Today we're proud to announce the release of Carbon Control, an exciting new feature in Catchpoint WebPageTest. Central to this new feature is the inclusion of a new experimental metric in WebPageTest for measuring a website's Carbon Footprint. Measuring carbon footprint has been the most requested and discussed issue in our tracker, and for good reasons: the web community is increasingly concerned about reducing our contributions to climate change, and companies will increasingly be held accountable for monitoring and reducing their emissions. At Catchpoint WebPageTest, we find this challenge ..read more

Things can move pretty quickly around here. In addition to the change log, we're publishing monthly summaries of some of the highlights of features and changes made to WebPageTest in the last month. Overview The custom waterfall page got a significant redesign WebPageTest now uses Chrome's Dev Tools priorities The Element Timing API is now supported The Locations API endpoint can be filtered by a single location We now warn you if we think your TTFB might be inaccurate Custom waterfall redesign and dynamic adjustments One of the (many) features that is a little tucked away in WebPageTest is ..read more

It’s May 2017. Google has just announced Android vitals at I/O 2017, an initiative to provide relevant app performance metrics to Android developers with respect to stability, battery and rendering on Android devices. I am on the Google Play team managing product and partnerships strategy for companies and Android app developers to build and distribute their apps on the Google Play Store. The news was received with somewhat mixed reactions among the Android app developer teams managed by my team. Most developers loved that Google Play was sharing performance data on their apps, to analyze bad ..read more

It’s been a while, but we’re bringing back our monthly product round-up to make it easier for folks to stay up to date with all the new features and improvements around WebPageTest. Overview Free Web Performance Course! Remove TTFB variance from experiment comparisons More events supported in the Chrome Recorder extension Pass through the current test ID in custom script Blacklist, custom scripts, custom metrics and more now support file input Ability to report the time until the title is displayed for Chrome tests Free Web Performance Course! WebPageTest has benefitted so much from the per ..read more

A complaint I sometimes hear about web performance metrics is that they focus too much on initial page load, unfairly skewering web apps that are actually fast but in different ways than traditional websites. The reasoning goes that many web applications are intentionally built more like native apps than like websites, prioritizing efficiency during lengthy browsing sessions after the web app is already open rather than optimizing for a first visit. While I would argue that site delivery optimizations should not need to conflict with post-load optimizations (...and wonder if users carry their ..read more

TLDR: if your site is Twitter, AirBnB, Apple, Spotify, Reddit, CNN, FedEx, or so many others then probably yes! Many of the most common performance problems in websites and applications today are caused by how they load and rely upon JavaScript, and the difficulty involved in solving those problems often depends on the degree of that reliance. When JS reliance is minimal, fixing poor delivery performance can be as simple as instructing the browser to load certain scripts at a lower priority and allow HTML content to render sooner. But when a site is dependent on JavaScript for generating its H ..read more

WebPageTest’s custom scripting functionality unlocks some very powerful testing capabilities, including being able to test multi-step user journeys and flows through your site and application. Writing those scripts, however, can sometimes be challenging. Today, that’s getting a whole lot easier thanks to the new WebPageTest Recorder extension that let’s you export flows from Chrome’s built-in recorder directly as WebPageTest Custom scripts. The extension is available today and works in Chrome versions 104 and up. The Chrome Recorder & Multi-Step Tests Chrome now ships with a new Recorder p ..read more

Today we are excited to launch a set of new, powerful features and functionality for all users of WebPageTest to help make it faster and easier for you and your teams to make sense of your website’s performance, the opportunities for improvement, and, critically, how significant those opportunities are. WebPageTest has always been great at providing in-depth and accurate information about how your site performs across all major browsers, but we’ve always stopped just short of giving you specific advice on what to do. One of the goals that has guided our changes to WebPageTest in the past few y ..read more

Today we’re super excited to pull back the curtains and unveil a new UI for WebPageTest—one we’ve been working on for a while now and that we think will make it a lot easier to use for WebPageTest power users as well as folks who are just getting started in their performance journey. WebPageTest is definitely a power tool, and it was important to us that we didn’t lose the depth and accuracy of the data that we surface. So if you’ve been using WebPageTest for a while, don’t worry—everything is still there. But being a powerful tool doesn’t mean we want to exclude folks who may not be familiar ..read more

When you're doing performance testing, one of the most important variables to consider is the connection type. The web is built on a set of a very chatty protocols—there's a lot of back and forth between the browser and the server throughout the browsing experience. Each trip from the server to the browser, and vice versa, is subject to the limitations of the network in use: how much bandwidth is available, how high is the latency, how much packet loss is there, etc. When doing synthetic testing, results are only as good as the accuracy of the throttling being applied to the network—use thrott ..read more