Site Managing Performance

©2016 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARD™
Metrics, Best Practices and Tools
Website Performance
Management
Shawn Miller - Sr. Solution Architect - Managed Delivery Service (MDS)
Desmond Tam - Sr. Enterprise Architect - Consulting Services

Agenda
■ Challenges & Pitfalls
■ Metrics - Traps, Gotchas, and Things Easily Missed
■ Approaches, Tools and Strategies
■ How Can Akamai Help?

Grow revenue opportunities with fast, personalized
web experiences and manage complexity from peak
demand, mobile devices and data collection.
Challenges
&
Pitfalls

Understand Your Users
Median times
only tell part of
the story

Traffic
Page Load Time
Akamai Real User Monitoring
Fast Only Matters if Your Application is Scalable

Possible Pain Points
⚠ Origin
⚠
⚠ ⚠
⚠
⚠ Middle
Mile
⚠ 3rd Party
⚠ Front-End

Information Overload … and Not Enough Time

When Your Metrics Mislead You...

Metrics: Traps, Gotchas, and Things Easily Missed

Measuring Performance
We need benchmarks, so what do we measure?
● Time to First Byte (TTFB)? Fully Loaded?
Onload?
● RUM? Synthetic?
● Mobile!
● Single point in time VS regular intervals

Watch Out...

Understand the Measurement
❒ What is happening up to that measurement?
❒ Are you measuring what you expect?
❒ Is it representative of how customers approach your site?
❒ Is the benchmark/metric you are using still valid?
❒ Fixated on one point but missing out on the bigger picture?

W3C Nav Timing

Browsers and Devices

But hey,
Time to First Byte
is pretty solid metric, right?

Time To First Byte
Evolution of CDN - Uncacheable Pages...
Pre-Optimization

Evolution of CDN - Uncacheable Pages...
Pre-Optimization
Time To First Byte
Post-Optimization
examples with two
very different
outcomes!

Onload Event
Onload for one application may work better for some but not for others

Metrics
What about user experience?

Was the test configured incorrectly? (i.e. unintended redirects,
geo-blocking)
In some cases this is acceptable, in some they’re not.
● What’s representative of real world?
● How do users get to your site?
Navigation - Redirects and Representative Site Configuration

Navigation - Redirects and Representative Site Configuration
Did the page even render?
If something rendered, was it what you expected?

User Experience While Loading - First Paint / Start Render vs OnLoad vs Fully
Loaded

User Experience While Loading - Visual Progression
Speed Index
Visually Complete Progress
Image Source: Webpagetest.org, July 2016
https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpagetest/metrics/speed-index

User Experience While Loading
Load Time
2.4s
DOM Complete
1.4sSpeed Index
12717
Surely Speed Index?

User Timing
When does the “important stuff” appear on my page?
window.performance.mark('HERO_HAS_ARRIVED');
● User Timing Api: https://www.w3.org/TR/user-timing/

Identifying the Issues
How do you identify the cause?
Who is responsible?
How do you mitigate 3rd party issues (product recommendations, etc)

Identifying the Root Cause
Webpagetest.org Browser Dev Tools
● Waterfall
● Domain tab
● Filmstrips
● Calling page (aka “loaded by”)
● Waterfall
● Script debugging
● Calling page (aka “Initiator”)
● Browser emulation

Metrics
It’s not all doom and gloom! Set goals!
● Set Goals
○ Revisit the goal and validate if it’s still applicable
● Verify the results!
● Educate stakeholders
● Enhance reporting with filmstrips/videos etc, where appropriate
● Comparative results to a competitor or a site representative of your
goals can be helpful to put things into context

Focus Back on User Experience and Impact to Business
AMOUNT OF TRAFFIC
REVENUE
ENGAGEMENT
PAGE VIEWS
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
COST
BOUNCE RATE
Source: https://speakerdeck.com/tkadlec/once-more-with-feeling

Tools , Approaches, and Strategies

Choose the Right Tool(s)

Real User
Monitoring (RUM)
• Real world
• All wireless carriers/local
ISPs
• All end-users’ locations,
pages visited &
browsers/devices
End User Experience Fidelity
Synthetic
Monitoring -
Backbone
• Clean room environment
• Over Internet backbone
• Limited # of pages, locations
& browsers/devices
Synthetic
Monitoring - Last
Mile / Mobile
• Clean room environment
• Over limited # of wireless
carriers/local ISPs
• Limited # of pages,
locations &
browsers/devices
Major
ISPs
Real Customers
/ Employees
Operational Experiential
Local
ISPs
Mobile
Carriers
Understand RUM vs Synthetic Testing

Goals: Setting Performance Budgets
“A quantitative
expression of a
plan for a defined
period of time.”
Wikipedia

Example Performance Budget
MEASURE MAXIMUM TOOL NOTES
Total page load time 2 seconds WebPagetest, median from five runs on
3G
All pages
Total page load time 2 seconds Real user monitoring tool, median across
geographies
All pages
Total page weight 800 Kb WebPagetest All pages
Speed Index 1,000 WebPagetest using Dulles location in
Chrome on 3G
All pages except
home page
Speed Index 600 WebPagetest using Dulles location in
Chrome on 3G
Home page
Source: Performance budget at Etsy by Lara Callendar Hogan:
https://codeascraft.com/2014/12/11/make-performance-part-of-your-workflow/

Stick to the Budget!
1. Optimize an existing feature or
asset on the page.
2. Remove an existing feature or
asset from the page.
3. Don’t add the new feature or asset.
Source: Tim Kadlec

Too much of a good thing...
Each carousel adds
below-the-fold content
“Greatest drawbacks of carousels …
people often immediately scroll
past these large images.”

Avoid Being the Cop or the Janitor

Create a Performance Culture
EDUCATE CELEBRATECOMMUNICATE

A/B Testing

Trending vs Direct Comparison
Page Load: 36.1% ⤵
DOM Complete:
36% ⤵

Use Descriptive Statistics to Quantify RUM

Comparing RUM Metrics

Apply Front-End Best Practices
MINIFY & COMPRESS
OPTIMIZE IMAGES
CSS FIRST
JS BOTTOM
ASYNC SCRIPTS
AVOID REDIRECTS
DOMAIN SHARDING
REDUCE REQUESTS

How Akamai can Help
☑ Leverage Akamai Luna Reports and RUM
☑ Akamai Assessment Services
☑ Akamai Managed Delivery Service

Make Use of Akamai Data
Log Delivery Service
Cloud Monitor
Luna Portal Reports Spreadsheet Analysis
Luna Portal Reports
Raw Export

Akamai Assessment Services
1 2 3
Event Primer 360º Assessment Custom Consulting Services
We Offer...

Especially When It Involves ...
Visualization of the Internet
Barrett Lyon / The Opte Project

Managed Delivery Service
Monitoring / Alerting
• 24 x7 Monitoring
(Hourly sampling)
• Triage Changes
• Alert to issues
• Recommend Next Steps
• Help Mitigate issues
Optimizing
• Monitor & Analyze
o Configuration - Feature
Enablement & Optimization
o URL Content Structure
• Recommend Optimizations
• Help with Optimization
Reporting
• Trend Reports
• URL RUM data insights
• Alert & Action Summary
Detect and Mitigate
Issues
Proactive
Gain Insight
Weekly
Optimize
Monthly
Offload 24x7 performance management of business critical URLs to Akamai experts....

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Site Managing Performance

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