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Prior to rendering any of your site, the browser must process all of the style and layout information for the current page. Until this happens, the browser holds off on displaying any content to the user. As such, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), like JavaScript, are considered to be render-blocking. When building your site, your browser performs the following steps: Examines the HTML and builds the Document Object Model (DOM), which is a structural representation of the HTML that the browser understands; Examines the CSS and builds the...

Publishers and ad agencies both have an interest in ensuring that ads are as viewable as possible on as many devices as possible. Whether focused on clickthroughs, impressions, or both, increasing return on investment comes about as publishers and ad agencies working together to improve viewability. Today we are going to look at the ROI of ad monitoring and discuss the importance of monitoring methodology and sample size in reporting on viewability and ad functionality. According to the Media Rating Cou...

Ad viewability is best and most briefly described as the percentage of ads that are actually viewed by a website visitor. More specifically, ad viewability is typically defined as half of the ad being visible for one second. Under the above definition, comScore’s report from 2013 states that a full 54% of ads are not viewable. But how do they know? How can ad viewability be measured? The problem with measuring ad viewability is the fact that one doesn’t have a reliable and consist...

One of the most discussed topics in the APM space relates to monitoring ads for digital publishers. There are a variety of problems associated with delivering ads online including an ad's visibility, user experience (UX) impact, and how it affects overall web performance. These problems are a result of the complexity of  ad delivery networks combined with the reality that publishers need to serve ads in order to generate revenue for their sites. In many cases, when the performance of the revenue-generating side of the business is overlooked,...

As a performance company, we're always looking for ways to incorporate performance into our development process. With the recent release of version 2 of Rigor Optimization's API, we've been exploring methods of automating some of the manual performance analysis we do as a team. While playing with the new API endpoints, it occurred to us: when we push new code, we automatically run tests to catch functional regressions. Why can't we do the same to catch performance regressions? When we push new code, we automatically run tests to catch function...

Within the APM market there is a lot of debate as to whether APM stands for "application performance monitoring" or "application performance management." Many in the community believe these terms can be used synonymously and are essentially interchangeable. However, we hold these terms in two very different lights. In fact, we always expected to create a performance monitoring platform. Conceptually, monitoring is fairly straightforward. You identify something that you want to monitor. Then you create a way to observe and check the progr...

In today’s digital world, many companies’ websites are their products, and therefore represent most, if not all, of the customer experience. In any business, brand leadership is (or should be) constantly seeking ways to improve the customer experience. In a restaurant, you make the food better, consistently train the wait staff, and reduce wait times as much as possible. In brick and mortar retail, you carry the best selection of goods that your customers demand. If your business resides on the internet, you make sure your website offer...