Speed Monitoring: Why Every Developer Agency Should Have It

Website speed impacts conversions, SEO success, and PPC advertising costs. Developer agencies can use monitoring to guarantee clients regular hours for speed optimization or offer new service packages.

In this article, we'll explain why speed monitoring is beneficial for developer agencies and what our PLUS speed monitoring offers.

Why Accelerate and Monitor Websites?#

How does website speed benefit your business?

• Increase in conversion rates.
• Improvement in Google SEO rankings.
• Reduction in PPC campaign costs in Google Ads.

In a large e-commerce site study, we found that users with a load time around one second have a 3.5 times higher conversion rate than those with a load time around 2.5 seconds.

If you don't measure, you don't improve. Monitoring is the essential first step towards addressing website speed:

• If something goes wrong, monitoring ensures you're informed.
• It provides data for targeted optimizations and improvement suggestions.
• You get feedback after implementing changes.

Occasional speed tests in PageSpeed Insights might give you the illusion that everything is running smoothly. However, you need long-term speed metric monitoring to catch problems and keep you informed.

Measuring speed once in a while might create the illusion that all is well. It's often not the case.

How Does the Speed Topic Benefit Developer Agencies?#

We collaborate with companies like PragueBest, SUPERKODERS, PeckaDesign, and Programia and see that speed monitoring helps them serve clients better:

• Speed as a Business Improvement for Clients
  Faster websites and higher conversion rates equal happier clients and more funds for development.
• Better Client Retention
  A developer agency that monitors speed provides another reason to maintain the partnership.
• Long-term Collaboration with Clients
  A developer agency that monitors speed continuously engages with projects, optimizing them. It's work that developers typically enjoy.

How do developer agencies evaluate our web speed monitoring?

“We appreciate the ability to check data daily and receive email notifications in PageSpeed.ONE PLUS. It has been beneficial to mark changes in the tool and monitor their impact.” — Eduard Beneš, PragueBest

Why Should the Agency Pay for Monitoring?#

When an agency pays for the monitoring itself, it has full control. It sees all the data, can quickly react to changes, and uses monitoring as a tool for guided optimization.

This way, the agency has an overview of website speed and can propose improvements to clients instead of passively waiting for requests.

Advantage for the Agency in Contract Negotiations#

Monitoring can easily be included in website maintenance contracts:

• SLA and Maintenance
  Monitoring as part of regular maintenance and reporting.
• Service Packages
  Part of premium services alongside additional optimization.
• Speed Guarantee
  If an agency guarantees website performance to a client, it needs tools to monitor it.

With monitoring, the agency shifts from being just a supplier to becoming a strategic partner that helps clients maintain maximum website performance.

Finding the cause of speed degradation using PLUS monitoring on iRozhlas.cz.

What Is and Isn't Website Speed Monitoring?#

There are many tools on the market today, and developer agencies sometimes confuse different types of monitoring. We see them using tools that solve other problems. The most common ones include:

• Sentry – great for tracking errors in JavaScript and frontend applications but not ideal for measuring website speed from a user's perspective.
• Grafana – excellent for visualizing metrics from the backend and servers (CPU, RAM, API latency) but does not address the frontend and real user experience with page loading.
• CrUX Dashboard – provides aggregated data from real users via the Chrome UX Report but lacks daily oversight and deeper analysis of specific issues.
• Pingdom/UptimeRobot – mainly track server availability and can perform simple synthetic tests, but they don't primarily focus on website speed.
• Lighthouse in DevTools or PageSpeed Insights – a one-time test for local development, but it doesn't offer continuous monitoring and performance comparison over time.

Most of these tools either address code errors, backend monitoring, or aggregated browser data. For website speed monitoring, you need more:

• Long-term Metric Tracking
  How does performance evolve over time? When did a regression occur?
• In-depth Analysis of Specific Pages and Issues
  How does speed differ between desktop and mobile? Which pages are the slowest?
• Immediate Feedback
  When deploying a new website version, how do you know if it slowed down or sped up?

PageSpeed.ONE's speed monitoring fills these gaps.

What Does PLUS Monitoring from PageSpeed.ONE Offer Developer Agencies?#

Our monitoring was born from practical experience – it stems from consultations with clients and collaborations with developer and marketing agencies. As a result, it provides data that holds real value for website speed optimization.

Now, let's take a closer look at what our tool can bring you.

For each client, you see a dashboard with test suites and speed metrics:

The image shows a client dashboard with two tests.

Team and client management is therefore "included" in the solution, but it's not, of course, the main part of the application. That would be the testing itself, its outputs, and the regular reports.

Watchdog, Notifications, and Regular Reports Keep You Informed#

Every month, you'll receive a summary of the most crucial aspects for each client:

Monthly reports provide an overview of what's new in the performance area (1), as well as the state of client websites (2) and metric development.

The Watchdog, which monitors daily synthetic tests, will be invaluable to your developers:

The Watchdog sends notifications when an important metric moves in a positive or negative direction for three days or more.

If something goes wrong (or improves), you, your project managers, or developers will receive a message via email, Slack, or Teams:

Watchdog notifications to Teams.

Detailed Technical Data for Fine-tuning Needs#

Your developers will appreciate detailed technical reports that simplify identifying errors or optimization opportunities.

The Pages report shows metric development for measured page types, making it easy to identify which part of the website is misbehaving:

Detailed status of metrics and their development for important entry pages on an e-commerce site, as displayed in the Pages report.

The Technical report further shows technical indicators for each page, such as the data volume of individual elements that may be responsible for worsening metrics:

Technical indicators, such as total data volume, often reveal what causes metric deterioration and user experience issues.

The Test Run Details then provide developers with even more detail in the form of a complete Lighthouse tool report or profiling reports that can be opened in Chrome DevTools:

Web performance geeks can download Trace or HAR results from the test run for use in Chrome Developer Tools.

The Opportunities report is the main place displaying tasks that can help with speed optimization:

What is the status of metrics for specific page types and what can be improved on them?

PLUS monitoring also offers developers many other features, prepared based on our experiences. One of them is the ability to add annotations to graphs, allowing you to mark important new deployments on the website:

Annotations are also added automatically, for example, when URL settings change in the test or we change something in the test infrastructure.

You can export monitoring data or connect it to your dashboards via a public API. For an external team or agency, a read-only key can be created.

Of course, with PageSpeed.ONE monitoring, you can count on any number of clients and users.

There's much more. Check out the monitoring documentation, where we regularly add new articles.

How to Get Started with PLUS Monitoring?#

The prices for PageSpeed.ONE speed monitoring are currently lower than those of similar tools:

• annually ( per month) for one thoroughly monitored website (a "test suite," which includes 5 URL synths and 5 CrUX domains).
• annually for 5 additional URLs, annually for 10 additional domains.
• Discounts or commissions for agencies from 10% for 5 or more test suites.

Price examples:

• For a client with a smaller e-commerce site, two language versions of the website, and two competitors to track, you'll pay annually.
• For a larger client, where you want to monitor 2 websites in detail, each with 10 URLs and 20 domains in total, you'll pay annually ().

Find more in the pricing list.

Are you interested or want to discuss speed monitoring further?

• Check out the landing page or sample project.
• Schedule a monitoring demonstration.

Agencies can start a standard 30-day team trial without a credit card. You can run multiple client tests in one team with the same trial end date.

One billing account for multiple teams#

Each client can have their own team, while multiple teams can connect to one primary team that pays the subscriptions for all of them. Billing details and the card stay with the primary team, and the connected team’s owner can see who pays.

Later, the client or agency can detach the team and pay separately. Its current billing period will finish under the primary team. See the billing and subscription guide for details.

Try the monitoring on your own project and see how easily it fits into your workflow.

…or simply order PLUS monitoring.