“We were able to improve our website load speed by almost 5 seconds.”

The Las Vegas, Nevada based company, All-Wall, maintains a large e-commerce site specializing in dry wall tools. The All-Wall site offers thousands of products to a global customer base. In this interview, we talk with Jason Weiler, All-Wall’s President.

Knowing that downtime and slow website performance reduces revenue, All-Wall partnered with Uptrends to analyze and monitor their website. All-Wall selected to use three different monitor types for their website: Full Page Check, Transaction Monitoring, and Website Monitoring.

The power of global website monitoring

All-Wall uses a web-hosting provider. Although All-Wall can’t address server issues directly, they can monitor the service they receive. Using a Full Page Check Website Monitor, All-Wall made some surprising discoveries.

“The biggest shock was the difference in response times from different checkpoints around the world. We saw that some areas were giving us continual problems. For that, the first thing to do is to go to our provider and try to get things squared away to make sure we have enough bandwidth to handle it.”

Uptrends' 233 worldwide checkpoints, allowed All-Wall to discover bottlenecks affecting specific regions around the world. They can now notify their hosting company of these bottlenecks as they happen to ensure a positive experience for their customers regardless of their location.

Using the waterfall chart to optimize page-load time

While Uptrends' Website Monitoring allowed All-wall to see site failures and bottlenecks, Uptrends’ Full Page Check revealed several latency issues.

The Full Page Check provides a waterfall report that gives the load times for each item on the page (including third-party content). Viewing their waterfall reports, All-Wall discovered that the large size of many of their images bogged down their page load times.

“Right off the bat we used the waterfall report to take a look at everything. The first thing that jumped out at us were images that were a little too large. We wanted to cut down on these and increase speed. There were a few different optimization things that we were able to do.”

In the world of online sales, even 400 milliseconds can make a difference between someone making a purchase or choosing to abandon a site and complete their transaction with a competitor*. All-Wall’s decision to use the Uptrends solution allowed them to improve their page load times by nearly five seconds.

*Source: Google Research Blog

Shopping cart monitoring

If All-Wall’s shopping cart and other crucial transactions do not perform well, they can lose business and damage their reputation. Fortunately, Uptrends Transaction Monitoring verifies that All-Wall’s checkout runs smoothly. Uptrends enables All-Wall to monitor their shopping cart 24 hours a day native in the browser. If anything goes wrong, Uptrends alerts them to the issue. For this online retailer, the end user experience will never again have to be a mystery.