic volume a site and web server can handle before it begins to experience performance issues or crashes, as this enables admins to have a better understanding of when to act, like investing in new software and hardware or deploying necessary updates to improve performance.
In addition to leading to more engaged customers and end users, websites optimized for performance provide back-end benefits to brands and companies. Faster traffic requires less bandwidth consumption, which can allow companies to offload servers and reduce the costs associated with web hosting. This has the added advantage of giving admins the ability to scale site capacity for seasonal increases and sudden spikes in traffic volume.
SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM) provides a useful suite of tools for helping you test, analyze, and optimize webpages and site content. WPM’s web-based application performance monitoring capabilities are built to provide you with quick and actionable insight into web service issues impacting load times and user experience, including for third-party and SaaS applications.
WPM collects performance metrics associated with webpage load times to create detailed TCP waterfall charts to highlight the specific site elements and content contributing to the biggest overall load times. This allows you to more easily keep an eye on HTML, JavaScript, and CSS elements causing site slowdowns, while WPM’s notification and alerting tools make it simple and straightforward to receive updates when the tool detects underperforming or incomplete web transactions.
WPM’s website performance testing capabilities allow you to easily monitor traffic and web interactions from multiple locations—including within network firewalls or from Amazon instances—for deeper understandings of how site performance can vary. WPM installs behind network firewalls, allowing you to safely use the tool’s monitoring functions for tracking the performance of internal web applications, such as help desk, supply chain, and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.
WPM can also be seamlessly integrated with other SolarWinds products for more holistic visibility into critical infrastructure performance like web apps, allowing you to quickly drill down to identify root cause and generate easy-to-understand visualizations like web transaction and application performance metrics.
Web Performance Monitor
Monitor webpage performance, internal digital services, and SaaS application performance.
Run webpage load tests to determine how users experience your web-based apps.
Use detailed load time metrics to troubleshoot issues and perform website speed analysis.