In today's world, we have many tools available to us to measure the performance of our websites. There are two types of data that can be collected with these tools: lab data and field data. It is possible to embed lab data tools into a continuous integration pipeline. This is also how third-party solutions work, such as Checkly (lab), Vercel Analytics (lab and field data) or WebPageTest (lab data). Today, third-party real user monitoring (RUM) solutions such as DataDog or Sentry also provide performance data for cross-referencing.
Back in 2014, I was working as a contractor on modernizing the MOT for the British Government. Even then, without all the modern tools I mentioned above, we could easily find the slowest page in the system as we had some really cool hardware at our disposal. You can watch it here:
It was an eye-opener for some developers back then who were just using Google Analytics as their performance monitoring tool.
And yes, in 2014 in our office we had a touch 72" monitor!
Godspeed
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Top comments (1)
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