Press release

New ThousandEyes Research Establishes Internet Performance Benchmark for Top Performing Digital Businesses

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ThousandEyes, the company providing visibility into the Internet and
digital experiences today released the 2019
Digital Experience Performance Benchmark Report, a comparative
analysis of web, infrastructure and network performance metrics from the
top 20 U.S. digital retail, travel and media websites. This research
empowers website operations teams to benchmark their own performance
metrics against their competitors and provides recommendations to help
guide future performance management, content delivery and network
architecture decisions as they aim to deliver the highest quality
digital experiences for their customers. Notably, the research also
establishes an industry-agnostic ‘Internet Performance Bar’, setting
minimum performance thresholds that any digital company should strive to
meet to deliver the best possible end-user experience.

“One of the biggest challenges we have in website performance
engineering is understanding what ‘good’ looks like. We lacked an
industry-wide, competitive context for our performance,” said Mark
Rodrigue, Sr. Network Engineer at Room & Board. “The ThousandEyes
research finally shines a light on where we stand in relation to our
competitors, and gives us hard data we can absolutely use to guide
future infrastructure investments in the spirit of delivering the best
possible website performance and digital experiences for our customers.”

The Digital Experience Performance Benchmark Report is the third report
in an ongoing
series of research produced by ThousandEyes that is intended to help
companies gain a data-driven understanding of how various aspects of
Internet infrastructure impacts their digital experience delivery. The
data for all three reports was gathered using the ThousandEyes platform,
which uses active monitoring and global vantage points to measure
application layer and network layer performance metrics for any website.
The most recent research measured Internet, network, server and
experience metrics every 10 minutes for 60 days across 36 major metros
across the U.S. In total, over 300M unique measurements were collected
and analyzed.

Key findings from the research include:

  • Each industry displays unique performance patterns: The three
    measured industries (retail, media and entertainment, and travel and
    hospitality) display distinct performance cohort behaviors that differ
    from each other. For example, top retail sites fall into two distinct
    clusters of HTTP response times along a mostly uniform range of
    network latency, while media and entertainment sites saw a more
    uniform range of HTTP response times but with two distinct clusters of
    network latency.
  • Significant performance variations exist, despite perceived market
    maturity:     Performance variations across CDN providers, ISPs and
    geographies exist even in the highly mature US market. This makes
    real-time operational visibility from a variety of geographical and
    Internet user vantage points important so businesses can keep a
    real-time eye on unexpected performance blockers.
  • Focusing on delivering strong DNS, network and HTTP response time
    performance will help most companies deliver top-tier digital
    experiences:     60% of sites with 1st quartile response times
    delivered DNS and network performance at or better than the median.
    Delivering near to or better than the median response time highly
    correlates with strong page load performance. 87% of sites that did so
    delivered 1st quartile page load times.
  • A minimum Internet Performance Bar exists that, if met, should
    deliver top-tier website performance, regardless of industry:     Given
    cross-vertical performance ranges across the gathered metrics, it is
    recommended that operations teams minimally target DNS time of 25ms,
    network latency to the CDN edge of 15ms and HTTP response time of
    350ms, from all important markets within the U.S.

“Internet performance is an under-appreciated yet major contributor to
digital experience, and in the battle for customer loyalty, every
millisecond matters,” said Alex Henthorn-Iwane, report author and vice
president of product marketing at ThousandEyes. “With this research, we
hope to provide operations professionals the data and inputs they need
to know which aspects of digital experience delivery to improve so they
can ensure the best possible customer digital experiences.”

Learn more about the 2019 ThousandEyes Digital Experience Performance
Benchmark Report:

About ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes empowers enterprises to see, understand and improve digital
experiences for their customers and employees. The ThousandEyes cloud
platform offers unmatched vantage points throughout the global Internet
and cloud providers, delivering immediate visibility into the digital
experience for every user, application, website or service, over any
network. ThousandEyes is central to the global operations of the world’s
largest and fastest growing brands, including Comcast, eBay, HP, 120+ of
the Global 2000, 65+ of the Fortune 500, 6 of the 7 top US banks, and 20
of the 25 top SaaS companies. For more information, visit www.ThousandEyes.com
or follow us on Twitter at @ThousandEyes.