WebPageTest Joins Forces with Catchpoint

I’m incredibly excited about the future of WebPageTest and web performance testing in general with today’s announcement that WebPageTest and Catchpoint will be joining forces and I hope you’re as excited as I am for the possibilities it will bring.

WebPageTest has always been about providing the most accurate and realistic performance measurements of the user experience for web content, on real devices with a wide selection of real browsers, measured from actual locations around the world. The community pulled together amazingly well over the years to provide the geographic footprint that it has today. I have been running the server infrastructure out of my basement for the last 12 years and managing the project mostly in my spare time, though I’m also incredibly grateful to all of the companies and individuals who have also contributed ideas and code to the project.

Catchpoint was born in the fires of availability and performance monitoring for operations and SRE teams where SLAs, reliability, and accuracy are all absolute requirements and they have had similar goals of providing testing from real network connections on real ISP’s all around the world. They have built an incredible test network of over 800 locations and highly available systems and teams to make sure the systems are always available.

By joining forces, we will be bringing Catchpoint’s broad test network to WebPageTest, move the infrastructure out of my basement and into a highly available environment with incredible operations and support.

Catchpoint will also be investing in the future development of the WebPageTest open source software and I’m particularly excited to be joining the team to lead the engineering efforts on WebPageTest. It’s going to be great to be able to focus on it full-time and I’m excited to see where we can take it.

The public instance of WebPageTest at Webpagetest.org will continue to be freely available for anyone to use for performance testing and hopefully, you’re as excited as I am for what the future will bring. WebPageTest wouldn’t be what it is today without the incredible support of the web performance community and we are all dedicated to making sure that the evolution of WebPageTest continues to honor that community spirit and involvement.

Patrick Meenan, Engineering Fellow at Catchpoint & Founder of WebPageTest