Competitive benchmarking

With SpeedCurve Synthetic, you can monitor any other website in the same way that you can your own website. That means you get all that same, rich, awesome data, screenshots, and filmstrips that you can compare. 

You can also drill down and focus in on things like construction. That website that's rendering twice as fast as yours... what are they doing differently? Have they got more Java script? Have they got less? Are you making 400 requests and they're only making 80? This is the place to find that out. 

Here's a competitive benchmarking demo using The Verge

On the Settings page, first we add the individual pages we want to monitor. We give the home page the custom label Home and the article page the custom label Article. If we wanted to compare the performance of different article pages, we'd add more individual URLs and give them all the same Article label.

Now we can hit the Add Site button to start setting up competitive benchmarking:

We're adding TechCrunch to the benchmarking, so we enter its name in the Site Name field and then start adding URLs. The first URL we add is for the home page. We give it the custom label Home to correspond with the label we gave The Verge's home page: 

Let's fast forward a bit. We've added a bunch more competitors' URLs to the settings, and given all the home pages the custom Home label. We've run our synthetic tests across all those URLs for a month and accumulated a lot of data. Now when we go to the Benchmarking dashboard, we're able to filter that data by page type. Here you can see all the results for pages that were labelled Home:

Also on the Benchmarking dashboard, you can see the latest filmstrip views of the rendering for each of the pages labelled Home:

You can also generate awesome video versions of your filmstrip view, showing your page rendering side-by-side with your competitors.