Have you ever wondered why the StatusCake.com response times are much higher than the likes of some of our major competitors?

Well that is all to do with our testing process. Traditionally website monitoring services load browser headers, and in some cases, the body text of your website as well.  Whilst this is great for detecting website uptime or downtime it doesn’t give the full picture.  What if some of your JavaScript apps are slowing down the speed of your website?  What if your image CDN responds with the pictures after 20 seconds?

At StatusCake if we tested just the headers and body text we wouldn’t be able to check to see if everything is running as it should – give you the full picture.  So instead of just loading headers and body text we load the entire website page.  Just as a website visitor would.  We do this by using simulated browsers that load everything on the webpage – every image, every bit of CSS and every JavaScript element.  We also accept the cookies and react based on them.  The only things our simulated browsers don’t do is load any executable or Java (yes we load Flash!)

So what does this all mean? Well it means you can expect the response times from StatusCake to be several times larger than that of our competitors.  It also means if anything slows down the service of your website to your visitors you’ll get a performance alert; even if the thing slowing it down is a 3^rd party application.

It is this style of website testing that allows StatusCake to offer truly realistic performance expectations. Our server threads each dedicated 1000kbs of bandwidth to a website test – so the performance you see is what you can expect; no other test will interrupt the process or cause fluctuations.  Of course to get the best idea of performance you will always want to test in the same location; and you can do just that with any of our paid plans

Our Real Website Testing method is well… It’s just another cherry on top of the StatusCake!