Performance 2 min read
10 Tips to Get a Faster Loading Website
Ten practical ways to make your website load faster, from a CDN and image optimization to caching, compression and server response time.
ReadGlossary · Types of monitoring
What is real user monitoring?
RUM
Real user monitoring (RUM) measures how a website performs for its actual visitors, using a script in the page or browser data, and reports load times, Core Web Vitals and errors from real devices and networks.
How it works and why it matters
RUM sees what scripted tests can’t: slow phones, poor mobile networks, far-away countries, browser extensions and pages nobody thought to test. The results are distributions, reported as percentiles, such as the 75th percentile Google uses for Core Web Vitals.
Google’s Core Web Vitals are Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability). Chrome collects them from users who allow it, and Google’s Chrome UX Report publishes them per page and site when there is enough traffic.
RUM only measures when people visit. It can’t tell you a site is down at night, or that checkout broke before the first customer tried it, so it complements uptime and synthetic checks rather than replacing them.
How Uptimecheck helps
Uptimecheck doesn’t add a RUM script to your pages. Its page speed monitoring shows what real Chrome users experienced over 28 days, from Google’s Chrome UX Report, for pages and sites with enough visits, next to a daily Lighthouse test on mobile and desktop for the start page and up to 4 more pages.
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Read more in the guides
Monitoring 7 min read
What Is a Good Website Response Time?
Response time is how long your server takes to answer a request, not how long the page takes to load. What counts as good, why monitors and browsers measure differently, and what slows sites down.
ReadQuestions
Does a RUM script slow down the page?
A small script adds some weight, and a large one can hurt the metrics it measures. Load it asynchronously and check its size.
What are good Core Web Vitals?
By Google’s thresholds, at the 75th percentile of visits: Largest Contentful Paint 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift 0.1 or less.
Can RUM detect downtime?
Only indirectly: when the site is down the script can’t load and the data stops. A gap in data is easy to miss, so use uptime checks to be alerted.
More from Types of monitoring
All terms-
Heartbeat monitoring
Cron job monitoring Jobs ping a URL when they run; a missing ping is the alert. Read the definition : Heartbeat monitoring -
Keyword monitoring
Checks that a page shows the right text, not just that it answers. Read the definition : Keyword monitoring -
API monitoring
Real requests to API endpoints, checked for status, data and speed. Read the definition : API monitoring
Downtime is obsolete.
Set up your first monitor in under a minute, or look around the live demo first.
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