What is Page Speed Monitoring?
Page Speed monitoring isn’t about detecting if your site is currently up or down (regular HTTP monitoring provided by StatusCake can do that), rather it’s about monitoring the performance of your site from a real Chrome browser instance and alerting you when thresholds have been passed
Why is my site still pending?
The first scan may take up to 30 minutes to occur, this is because the resources are being allocated during this time frame. If after 30 minutes your site still is pending then please contact support.
What Should I Monitor?
Page Speed monitoring should not be used as standard monitoring, it consumes a lot more of your bandwidth than a regular HTTP test – further some servers limit outbound resources per an IP and as such multiple tests on the same domain may result in misleading results. With this in mind we recommend monitoring 1-2 pages per a website, usually the homepage.
How many Monitors can I add?
As these monitors are quite resource intensive, we unfortunately have to limit these to prevent any negative experience to our other customers. Please check the plans page for the limits we currently have on offer.
Why would I setup an alert on page size being lower than X?
We added the ability to alert on page size being smaller than a set value as we feel it’s an important indicator something might not be right with your site; if your site is normally 600kb and then suddenly drops to 10kb it is highly likely a resource has failed to load correctly. It can also be a useful indicator that your page may have been hijacked.
How Does it Work?
We use a dedicated server location (with more locations in the very near future) that has a Webkit based browser loading your site as a normal user would. We wait for the on-complete trigger (all external first load data is loaded by this point) and then record the response times.
Do you cache files from previous tests
Caching is entirely controlled by your web-server.
Our testing servers use the default browser settings, but drop any locally cached files after each test.
One exception are DNS entries. We keep a temporary cache to speed up test-startup and to ensure that the results are accurate, as DNS is provided by a third-party service.
How do I identify what is making a page take longer to load?
For each individual test that’s run by Page Speed we allow the user to drill down into the detail, this means that for every single resource that’s requested on page load, we can provide information on load time.
This allows you to see which resources are commonly causing issues, and how each resource contributes overall to page load.