When a website doesn’t perform, it not only leads to complaints and fewer conversions, but also a loss in revenue and damage to a company’s brand and reputation. And this is exactly why website performance monitoring has become a must-have practice for agencies and development teams alike. This eBook examines the current technology landscape—the challenges this is creating for website performance monitoring, and how Pantheon partner New Relic is helping companies reduce costs and grow their business while building better performing websites.

1. Troubleshoot Issues and Delight Users
Website Performance Monitoring 101

2. In today’s world, websites are the lifeblood of most
organizations. Whether they are customer facing marketing
sites, e-commerce sites or business critical web applications—
high tech, nonprofit, higher ed, etc.—websites are the face of
your company, and performance can make or break the
bottom line.
Consider the following statistics:
• A 1-second delay in response time can reduce website
conversions by 7%
• A website visitor makes their initial impression of your
website in under 3 seconds
• More than half (51%) of online consumers in the US said
that site slowness is the top reason they would abandon an
action online
• When online service fails, 75% of consumers move to
another channel, which can lead to millions of lost dollars
Troubleshoot Issues, Delight Users

3. Why Performance Monitoring?
Original content for this piece was inspired by New Relic, a
performance management solution enabling developers to
diagnose and fix application performance problems in real time.
New Relic APM Pro is included on all Pantheon sites, for free.
When a website doesn’t perform, it not only leads to
complaints and fewer conversions, but also a loss in revenue
and damage to a company’s brand and reputation. And this is
exactly why website performance monitoring has become a
must-have practice for agencies and development teams
alike.
This eBook examines the current technology landscape—the
challenges this is creating for website performance
monitoring, and how Pantheon partner New Relic is helping
companies reduce costs and grow their business while
building better performing websites.

4. Getting Started: Website
Performance Monitoring Assessment
Website Performance Monitoring 101

5. Performance Monitoring Assessment
• Are you measuring your site’s uptime?
• Are you measuring the performance impact of introducing
new code / features on your site?
• Are you measuring end-user experiences on your live
website today?
• Is your website delivering consistent response times across
users and geographies?
• Do you have under-performing regions? Do you have a
web performance plan in place to correct those problems?
• Is your site delivering a consistent user experience,
regardless of browser type?
If you answered “No” or are unsure of the answer any of these
questions, you’re in the right place.
Read on to see why performance monitoring is imperative for
running a modern, performant website.

6. Performance Monitoring Challenges
Status Quo High Cost
Cloud-based architectures are
now the norm, but
implementing a monitoring
solution that can easily collect
meaningful data across
servers, virtual machines and
containers can be a daunting
task. Website performance
monitoring requires tools that
deliver the data and insights
developers need across the
entire stack.
Performance monitoring is
not always the number one
priority of many web teams.
It’s not unusual for developers
to consider Google Analytics
and an uptime tool like
Pingdom sufficient to monitor
a site’s performance. This path
can prove disastrous when a
real problem arises and the
development team is not
equipped to rapidly address
the problem.
Whether you’re using an on
premise solution, building
your own tools, or buying a
SaaS product, monitoring
costs can add up fast. The best
SaaS monitoring tools can
easily cost thousands of
dollars a year, while building
your own tools uses previous
developer time.
Limited Visibility

7. The time it takes to maintain
bespoke or custom monitoring
systems is not insignificant.
Upgrades have to be planned,
and if you’re an especially large
company, they may need to be
planned a whole year out. This
often leads to running on very
old versions of the legacy
product, missing the
opportunity to take advantage
of newer capabilities.
When pressed for time, you
don’t want to be bogged
down by so much information
that you can’t focus on the
most meaningful data. Many
performance monitoring
solutions present too much
information, without
indicating what exactly
developers and stakeholders
need to see.
Performance Monitoring Challenges
Surfacing the Right Data More Staff Time

8. Making the Right Choice
You are likely using SaaS-based applications elsewhere in
your organization from your CRM systems to your website
management platform, and they make sense for performance
monitoring for the same reason. However, it’s not just SaaS
that you need to look for, as the solution should offer multi-
tenancy as well.
Your performance monitoring solution should also have all-
in-one functionality. Below are the must-have capabilities
your development and IT teams should be on the market for:
• Rapid root cause analysis
• Monitor the entire stack
• End-to-end visibility
• Custom dashboards
• Mobile support

9. Agency Use Case: Valet
Valet is a full-service agency providing custom WordPress
development, design, strategy and support. Valet specializes
in ensuring that website owners have all the strategy, insights,
and support they need to meet the month-to-month
requirements of running a business. That includes continually
monitoring and optimizing performance for clients. The team
at Valet finds New Relic invaluable in identifying and
troubleshooting problematic areas of client sites.
Pantheon's addition of New Relic monitoring
allows us to drive innovation and focus on
performance for every website project we work
on—even the small ones.
— Mason James, CEO & Co-founder, Valet

10. Website Performance Monitoring
Best Practices
Website Performance Monitoring 101

11. Setting Your Site Up for Success
Knowing what criteria to look for in a website performance
monitoring tool is a critical first step toward speeding up your
sites, maximizing revenue, and protecting your brand, but
simply implementing the solution on a live website is not
enough. You also need to approach performance monitoring
with the right mindset. That includes testing new code and
new features in development and test environments before
they go live.
What’s the best way to ensure a performant website? Follow
these best practices and you’ll be on the right track.

12. Ensuring quality experiences across all users, browsers, and
geographies is a must. That’s why you should leverage
browser performance data from real end users—from the
moment they click until the page has loaded. You’ll be able to
see exactly what your customers see by monitoring
transactions, JavaScript rendering speed, and network latency
all from their perspective.
With that actionable intelligence at your fingertips, you can
work on a remediation plan to deliver top-notch user
experiences for key target populations of your business.
Know exactly what your end users are experiencing.
Setting Your Site Up for Success

13. Developers are always looking for ways to rapidly build and
deploy websites that get the job done, while shortening their
development cycles.
Regardless of whether you’re running a single Drupal or
WordPress site, or managing a whole portfolio of sites, you
should use a performance monitoring tool that supports the
associated frameworks and underlying technologies you and
your organization use.
Monitor all your sites.
Setting Your Site Up for Success

14. Although a quantifiable improvement in your website’s
performance is definitely something worth celebrating, it still
doesn’t answer the question: is it truly fast? That’s when you
need to look to your monitoring tool for a comparative view
of how your site stacks up against competitors.
Make sure you’re looking at site performance based on four
key metrics (end-user response time, server-side response
time, error rate, and application downtime) and measure them
against other sites like yours.
Benchmark your performance.
Setting Your Site Up for Success

15. When customers complain about your website’s performance,
it’s already too late. To stay ahead of potential bottlenecks,
use New Relic’s alerting feature to set up proactive alerts and
notifications, along with error and availability reports, and
weekly performance reports.
Whether you’re deploying a new site into production, fine-
tuning an existing site, or complementing your existing
monitoring solutions, alerts should be used as the first line of
defense against performance problems.
Make proactive alerting your friend.
Setting Your Site Up for Success

16. Faster Websites = Happier Customers
Website Performance Monitoring 101

17. Boost Your Bottom Line
Companies are increasingly realizing that the speed of their
websites directly impacts their bottom line. With New Relic,
web teams and agencies can reap the following benefits:
• Faster problem resolution
• Web teams using New Relic can identify and monitor
web processes as they are created, with real-time,
end-to-end insight into their site’s performance.
• Greater productivity
• With New Relic, development and IT teams are able
to manage their sites from anywhere.
• Improved user satisfaction
• Web teams can ensure their website delivers a great
experience every time, especially when they leverage
real user monitoring.

18. Enterprise Use Case: Tableau
Tableau Software is an analytics and business intelligence
company that helps over 32,000 customers see and
understand their data. Tableau’s internal marketing team is
responsible for the main corporate website, plus dozens of
other websites across multiple campaigns, products and
company initiatives. They rely on New Relic for actionable
intelligence into site performance across their portfolio.
There's no better platform for building websites than
Pantheon and there's no better way to measure our
performance than New Relic.
— Eric Peterson, Marketing Systems Engineering

19. Less Time Questioning Your Website
Website Performance Monitoring 101

20. Make Your Website Awesome
With the rise of responsive design, integrated third party services,
cloud computing, and other modern technologies, websites no
longer look or act the way they used to. This means that you need
the best website management platform coupled with industry-
leading performance monitoring tools to ensure a successful
digital experience. Development teams who continue to operate
in traditional hosting environments without the latest
development and monitoring tools will be at a competitive
disadvantage.
With Pantheon and New Relic, businesses can achieve faster
development cycles, more reliable uptime and cost reductions,
along with greater efficiency and resource alignment.
From your Dev environments to your Test and Live environments,
you can access all of the features of New Relic Pro for all your
sites with the click of a button. For Free.

21. Monitor and Optimize Every
Web Experience.
New Relic is free for all sites on Pantheon.
Click here to learn more.