Speed Monitoring: Why Every Development Agency Needs It

Website speed influences conversions, SEO success, and PPC ad costs. By monitoring speed, development agencies can guarantee clients regular hours for speed optimization or offer new service packages.

In this article, we explain why speed monitoring is intriguing for development agencies and what our Speed Monitoring PLUS offers.

Why Accelerate and Monitor Websites?#

How does website speed benefit your business?

• Increased conversion rates.
• Improved SEO rankings on Google.
• Reduced PPC campaign costs in Google Ads.

For a large e-commerce site, we found that users experiencing load times around one second had a 3.5 times higher conversion rate than those with load times around 2.5 seconds.

Who doesn’t measure, doesn’t accelerate. Monitoring is the essential first step to addressing website speed:

• If something goes wrong, monitoring ensures you're informed.
• It provides data for targeted optimizations and improvement tips.
• You receive feedback after implementing changes.

Occasional speed tests in PageSpeed Insights might give you the impression that everything is running smoothly. But what you need is continuous monitoring of speed metrics to catch problems and inform you.

Periodic speed measurements might suggest everything is buttery smooth. Reality often differs.

How Does Speed Benefit Development Agencies?#

We collaborate with companies like PragueBest, SUPERKODERS, PeckaDesign, and Programia, and we see that speed monitoring helps them serve clients better:

• Speed as a Business Booster
  A faster website and higher conversion rate mean happier clients and more development funds.
• Better Client Retention
  When a development agency monitors speed, it provides another reason to maintain the partnership.
• Long-term Client Collaboration
  The agency continuously dedicates itself to the project, optimizing over time. It’s work developers usually enjoy.

How do development agencies rate our website speed monitoring?

“We appreciate the ability to check data daily and receive email notifications in PageSpeed.ONE PLUS. Marking changes in the tool and tracking their impact has proven very useful.” — Eduard Beneš, PragueBest

Why Should the Agency Pay for Monitoring?#

When an agency pays for monitoring itself, it holds complete control. It sees all the data, can quickly react to changes, and use monitoring as a tool for guided optimization.

This way, the agency has an overview of the website’s speed and can propose improvements to clients, instead of passively waiting for requests.

Advantage in Contract Negotiations#

Monitoring can be easily included in website maintenance contracts:

• SLA and Maintenance
  Monitoring as a part of regular maintenance and reporting.
• Service Packages
  Part of premium services along with additional optimization.
• Speed Guarantees
  If the agency guarantees website performance to the client, it needs tools to monitor it.

With monitoring, the agency shifts from being a supplier to a strategic partner, helping clients keep their websites at peak performance.

Finding the cause of speed deterioration using PLUS monitoring on iRozhlas.cz.

What Is and Isn’t Website Speed Monitoring?#

There are many tools on the market today, and development agencies sometimes confuse different types of monitoring. We often see them using tools that address different issues. The most common include:

• Sentry – excellent for monitoring JavaScript and frontend application errors, but not ideal for measuring website speed from the user's perspective.
• Grafana – great for visualizing backend and server metrics (CPU, RAM, API latency), but doesn’t address frontend and real user page loading experience.
• CrUX Dashboard – provides aggregated data from real users from the Chrome UX Report, but lacks daily overview and deeper analysis of specific issues.
• Pingdom/UptimeRobot – primarily monitor server availability and can run simple synthetic tests, but don’t focus on website speed.
• Lighthouse in DevTools or PageSpeed Insights – a one-time test for local development, but doesn’t offer continuous monitoring and performance comparison over time.

Most of these tools either address code errors, backend monitoring, or browser-aggregated data. For website speed monitoring, you need more:

• Long-term Metric Monitoring
  How does performance evolve over time? When did regressions occur?
• In-depth Analysis of Specific Pages and Issues
  How does speed differ between desktop and mobile? Which pages are the slowest?
• Immediate Feedback
  When you deploy a new version of the website, can you tell if it slowed down or sped up?

PageSpeed.ONE’s speed monitoring fills these gaps.

What Does Monitoring PLUS from PageSpeed.ONE Offer to Development Agencies?#

Our monitoring was born from practice—stemming from consultations with clients and collaboration with both development and marketing agencies. As a result, it delivers data that truly holds value for website speed optimization.

Let’s explore what our tool offers.

For each client, you see a dashboard with test kits and speed metrics:

The image shows a client's dashboard with two tests.

Team and client management is "included" in the solution, but it isn’t, of course, the main part of the application. The main focus is the testing itself, its outputs, and also regular reports.

Watchdog, Notifications, and Regular Reports Keep You Informed#

Every month, you’ll receive a summary of the most important information for each client:

Monthly reports provide an overview of what's new in performance (1), the client's website status (2), and metric development.

For your developers, the Watchdog, which monitors daily synthetic tests, will be highly valuable:

Watchdog sends notifications if a vital metric moves significantly in a positive or negative direction for three or more days.

If something goes wrong (or improves), you, your project managers, or developers will receive a message via email, Slack, or Teams:

Watchdog notifications to Teams.

Detailed Technical Data for Fine-tuning Needs#

Your developers will appreciate detailed technical reports that make it easier to find bugs or optimization opportunities.

The Pages Report shows metric development for measured page types, helping you quickly identify which part of the website is causing issues:

Detailed metric status and their development for crucial landing pages on an e-commerce site, as shown in the Pages Report.

The Technical Report additionally shows technical indicators for each page, such as the data volume of individual elements that may be responsible for metric deterioration:

Technical indicators, like total data volume, often reveal what's behind metric and user experience deterioration.

The Test Run Detail then reveals even more detail with a complete Lighthouse tool report or profiling reports, accessible via Chrome Devtools:

Web performance geeks can download Trace or HAR results from test runs for use in Chrome Developer Tools.

The Opportunities Report is the main place where we display tasks that can help with speed optimization:

What is the metric status for specific page types, and what can we improve on them?

However, developers will find many other features in PLUS monitoring, prepared based on our experiences. One of them is the ability to add notes to graphs, allowing you to mark important website updates:

We also automatically add notes, for example, when URL settings change in the test or when we modify something in the testing infrastructure.

Of course, with PageSpeed.ONE monitoring, you can count on an unlimited number of clients and users.

There's much more. Check out our monitoring documentation, where we continuously add new articles.

How to Get Monitoring PLUS?#

The pricing for PageSpeed.ONE speed monitoring is currently lower than similar tools:

• 5,400 CZK annually for one thoroughly monitored website (a “test kit” containing 5 URL synths and 5 CrUX domains).
• 1,200 CZK annually for an additional 5 URLs or 10 domains for larger websites.
• Discounts or commissions for agencies starting at 10% for 5 or more test kits.

Pricing examples:

• For a client with a smaller e-shop, two language versions of the website, and two competitors to monitor, you’ll pay 5,400 CZK annually.
• For a larger client, where you want to monitor 2 websites in detail, each with 10 URLs and a total of 20 domains, you’ll pay 15,600 CZK annually ((5400 + 2 _ 1200) _ 2).

Find more in the price list.

Interested or want to discuss speed monitoring further?

• Check out our landing page or demo project.
• Arrange a demonstration with Martin Michálek.

In cases of serious interest, we offer agencies a two-month trial.

Try monitoring on your own project and see how easily it integrates into your workflow.

…or simply order Monitoring PLUS.