section.io Website Performance and Security Blog

section.io has always been committed to providing the best, most detailed metrics and logs to our users. As the only Content Delivery solution that integrates fully with agile development and DevOps practices, we recognize the importance of having accurate metrics to diagnose, resolve and continuously improve your website performance and security. That’s why we’re happy to announce that we have recently given our metrics an update by bringing in Grafana, which is a highly flexible graphing tool that charts the metrics we provide from Graphite.

There are several factors to look at when considering the total page load time for your website. Metrics such as Time to First Byte, Start Render Time, Visually Complete, and Full Page Load Time are important for different reasons and each have an impact on your user experience.

Summary of security issue raised In the past few days, vulnerability researchers at Google discovered Cloudflare’s reverse proxies were dumping uninitialized memory into their outputs, opening up websites that use Cloudflare to data leaks. This data included cookies, passwords, encryption keys, and even user’s private data from large sites that use Cloudflare.

It’s no secret that Akamai is the elephant in the room in any conversation regarding CDNs. It is the grandfather of the industry, and pioneered the art of bringing content closer to end users to improve browsing experience for people all around the world. Their first-mover advantage allowed Akamai to build an infrastructure still unmatched in size and scale by any of their competitors.

Fusion Retail Group in Australia is the parent company to several brands including Diana Ferrari clothing, shoes, and accessories, Colorado shoes, and Williams shoes. Recently these brands all over-went website updates with a focus on improved user experience to stand out in a competitive market. Quality images and detailed product descriptions were a clear need, but Fusion also wanted to focus on the speed of their websites as a fundamental element of improving UX and achieving higher conversion rates.

Have you ever gone to an ecommerce site right as a highly anticipated launch was occurring and found yourself locked out or inventory immediately gone? Flash sales or new product launches can be both a blessing and curse for ecommerce sites: While they bring motivated visitors who are ready to purchase quickly, they can also be plagued by scalability issues, bots holding product up in shopping carts, and malicious traffic that aims to re-sell items on a third-party site such as eBay.

Today we’re excited to announce that we have added Threat X, an intelligent Web Application Firewall, to section.io’s choice of reverse proxies. At section.io we’re committed to bringing you a choice of the best-in-class solutions for website performance and security. That’s why we let you choose which unmodified, open-source version of Varnish Cache works with your application, and now you have the choice between two WAFs: Threat X, which is a next-generation intelligent WAF backed by a team of security experts, and ModSecurity, a leading open-source WAF.

For nearly 20 years, use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) has been a smart way to deliver web traffic. CDNs promise faster, more secure and more scalable web applications. However, modern software development practices and the definition of networks and infrastructure using a software-centric approach are making legacy CDNs increasingly less relevant. “Software is eating the world” and CDNs have forgotten to come to the table.

Bounce rate is one of the most important metrics a marketing manager can consider: it is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing just one page, and a good indicator of how your content and site usability is resonating with your audience. The average bounce rate is around 50%, and anything under 40% is considered to be very good. A bounce rate of 70% or over is high for most pages on a website, although if the first interaction a user has is on a blog article then a higher bounce rate is more expected.

Some of the questions we get often at section.io are “What counts as a page view?” and “How does bot traffic impact my website?” At section.io and most other Content Delivery Networks, a page view is counted as any page that serves an HTTP response with a status code of 200 (meaning the page has been correctly delivered) and content type matching text/html. Importantly, this includes bot traffic that is not typically counted in the page view statistics for Google Analytics or other metrics services: