Announcing Classification Based Real User Monitoring

Competition as an e-retailer has never been tougher. The marketplace has become so crowded that if I want to buy a boutique reindeer outfit for my dog, I have literally dozens of options. Online shoppers have an overwhelming number of choices, and even the slightest blemishes on their user experience can turn them somewhere else. One of the easiest ways to lose customers is through slow pageload times.

Synthetic performance tests are a great place to start optimizing, but in order to get a real picture of what your users are actually experiencing, you need to collect real user data. You want metrics that provide deeper insight into your website’s performance as your users actually experience it — statistics like the average of the slowest 5% of pageloads. This is why Section offers free Real User Monitoring (RUM) for all of our customers. Our goal is to partner with you to deliver the best experience possible for your users.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve made our RUM even better. Our most recent release adds RUM by classification, allowing you to see pageload statistics on different areas of your site. Previous iterations of RUM yielded a single, site-wide set of statistics, which, while extremely useful, does not give you specific insight into the user experience on different parts of your website. You could have a lightning fast home page and still alienate users with a crawling checkout process. With our enhanced RUM, Section customers have an even more powerful tool for outpacing the competition.

The Details

Our new RUM supports five different classifications: Home, Product, Category, Checkout, and Uncategorised. You assign a page to one of these categories by adding a specific HTML class to the document’s body. This tells our RUM script to organize metrics for these pages into different statistical buckets. A few more small configurational changes plus some time to gather data and you’ll have accessible RUM metrics in your Grafana dashboards!

Although our new RUM version can work with any website on any platform, our categories are built to integrate seamlessly with Magento’s default HTML structure.

For more information on the implementation process, check out our documentation!