• How does Site Confidence perform the monitoring?
• How do you measure down time?
• Why is the default download threshold 30 seconds?
• Why do download times vary?
• Can you monitor password protected pages or check that login works?
• Can you monitor pages that use Cookies?
• Can you monitor pages that contain content requiring plug-ins?
• Can you monitor dynamically generated pages?

We use our own, proprietary testing technology. Our test agents are automated processes which emulate end user browser activity. They take any URL they are given and complete a standard HTTP/1.1 compliant download of the appropriate content just like Internet Explorer. They can download secure content using HTTPS, support any chunking and compression techniques, whilst also managing cookies, sessions and even a local browser cache when required.

Whilst making the download they capture any error codes issued by the web server and can inspect the content downloaded for a variety of inconsistencies to generate reports about availability. The agent also times each and every element of the process providing all the necessary data to analyse the download speed of page and their components over time.

Once we detect that your site is down we double the frequency of our tests, so if we normally test every 30 minutes (default) then this is increased to every 15 minutes. When you look at the error statistics you can see how often the test has failed. We do not record an error, and you will not receive an alert until we have failed to completely download your homepage at least twice. All online and emailed error reports will show the duration of the error.

People are impatient, so if the main text of your home page takes too long to download, many will give up and some will never return. We have chosen 30 seconds as the default cut off point. The average UK home page takes around 17 seconds. Ideally your home page should download much faster, we recommend less than 15 seconds. Go to the Benchmarks area to see the average download times for different sectors in the UK.

Download speed is of course influenced by the speed of your connection to the Internet. Many consumers and small businesses connect via dial-up modems which in practice cannot download faster than 5 kilobytes per second (40 Kbps). If your home page is larger than 100 kilobytes, it will take at least 20 seconds on a good day, and much more at busy times.

The download times we measure typically vary as a result of three factors. Firstly how fast your web server responds to requests for web pages, including dynamic page generation and any required communication with an application server or database server. Secondly, the content on your selected pages changing, with rotating banner ads or dynamic includes. And finally, load on the server or bandwidth contention on the internet connection due to increased number of users.

Yes. For us to monitor password protected pages you only need to provide us with a user ID and password. We can also test login scripts that require several stages of authentication.

Yes, you can specify whether or not to use cookies but, by default, we perform each test as though we are new users visiting your site for the first time.

If your site has content that require the use of a plug-in we can still monitor it, but we will not be able to tell you if the content requiring the plug-in has failed to download. If you have alternative content for users without the plug-in we will automatically download that instead.

Yes. Dynamically generated pages produce standard HTML code on the web server. Once this is downloaded to end users they are just the same as static pages.

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