A website has a lot of moving parts – and that means there are a lot of elements to think about when optimizing it for performance. How are you making sure that you best focus your website performance optimization efforts?
Website performance matters.
As we’ve stated in our infographic showing how optimizing website speed can help increase conversions, your webpage loading speed can dramatically impact your business. Just a few seconds can mean that a person may leave your website without ever seeing a thing.
But before you head off to optimize your on-site code and images, it is important to recognize that a website’s poor performance isn’t just caused by the files located on your web server. Often times page load speed is affected by off-site, third-party content.
What third-party elements can affect website performance?
We’re talking about social media buttons, commenting systems, advertising scripts, analytics suites, content delivery networks (CDNs), live chat systems, and many others. Just as we discussed in our post looking into whether Google Analytics is really slowing down your website, any extra code and calls to pull data from outside your web server can really weigh on your website performance.
Identify slow third-party webpage elements
With third-party content monitoring you can determine which page elements, scripts, and content are causing your website to slow down, and at what rate.
We’ve put our test website for a fake interstellar travel company called “Galactic Resorts” into ourFree Website Speed Test tool (a lite version of our paid Website Performance Monitoring service) to give you a taste of what third-party content monitoring can do.
You can get a waterfall visualization that shows page element performance by file URL, file size, and loading times. It measures loading times by: resolve, TCP connect, HTTPS Handshake, send, wait, and receive. Third-party content monitoring helps you easily identify potential performance problems at a glance.
It is also possible to see visualizations of elements by domain group, which sorts page elements by default as: 1st party, statistics, CDN, social, ads, first party overall, and third party overall. With the paid version of our Website Performance Monitoring service, you can also create custom domain groups to better visualize other elements not covered.
Monitor your third-party content, 24/7
Third-party content monitoring can really make it easy to spot performance bottlenecks, and give you the data you need to create a more effective website performance optimization plan. While we love our Free Website Speed Test tool, ultimately it can only give you a limited view of how your website is performing.
The Uptrends Website Monitoring service gives you a more comprehensive view by monitoring your website performance and third-party content around-the-clock with what is called a “Full Page Check+.” It can gather a larger sample of data using checkpoint locations of your choosing from around the world, and alert you if certain load-time limits are reached.
To learn more about the Uptrends service, or the “Full Page Check+,” sign up for a free four-week trial and speak with one of our customer service representatives!
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