DEV Community

Cover image for Back then, Boomers measured page speed with Google Analytics!
Dom Sipowicz
Dom Sipowicz

Posted on

Back then, Boomers measured page speed with Google Analytics!

In today's world, we have many tools available to us to measure the performance of our websites. There are two types of data that can be collected with these tools: lab data and field data. It is possible to embed lab data tools into a continuous integration pipeline. This is also how third-party solutions work, such as Checkly (lab), Vercel Analytics (lab and field data) or WebPageTest (lab data). Today, third-party real user monitoring (RUM) solutions such as DataDog or Sentry also provide performance data for cross-referencing.

Back in 2014, I was working as a contractor on modernizing the MOT for the British Government. Even then, without all the modern tools I mentioned above, we could easily find the slowest page in the system as we had some really cool hardware at our disposal. You can watch it here:

It was an eye-opener for some developers back then who were just using Google Analytics as their performance monitoring tool.

And yes, in 2014 in our office we had a touch 72" monitor!

Godspeed

Follow me on ELon's Twitter:
https://twitter.com/dom_sipowicz

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
gabihyla profile image
Gabriela Hyla

Really enjoy it your article!