Here is a little tour of the main Web Performance KPIs that should catch your attention.

Loading time: a basic metric, but a little outdated

Loading time has been the first performance indicator used. It simply represents the overall loading time of a page (until the last pixel is displayed).
It is interesting to follow this indicator but it does not represent the customer experience. The main reason for that is that a page is usually displayed progressively and become interactive before being fully loaded, which makes the user feel like the page was loaded before the total loading time was reached.

Speed ​​Index: a weighted measure of loading time

The Speed ​​Index is a measure of the display time that takes into account the actual user experience. It is expressed in milliseconds. A low score means a fast display and therefore a better user experience. Concretely, the speed Index represents the average display time of all pixels above the bottom of the screen.

Let’s take an example:

Page A is displayed progressively (30% of pixels at 0.5 seconds, 70% at 1 second and 100% at 1.5 seconds) vs page B which is displayed in one time (0 to 100% at 1.5 seconds).

Page A and Page B will have the same loading time (1.5 seconds). However, the user experience will be much better on page A.
In the case of page A, as the page is displayed gradually, it has a double positive effect for the user:

• He has a visual confirmation that the page is loading: it helps him to wait and keeps him focus on the page.
• He can already use some of the page contents: the loading time is no longer “lost”.

The Speed ​​Index calculation will take this difference into account to favor the progressive display. Thus, Speed ​​Index page A will be 1000ms when the one of page B will be 1500ms.

What is a good Speed ​​Index?
It is commonly accepted that after a 1 second wait, customers will lose their train of thought and their purchase intent. After 3 seconds, more than half of them will leave the site out of frustration. Therefore, a good Speed ​​Index should ideally be (and stay!) under 1000ms. Between 1000 in 3000ms, the navigation remains “acceptable” but fragile. And above 3000ms it is absolutely necessary to improve it as the risk of losing visitors if becomes very high.

​​Page Speed Score: a best practice compliance indicator

The ​​Page Speed score is a very different indicator. It does not represent the loading time, but Google’s best practice recommendations.
This score is a global grade out of 100 and made up with the compliance grades of each different best practices.

Thus, Google Page Speed ​​is not an indicator representing the user experience, but rather a tool that will highlight optimization opportunities. It is very complementary to other KPIs as following your PageSpeed score will help you build the optimization roadmap to ultimately improve your Speed Index and User Experience.

As a conclusion, there are many indicators to track the Web Performance of your pages. But in the end, what you need to follow the big picture which is “how is my User Experience?”. To answer this question, the Speed ​​Index is the reference. On the other hand, once you have identified which pages need to be improved, you need to know what to do next to be able to improve, and this is when the ​​Page Speed score makes the most sense.

L’article Loading time, Speed Index, Score Page Speed… which indicator better represents the User Experience? est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

The acquisition of WebPerf.io to meet a growing market demand

Our mission has always been to offer the Digital, Marketing and E-Commerce Departments a global solution for Web Performance Management.
Following a growing demand from the market and our customers, we wanted to integrate a feature of Real User Monitoring to offer an new dimension in the web performance analysis by integrating the navigation data of real users. WebPerf.io, which has become, in the past years, a reference in the identification and analysis of visitor segments, was therefore the ideal solution to integrate. This new acquisition will allow us to respond more quickly and efficiently to market demands.

Real User Monitoring, a complementary feature to offer a 360° Web Performance solution

Until now, we have been following a Web Performance approach by simulating navigation scenarios for defined virtual users. The objective is to follow the evolution of the response times of a purchase scenario for example, without any effects of external factors.
This approach of STM (Synthetic Transaction Monitoring) is typically useful for measuring the impact of a change on web sites. It is precious to settle a process of continuous improvement since the measurements are calibrated and comparable, vs the RUM where each user has its own configuration that impacts the results.

The RUM enables to follow the Web Performance and to measure how each elements impacts on the conversion rates for a specific segment of real users. It is now possible to know, for example, that a new feature creates slowdowns for a strategic mobile user segment. Quanta will then offer a 360° view of the Web Performance of a site by offering Analytics and Alerting Business functionalities, Web Performance management, communication between the different actors of the site and from now on Real User Monitoring (RUM).

Our technical team is working hard to integrate the WebPerf.io solution. A private BETA program should be launched soon. To find out more, do not hesitate to contact us!

L’article Quanta acquires the WebPerf.io RUM technology to offer a 360° solution for Web Performance Management est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Why improve the alerting system of our QUANTA tool, will you ask? Simply to allow you to react more and more quickly and accurately to changes in the web performance of your website.

As we often say, without precise, immediate, and common to all your teams information, your website may see its conversion rate strongly impacted. And this information, the basis of all optimization strategies, must have an effective alerting system, as close as possible to your concerns.

So, to discover what Phase 2 has in store for you, … Just follow me!

A bag full of new settings: Alerting on the total time of web scenarios and alerting thresholds

Until today, QUANTA’s alerting system allowed you to be notified in the event of an incident on your website. For example, in the classic case of a site undergoing a downtime.

Now, the new alert feature on the execution time of web scenarios, and the setting of thresholds of so-called alerts pushes the concept even further.

First of all, this new feature notifies you when the execution time of your web scenarios exceeds a designated limit. You can configure this limit to compare the run time against a fixed threshold or the average time monitored over a given period of time (last 2 hours, last day, or last week).

Advanced settings detail – Alerting on the total time of web scenarios and alerting thresholds

In parallel with this, we added the possibility to configure alert sensitivity. You will now be able to choose:

• how many failures of the scenario will trigger an alert (ex: I receive an alert when the incident occurred more than 15 times in the span of 25 minutes),
• and how long it will take after the resolution of an incident for the associated issue to be considered as closed (ex: I no longer receive an alert when the scenario has run 20 times without incidents).

This new feature will allow you to mobilize your teams on all incidents that could affect your web performance, not just the most impressive ones.

A more precise analysis: Alerting schedule

The QUANTA analysis and monitoring tool is the co-pilot of your web performance. But to function optimally, it must be able to rely on accurate data. But if these data came to be polluted, you could find yourself under an avalanche of alerts unnecessarily alarming.

That’s why we’ve created this feature that lets you disable certain alerts at certain times of the day. This can be useful, for example, to disable alerts during your maintenance periods.

Advanced settings detail – Alerts scheduling

This feature, available in beta only, is accessible from the window for setting up alerts on the execution time of web scenarios.

If you wish to try this feature, don’t hesitate to contact us.

A more serene environment: Notifications schedule

With this new feature, you can now choose to stop receiving alerts at certain times of the day. This will allow you to no longer receive alerts on weekends, or at night.

Advanced settings detail – Notifications scheduling

However, do not panic! You will now receive an email summary of alerts that you may have missed, to stay informed at all times of everything that happened on your website.

As for the previous one, this new feature is only available in beta, so you’ll need to contact us if you’d like to try it.

There you go ! This is the end for this batch of new features for QUANTA’s Alerting settings! As usual, we are at your disposal if you want to know more, and we are always very interested in your feedbacks!

L’article What’s Up Quanta #14 – Phase 2 for the new Alerting system! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

And what better way to be more efficient strategy-wise than to personalize the tools necessary for the creation of said strategy? As we always say, and repeat: to improve the web performance of a website, it is important to know the profile and behavior of its users.

It is with this idea in mind that Quanta’s Tech Team wanted to refine Quanta’s analysis tools. It will now allow you to:

• Personnalize Quanta, based on your needs,
• Refine your strategy thanks to new indicators.

And for this first batch of new features, we chose to focus on frontend monitoring.

New frontend options

In the settings window for your web scenarios, “Scenario edition”, new options are available for the frontend monitoring.

New options in the web scenarios settings

With these new options, you will be able to:

1. 1. Choose the browser</strong

As previously announced, we made the decision to change the default browser used in Quanta. As of September 1, 2017, Google Chrome is used by 63.98% of Internet users, so we considered that it was more representative of user profiles in general. However, the Firefox option is still available, in the “Browser” drop-down menu! The choice of browser allows you to compare the measures between Firefox and Google Chrome, and choose the browser that your users use the most.

1. 1. Choose the polling region

You now have the possibility to choose from which region of the world you want to measure data, using the “Polling region” option. This allows you, for example, to take measurements closer to your users, or to test the effectiveness of your CDN.

1. 1. Simulate a mobile device

In order to more accurately measure the loading time of your pages on phone or tablet, you can now simulate a mobile device, with the “Simulate device” option. Note that the emulation is done using the browser simulator (which works by replacing the User-Agent and the screen size); mobile hardware performance is therefore not taken into account. In addition, you can also choose the orientation (portrait or landscape) for simulated mobiles.

1. 1. Limit bandwith

To allow you to simulate the behavior of a mobile user more accurately, we’ve added an option to limit bandwidth when running web scenarios. This option (“Bandwith limit”) is available in the advanced configuration of the scenario, and allows you to simulate different types of connections. This parameter is taken into account by both our back-end probes and our front-end probes.

Detail for the bandwith limit option

New frontend metrics

We added several metrics to the frontend metrics, which you can now find on the waterfall page. In order to help you make the most of these new metrics, we have associated a rank system, which will allow you to position yourself in relation to your competition.

Waterfall view of the Speed Index and Detailed loading times

In addition to all the features already available, you can now use:

1. 1. The Speed Index

The Speed Index is a crucial indicator when talking about web performance.

This indicator highlights the loading pace for displaying the different elements of a page.

In other words, if you analyze 2 pages with the same number of elements, and the same Start Render and global loading time, the Speed Index will help you to determine which one is the most web performant between the first, with 80% of its element being loaded in 1sec, and the second, with 20% of its element being loaded in 1sec.

The Speed Index is expressed via an overall score: the lower the score, the faster the page is displayed.

1. 1. The detailed analysis of a loading page stages

With Quanta, you could already see the overall loading time and the DOM loading time. But we decided to highlight the time spent before the reception of the first octet (TTFB), and added the time spent before the Start Render (when the user is no longer faced with a blank page).

L’article What’s Up Quanta #13 – An avalanche of new frontend monitoring features! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Why create a plugin for Artifakt?

Modern architectures are increasingly cloud-based, in order:

• to be more flexible when it comes to creation and operating mechanisms,

• and to optimize costs.

But this flexibility often comes with a new complexity when it comes to deploying and administering these cloud-based infrastructures that are very different from static architectures.

And that’s where Artifakt‘s expertise comes in. 🙂 Artifakt makes it easy to deploy and optimize applications in the cloud, and automatically manages their configuration. The platform also makes it possible to adjust the number of instances according to the monitored traffic and the load thus produced.

The QUANTA app, for its part, allows you to follow in real time the web performance of your e-commerce website, and alerts you in case of problems (unavailability or slowdowns, for example).

Based on these characteristics, we determined that there was real synergy and a real added value between our tools. Therefore we thought it logical to build an integration.

How does it work?

This integration is available in the form of an Artifakt plugin that allows you:

• To automatically deploy the QUANTA agents and the PHP module to your instances managed by Artifakt.

• To visualize the deployments made by Artifakt, via our event system, directly in QUANTA.

L’article What’s Up Quanta #12 – The new Artifakt integration is out est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Our analysis focused on business elements (conversion rate, page views, turnover, etc.) and their technical implications, by comparing the activity of 450 sites on the first day of the sales period VS the average metrics recorded the day before the beginning of the sales. Well, it’s safe to say that we had some surprises. ^^

The great upheaval

As early as 8 am, the indicators began to rocket. At the end of the day, the turnover registered an average increase of + 359%!

This end result was the combination of several factors:

More visits

Many visitors meet, that day, on the exact same time slot as early as from 8 am (+ 155% of sessions).

More pages viewed

Visitors click more on this one day, and go further in their sales funnel (+ 182% of additional page views per visit).

Better conversion rate

The prices are more attractive and the Internet users are competing with each other to “seize” the best deals, so the conversion rate is also above normal (+ 38% on average).

That is how the combination of all these factors (more visitors, who go further in the sales tunnel, and thus buy more) has led to this +359% global increase in sales.

Congratulations to all for these results. 😉

But do not think it is simple to get there. These results were made possible thanks to a good management of the load by the platform, kept almost the whole time in operational conditions. One could even go further by talking about optimal conditions, ie the platform held the charge, at the peak of traffic, with page load times as fast as in the off-peak periods.

Small reminder on this point: in the ecommerce world, every 100ms of additional loading time impacts the final conversion rate. That is, if a site is slowed down by 2s per page during the first morning of sales period, you can expect it to register 20% less than predicted!

By analyzing the measures recorded on the hosting infrastructures during that same morning of sales, it’s easy to grasp the magnitude of the difficulty encountered by any emerchant who is preparing for a strong traffic on the day of the sales.

A technical challenge for estores

Because, yes, the very good results that the ecommerce sites recorded during the sales have a significant technical cost for the infrastructures.

Increased demand for infrastructure

Metrics showed this summer a +149% CPU load increase on french ecommerce infrastructures. This increase can be easily explained by the execution of the order processing and the CMS code (whether it is based on Magento, Prestashop, OroCommerce, or even a “home” solution).

What does it tell us ? From this number we can say that in order to keep a little room for mishaps on the infra, and to withstand this sudden increase in the load, it is often necessary for the emerchants to have 4 times more infrastructure on the D-Day, than on the rest of the year. On a so-called “fixed” infrastructure, this amounts to paying a quadruple capacity compared to its average need, and just for… 2 days in the year (the first day of the winter and summer sales) ! You can understand easily why elastic (or cloud) infrastructures have the wind in their sails at the moment.

To correctly anticipate the provisioning of infrastructures before the D-Day, the most recommended option remains the implementation of upstream load tests. On the subject, if you have any questions about how to set up these tests, do not hesitate to read our article dedicated to this matter.

Greater response times during peak traffic

There was a +44% increase in page response time, demonstrating that despite the addition of supplementary infrastructures for the D-Day, some users are still suffering from unoptimized and slower-than-usual software processing, hence the importance of:

• Upstream optimization,
• Load tests (yes. Again!),
• And caches at all levels => varnish, cache block, …etc.

What does a 44% increase in response times represents, you say?

With an average of 600ms of page rendering time (this is the time for our panel of measured websites), a user has a navigation experience of an additional 250ms of loading times with each click, on the morning of sales period.

According to various studies, including that of the star, Amazon, 250ms of additional loading time is equivalent to about 2.5% of turnover loss. For the entire French ecommerce, it is therefore several million euros that can be lost in a single day, if the anticipation on traffic peaks is not properly carried out!

Indeed, there is a combination of a slowed time precisely on a day when the turnover is much higher, the effects of speed on conversion are thus multiplied.

This analysis of the summer 2017 sales shows how closely the commercial success of a website is linked to its technical preparation in many aspects:

• The availability (an unavailable site does not sell anything and deteriorates the image of a brand),
• The speed (each 100ms counts for the conversion rate … and the SEO too),
• And how the infrastructure handles the load in general

In other words, this shows that success and web performance are intimately linked when talking about ecommerce.

See you soon in January 2018 for an upcoming analysis of the next french biggest peak of activity of the year. But by then, do not hesitate to contact us for an expert advice during your preparation.

L’article French Summer Sales 2017 – Health status of the ecommerce websites est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

What is OroCommerce, you ask?

OroCommerce is Oro Inc.‘s new disruptive platform, specifically designed for BtoB ecommerce websites.

This CMS easily integrates with applications, CRMs, PIM tools, or any other useful ecommerce software. It’s a complete platform that offers native CMS tools, managing solutions, and configurations to make life easier for mid to large-sized companies.

Moreover, it is a solution that relies heavily on the power of open-source technology, and community contributions, for its betterment.

What does this partnership represent for Quanta?

First, we believe that OroCommerce and QUANTA are like-minded companies. We admire the level of expert thinking, technological progress, and BtoB orientation that OroCommerce embodies. So much so that we initiated the creation of OroWiki, a blog for OroCommerce’s enthusiasts and experts.

Considering this, we believe that the emerchants that come to OroCommerce for its cutting-edge technology, could be interested in managing and optimizing their web performance with QUANTA.

Thus, this partnership is an incredible opportunity, both in terms of technology and reach, simply because it has a true potential of emulation.

As Romain Lamaison, our CEO says : “It’s not about innovation, it’s about revolution.”. And working with OroCommerce is an opportunity, not only to push further the boundaries of disruptive technology, but also to shape tomorrow’s ecommerce world.

L’article Quanta partners with OroCommerce! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

The entire Quanta team has worked hard to offer you brand new features. So it was high time to talk about it. 😉 So here we go for the overview of the new alerting system, and of the latest profiler, the one for OroCommerce.

THE NEW ALERTING SYSTEM

As some of you may have already noticed in the app, we’re undertaking a major project to profoundly improve the QUANTA alerting system, making it ever more customizable and intuitive.

The first phase of this work has just ended and mainly concerned the “configuration of alerting” part, to make this crucial tool more fun to use.

So we built a new page specially dedicated to the subject, soberly called “Alerting”.

This tab of the app now allows you to:

• Configure your alerts with a simplified subscription form,
• Manage your (very) many alerts more easily,
• As well as register your teammates for alerts when you are in “administrator mode”.

New “Alerting” tab in QUANTA

Of course, all these actions are also possible for the Daily & Weekly Digests.

All this work of personalization on the alerting dashboard was accompanied by a complete overhaul of the system, to make it more scalable, which will allow us in the future to implement new functionalities more easily.

This work did not, of course, happen at random. This redesign was necessary to prepare for the “Phase 2”, which promises some surprises. We are indeed working on some new features that should be released in the weeks to come:

• Configuring custom thresholds alerts,
• And the possibility of now being warned when a web scenario exceeds a certain threshold of loading time (against an alert only in case of scenario error, currently).

We hope that these new features will please you, and please, do not hesitate to send us your remarks. 😉

THE ONE AND ONLY PROFILER FOR OROCOMMERCE

For those who follow the technological advances in the field of e-commerce, you surely have already heard about OroCommerce, the new CMS published by Oro, and destined to BtoB companies.

And for those who are also following the Quanta news, you must have heard that we released the very first OroCommerce profiler, designed to monitor the performance of this brand new platform.

Like our already well proven Magento 1 and Magento 2 profilers, our users now have a profiler that offers the same level of analysis for OroCommerce websites.

Analysis of the general performance of an OroCommerce website in the QUANTA app

This new profiler allows you to have an extra level of detail of analysis on all the e-commerce websites running on OroCommerce. It allows you to precisely identify the code blocks that have the greatest impact on OroCommerce’s web performance, and to track live the evolution of the application’s execution time.

Detailed analysis of the different loading times of an OroCommerce website in the QUANTA app

Detailed analysis of the blocks of an OroCommerce website in the QUANTA app

This new profiler is currently in beta. To use it, simply send an email to the support team, and we will gladly give you access to it. 🙂

So that’s it for this What’s Up Quanta # 11!

See you soon for other news about the new features for the QUANTA app, and do not hesitate to contact us for specific requests. We are always eager to hear good ideas to improve the app, and to always offer you more web performance!

L’article What’s Up Quanta #11 – A new alerting system and the famous OroCommerce profiler est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

QUANTA is very proud to announce that the team will be at OroVibe 2017 as a Big Vibe Sponsor, and that Guillaume, co-founder of QUANTA, will hold a conference during the event!

What is OroVibe?

OroVibe is the flagship event dedicated to the new OroCommerce disruptive platform, specially designed for B2B ecommerce websites, which will take place on June 13th 2017, in Paris.

A new kind of event, OroVibe aims at bringing together 250 ecommerce experts, freelancers, final customers, B2B enthusiasts from various countries, …etc. to exchange in a startup-like atmosphere, relaxed and creative, and establish the foundations of an OroCommerce community.

OroCommerce uses open-source technology, so the ecommerce community has the tremendous opportunity to influence the future of the platform.

Therefore, OroVibe is the perfect opportunity to shape tomorrow’s ecommerce.

Quanta, Big Vibe Sponsor

At OroVibe, QUANTA will be well positioned considering we are officially a Big Vibe sponsor!

We therefore join the Dn’D and Synolia Agency as official supporters of this innovative event.

So, if you haven’t bought your tickets yet, but want to participate in OroVibe, register here with the QuantaVibe code and immediately get 25% off of your tickets. 🙂

Quanta, Top Speaker

The agenda for the day is made of time of exchanges, and of conferences.

So you’ll be able to sit in comfortable sofas at the OroVibe Studios to interact with other ecommerce experts, as well as participate in various activities offered by NBS System in the Playground.

The overall agenda is available here.

But as I said in the introduction, OroVibe will also be an opportunity for renowned ecommerce experts to present themed conferences. And Guillaume, co-founder of QUANTA, will be amongst these Top Speakers.

He will be hosting a conference on “Managing Web Performance for a faster B2B Experience“.

This conference will be an opportunity to present several use cases of B2B companies and their web performance challenges. Today, analyzing and studying the performance of a B2B ecommerce website are essentials in steering an effective web strategy. Guillaume will talk about the impact of page load times on the final value of the order and will identify the pitfalls of web performance that must be avoided by B2B companies.

And that’s it for our presentation of OroVibe 2017!

We’ll be waiting for you, and hope to have the opportunity to exchange with you on the future of B2B ecommerce.

L’article Big Vibe Sponsor & Top Speaker: Quanta will be at OroVibe 2017! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Why monitor an e-commerce website?

For those of you that, like us, are passionate about web performance and e-commerce, you should have seen lately that everybody is talking about the users’ cry for instantness.

E-customers don’t want to wait. If they can’t buy online in a timely manner, and on a website which offer great UX, they will simply leave.

You’ll thus have lost both a chance to sell, and a chance to establish your reputation. And we all know how much money it cost to attract new customer, instead of simply retaining your current ones…

That being said, if you want to reduce your loading times, increase your conversion, retain your customer, AND offer a great UX, then web performance should be your number 1 priority.

And to optimise your web performance, you need to carefully monitor your website. And not just the back-end (which means everything that is invisible to your users : server, response time, network, …etc.)! You need to keep an eye on your front-end (which means everything that is visible to your users : images, pages, links, tags, …etc.) also, to have a complete pictures of where your e-commerce platform could be optimised.

How does our front-end monitoring feature works?

Until recently, Quanta’s main focus was to offer precise, clear and constant back-end monitoring. It means that thanks to our app’s profilers and dashboards, you were able to monitor your back-end and keep track of any incident or slowdown that your server, network, databases, …etc. experienced.

With the front-end monitoring feature, you have the opportunity to analyse more thoroughly the web performance of each page of your e-commerce funnel.

Quanta’s probes now analyse the loading times of the front-end elements (images, CSS, JS, external tags, …etc.) on each of your pages.

Our waterfall view

Our waterfall view allows you to track down each resource loaded. As such, you know what happened, for how long, and when! Also, to help you identify the most important issues, we provide you with Google Pagespeed recommendations.

Waterfall of the category page

In other words, you can now discover which of your super heavy kitten image, or which JS line written by your freshly arrived intern, is jeopardizing your web performance and thus your revenue, AND take action right away to correct it.

Pretty neat, ha?

Results?

Some of our clients already tried it, and had mind-boggling results. Seriously.

The first place actually goes to Madura, who reduced its frontend page loading times by 20%, in just one week!

But we’ll soon do a Case Study on this subject, so stay tuned to read about the real life applications of this new feature.

L’article What’s Up Quanta #10 – Our Front-End monitoring is there! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.