Webinar Recap: Taking Web Performance to the Next Level

In the webinar, Taking Web Performance to the Next Level, experts from Catchpoint and Akamai discussed how businesses can optimize web performance to enhance user experience, protect revenue, and stay competitive. Hosted by Piril Kavlak, Director of Product Marketing at Catchpoint, the session showcased the recently announced incorporation of WebPageTest into Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) platform, real-world success stories, and a preview of upcoming features. Here’s a recap of the key takeaways.

Every second counts

Website speed is critical to user experience and overall business success. Slow load times are more than an inconvenience—they can severely damage a company’s reputation and bottom line. As Piril emphasized in the webinar, “Page load time is one of the most critical metrics for SEO and company growth because it directly impacts user experience.” According to Google, 53% of mobile site visitors abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Real-world examples, like Pinterest reducing wait times by 40% and boosting conversion rates by 15%, demonstrate the tangible benefits of optimizing website speed. To protect revenue and ensure smooth operations, it’s essential for businesses to not only keep their websites up and running but also to make them fast and resilient. Understanding and optimizing performance from your users’ perspective—no matter their location, device, browser, or connection speed—is crucial for maintaining user trust and satisfaction.

Piril underlined how Catchpoint stands out in this arena by ensuring the resilience of your entire Internet Stack, from networks and protocols to BGP, CDN, and cloud services, all the way to applications. With Catchpoint IPM, you can monitor and identify potential issues across customer interactions, workforce applications, networks, or website experiences—before they escalate into incidents that could impact your business.

Enhancing user experience with Catchpoint WebPageTest

Next, Mikayla Reddy, WebPageTest Solutions Lead, discussed how the incorporation of WebPageTest into the Catchpoint platform has further strengthened Catchpoint’s industry-leading Website Experience solution. WebPageTest, recognized as the gold standard in website performance testing and optimization provides a powerful suite of tools for front-end developers and performance engineers. These tools offer deep insights through detailed visualizations like waterfalls, helping identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, and ensuring that websites perform well and deliver a superior user experience.

The webinar also mentioned some of the world’s leading brands that rely on WebPageTest, including Google and Shopify. For instance, companies like Cloudflare have achieved significant improvements, such as a 23% reduction in First Contentful Paint and a 72% reduction in Time to First Byte, by using WebPageTest as their go-to tool for synthetic testing. These results translate into better-performing pages, happier users, and more satisfied developers, underscoring the impact of Catchpoint's comprehensive performance monitoring solutions.

Live demo: Enhancing performance with real-time testing

Before the live demo, Kelly Avina, our Director of Product Management, highlighted the features available within the Catchpoint Portal through this integration and emphasized the unique benefit of having WebPageTest seamlessly incorporated into the platform: enabling Catchpoint customers to enjoy a unified, streamlined experience while leveraging the full power of WebPageTest for performance testing and optimization.

During the live demo, Kelly used  Catchpoint’s tools to optimize the "Cinema App," a demo website for booking movie tickets. The demo highlighted performance issues, such as slower load times on Mobile Safari and higher First Contentful Paint in Milan.

To address these, Kelly ran a real-time test on an iPhone 15 using WebPageTest within Catchpoint. The test revealed a high Speed Index, indicating slower rendering. Kelly then explored optimization options, selecting three no-code experiments: deferring render-blocking scripts, inlining external CSS, and self-hosting third-party files. While some metrics improved, the Speed Index worsened, prompting a more targeted approach.

The demo also identified opportunities to improve usability, such as reducing layout shifts and enhancing accessibility, highlighting how Catchpoint’s tools allow for targeted performance enhancements and data-driven decisions to improve user experience.

How Akamai leverages Catchpoint WebPageTest

Special guest Josh Appel, Enterprise Architect at Akamai Technologies, shared insights into how they use WebPageTest and Catchpoint for continuous testing and deeper performance analysis. One of the challenges Josh highlighted was the limitation of manual browser testing, which lacked the ability to accumulate data over time. WebPageTest solved this problem by providing a reliable source of data that could be used consistently. It has become a trusted resource within Akamai, making it easier to experiment and deliver actionable insights to development teams.

Akamai’s workflow typically starts with analyzing real user data through its RUM tool, Impulse. Josh then creates a WebPageTest profile based on this data, allowing him to run tests continuously and refine performance strategies over time. Integrating WebPageTest into Catchpoint’s platform has streamlined this process, enabling Akamai to run tests from multiple locations and maintain consistent profiles, ultimately making it easier to consult and assist their clients in improving performance.

Overall, bringing WebPageTest into Catchpoint’s IPM platform has significantly enhanced Akamai’s ability to experiment, gather insights, and efficiently implement performance improvements within a single platform.

New features and plans for WebPageTest Self-Service Portal

In an exciting announcement, Piril introduced the upcoming features and plans for the new WebPageTest Self-Service Portal within Catchpoint. The new WebPageTest Portal, currently accessible from webpagetest.org, will be fully moved to the Catchpoint Portal by early next year. Everything available on webpagetest.org will still be accessible to all users in the new WebPageTest Portal within Catchpoint.  

These new features include performance monitoring capabilities including scheduled tests, alerting, dashboards, and advanced AI-powered smart boards. Additionally, we’re introducing a new enterprise plan with access to our IPM capabilities, enabling businesses to take even greater control of their web performance management.

For the full live demo and question and answer session, be sure to watch the full webinar. You can also request a personalized demo to see Catchpoint’s suite of powerful web performance tools at work.  

Read our blog to learn more about Catchpoint’s incorporation of WebPageTest.

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