Web performance test & monitoring: Dareboost 2017 retrospective

Spread the love

To make 2018 a great year for your website performance, let’s have a look back on the major evolutions for Dareboost in 2017: new features, improvements, best practices, etc. This retrospective post may remind you some very useful information for 2018!

2017: another eventful year for Dareboost! Here is an overview to make sure you haven’t missed any important information.

A reinforced Dareboost team

Let’s start with the heart of Dareboost: its team, which has been reinforced with the arrival of two new talented profiles within the last months:

Boris Schapira & Matthieu Bué

Two people who occupy key positions and will definitely enhance our ability to assist you in your optimization efforts.

My goal is for our clients to improve their websites’ performance […] and check with customers to ensure that they are on track with their performance objectives and, if not, see if I can help with an even broader use of Dareboost,” Boris explained in his interview.

Matthieu’s role is essential too: improving the user experience of our platform. “We – all the team I mean – will think about fundamental changes that will bring more value to our users.”
Let’s bet you may find exciting changes on our interface in the months to come!

We haven’t finished introducing you to new people, since recruitments are still ongoing at Dareboost…

Best practices: updates & new checks

Dareboost tests are based on our own best practices repository (100+ checks) that we continuously keep up to date. Our goal: always provide you with audits taking into account the latest best practices regarding web performance, quality and security.
During 2017, we released two major updates of our repository, involving new controls implementation, numerous improvements for existing best practices… and significative changes for your Dareboost quality score:

  • in february 2017, we have updated our best practices regarding the Secure label in the address bar (when users request the website over the HTTPS protocol); enhanced our procedures for controlling the loading of third-party content and detec SPOF; added one best practice about the Public-Key-Pins (HPKP) HTTP header and another one to penalize the web pages that were not indexed. Feel free to read our detailed post about this update.
  • Since December 12, many other changes have come for Dareboost audits: new tests about SSL certificates, weight control of the HTML source code, security controls regarding relative links (base element and CSP base-uri directive), etc. Not to mention dozens of improvements for the existing quality checks: find the detailed description of this update.

Expanded monitoring features

At the end of 2016, we have just released one major new feature on Dareboost: user journey monitoring. We have been glad to see this transactional monitoring tool – allowing you to monitor the web performance throughout a whole user journey – attracts a growing number of customers. If you’re interested, we can arrange a demonstration.

New website speed comparison report

Boosted comparison and benchmark features. Last April, Dareboost announced an upgrade for its comparison feature, now allowing you to compare up to 12 analysis reports at a time! In addition, since December, these comparisons also include a graph to show the visual progress of the each compared web page.

New locations for Dareboost test probes. 12 different locations are now available to test your websites performance with Dareboost. Here are the last added locations: Mexico (Mexico), Brazil (São Paulo) and a second available location in the United States (Seattle).

Dareboost Locations map

The most curious of you (and those who are interested in monitoring their web performance more intensively) may also have noticed that new monitoring frequencies (30min and 15min) have been added on some of our professional offers.

Actually, regular readers of our blog – especially those who have read our selection of advanced use-cases for Dareboost – also had a preview of another new promising feature on Dareboost: custom dashboards, allowing you to better align your follow-up with your concerns and use Dareboost even more efficiently. Interested by this new option? Feel free to contact us for a test!

Dareboost custom dashboards

While evolving our product, we have enriched our blog with numerous articles and detailed advice dealing with the latest trends and best practices regarding web quality, performance and security. Here is our own 2017 best-of:

Since Dareboost allows to test and monitor the web performance of any website, we also publish our own benchmark results on various markets from time to time. Here are a few examples:

We regularly produce french e-commerce barometers in partnership with the professional magazine LSA. Among the latest editions, you could have a look at this web performance comparison between the 15 e-commerce leaders in France.

Our participation in the first DiG Publishing Lisbon event in Lisbon has been the opportunity to unveil the results of a web performance benchmark involving more than 60 european leading publishers (news and vertical websites).

Webperf benchmark DiG Lisbon

More and more users and (satisfied) customers

Product evolutions, strengthened team, more advice and enhanced support to optimize web performance: all these efforts led by Dareboost are rewarded by increasing results for our startup and we are quite proud of it. This crescendo development for our web performance testing and monitoring service motivates us every day to go even further in providing support our users… Whose community don’t stop increasing. Indeed, we are proud to start this new year with more than 60,000 registered users across 50+ different countries!

Talking about the customer side, the development of our professional solutions is just as fast and 2018 is likely to be an exceptional year for Dareboost. Indeed, one of our 2018 wishes is to collect more and more feedbacks, as nice as this testimonial from the french insurance comparator Lelynx.fr :

The attentive eye of Dareboost allowed us to gain some points on important KPIs.

One chance to win your Dareboost pro account!

As a conclusion, we hope that this 2017 Dareboost retrospective will lead you to consider your web performance optimization as a major stake for 2018! To further motivate you, let’s play a little game for a chance to win a Dareboost Business account (or a few Dareboost goodies). Just have a look at our dedicated post and good luck to all!


Spread the love