There is nothing like an unexpectedly high level of demand to bring a website crashing down, as companies involved in embarrassing and high-profile online failures can testify.

Faced with the realisation that the competition is only a click away, and that poor website performance means more than just bad publicity, website operators are turning to companies which can help them monitor the performance of their websites and quickly diagnose faults. The aim is to protect both the integrity of their brand and their sales.

"The competition between e-commerce websites has grown so fierce that price is not a differentiator any more," says Eric Nataf, director of marketing for Europe at e-commerce performance benchmarking company Keynote Systems.

"But navigability and ease-of-use remain a differentiator. If a user experiences bad performance or a bad quality of experience on your website and goes to the competition as a result and buys from them, it is not likely he will come back to your website, unless your competitor experiences the same problems."

Understanding

Website performance monitoring aims to give website operators a greater understanding of how their site is performing, not in terms of attracting visitors, but rather, in terms of response times when a user calls up a page, and in terms of site availability via different ISPs (Internet Service Providers), from different parts of the world, and over different types of connection.

Website performance monitoring falls broadly into two camps. In one are companies such as Keynote Systems and Mercury Interactive which, to give their clients this end-user performance perspective, simulate user demand by installing banks of computers at strategic points around the globe to "ping" their customers' sites, carrying out several million measurements each day to identify problems, either with the site itself or with the network.

In the other camp are software companies, such as Segue Software, Rational and Radview, which offer website load and functionality testing software for deployment in-house.

The outsourcing approach shifts the onus onto the performance measurement company, but leaves the website operator to identify the cause of the problems diagnosed by the monitoring company, and to solve them.

The software solution can offer more detailed analysis of problems, but is initially more expensive to deploy and requires more in-house expertise to install and use.

Some software companies, such as Segue, offer the choice of deploying their software either in an on-site or a hosted environment, while Attenda, the UK start-up, has developed another model in which internet applications monitoring and management is combined with the provision of server space and network connections to create "total managed hosting".

According to David Godwin, Attenda's vice president of marketing and strategy, this approach goes much further than pinging. It can also include monitoring the performance of the database serving the pages, and running dummy transactions throughout the day to check that all parts of the chain are functioning correctly.

"Pinging checks the availability of a network card within a server, and most hosters would use that mechanism as a measure of site availability, but it isn't," says Mr Godwin. "Pinging represents less than 10 per cent of the monitoring that needs to happen to ensure that things are performing the way they should."

This point is emphasised by Commercetest.com, a UK-based consultancy that specialises in the test, fault analysis and repair of e-business infrastructure. "As competition is so fierce within internet business, it's important that your service is available when customers want it," it says.

Website performance measurement is still a relatively new industry, and awareness of its value still seems relatively low, particularly in Europe.

Last November, for example, Mercury Interactive, the US performance measurement company, commissioned Benchmark Research to conduct a survey of more than 200 UK organisations, each with more than 200 employees.

The company found that only a quarter of managers responsible for e-business applications were using an automated testing solution on their websites and internet operations.

A similar number were not familiar with the concept, or benefits, of automated testing even when prompted, and of those not using automated testing, 61 per cent said they had no plans to do so in the future.

This despite the fact that when Mercury carried out more than 1,000 load tests using its ActiveTest hosted, web-based load testing service last year, it found that 98 per cent of the websites surveyed had a critical problem with scalability and that, on average, websites scaled to only 15 per cent of expected capacity during initial load tests.

New attitudes

Ken Klein, Mercury Interactive's chief operating officer, believes, however, that attitudes are changing fast. "There's an increasing recognition that web performance management is not a nice-to-have but a must-have," he says.

"Also, where there was previously a real focus on e-commerce sites generating top-line revenue, now the value proposition is shifting towards squeezing costs out of the system. These solutions not only ensure revenue, but also generate tremendous cost savings."

The scaling problem identified by the Mercury tests is a key website performance issue, but it is not the only one. Steve Butler, Segue Software's chief executive, says that a site's ability to provide a consistent and reliable customer service, however and from wherever the site is accessed, is equally important.

"Dotcoms and bricks-and-mortar companies are still failing to think seriously about their e-business from the consumer's perspective. The problem is that no one can really know exactly how many customers will go to a site, what they will do when they get there, and therefore what strain the IT infrastructure will be put under," says Mr Butler.

"E-businesses should test and monitor their entire internet infrastructure before going live to see how it will cope and scale to vast customer demand."

Testing tools "are not enough", says Keith Trotter, managing director of ImagoQA, a leading software testing consultancy in the UK. "There's a common misconception about testing tools that all you have to do is buy one and run it, to solve all your testing problems," he says.

"But there's a world of difference between installing a testing tool to solve a problem, and implementing a test automation process to resolve a whole range of interrelated issues"

"Outsourcing is the only viable option," he adds. "Otherwise you'll have have an in-house team of highly trained testing people working flat out one week, and twiddling their thumbs for the next two, waiting for the next phase of the project to be completed."

Website performance measurement may seem primarily focused on fault-finding, but there is a more constructive side to it, too. The reports the measurement process delivers can help website operators shape and improve their online offering.

"We do use it to look back and see what the performance was like but, to be honest, if there are problems, we get to know about it pretty quickly from someone ringing our call centre and having a go at us," says Toby Strauss, managing director of the online mortgage broker, Charcol Online, whose website performance is monitored by Attenda.

"For us, the most powerful thing is to use it to help shape the content of the site, try out new ideas and see how popular they are."

Whether website operators use a measurement and monitoring system as a defensive, or offensive mechanism, however, the message from the companies offering these services is clear: use it.

"We would urge website owners to test early, test often, and then once they deploy their websites, make sure that they're implementing a monitoring solution 24 hours a day, seven days a week," says Mercury Interactive's Mr Klein.

"If it's critical enough to build, then they ought to be testing and monitoring it."