Web Performance Experts Look into the Future of Web Performance

Last month, web performance experts from leading brands joined an exclusive session with the Catchpoint product team to explore new features and future enhancements in WebPageTest and Catchpoint Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM). This post shares highlights from that session.  

Key announcements and insights

Incorporating WebPageTest into Catchpoint’s platform

One of the most exciting updates shared was the integration of WebPageTest into the Catchpoint IPM Platform. This powerful combination provides users with access to Catchpoint's comprehensive suite of enterprise offerings, including Real User Monitoring (RUM), SLO, DNS, SSL, CDN monitoring, and much more.  

Next year, all WebPageTest users—including registered free and Pro users—will experience an upgraded experience as WebPageTest is fully integrated into the Catchpoint portal.

New features for pro users: boosting performance insights

WebPageTest Pro users can expect several new capabilities designed to enhance performance monitoring:  

• Scheduled tests: Automate performance tests on a customizable schedule—from every minute to several hours—to enable continuous performance monitoring.
• Overview dashboard: This central hub provides an at-a-glance view of the health of your tests, helping you track performance over time.
• Smartboards: Delivers in-depth performance analysis, offering insights into key performance components like JavaScript execution, asset loading, and third-party content.
• Alerts: Set up customizable performance alerts, ensuring timely responses to potential problems, with notifications sent via email, Slack, or PagerDuty.
• Team collaboration: Bring your team into the fold with multi-user access, allowing for seamless collaboration on performance monitoring and test results.

With the new WebPageTest Enterprise plan, users can take advantage of enhanced features like Single Sign-On (SSO), advanced security controls, and access to the world’s largest global observability network, with over 2,800 vantage points in over 100 countries worldwide. This upgrade will empower web teams to further enhance the user experience by providing the most comprehensive and advanced platform for IPM.  

Catchpoint’s core mission is to reduce the time it takes to detect and troubleshoot Internet performance problems before they impact your customers, ultimately protecting your revenue. We do this by monitoring what truly matters—not just your website but all the elements of your Internet Stack—from the locations that matter most: where your customers are, helping you get answers faster.

Expanding Into mobile RUM and introducing frustration metrics

To further enhance user experience monitoring, Catchpoint is expanding into mobile Real User Monitoring (RUM), enabling teams to track performance on mobile devices with OpenTelemetry support. Additionally, new frustration metrics—such as rage clicks, dead clicks, and thrash cursor—help teams pinpoint user pain points more effectively, providing a comprehensive view of user interactions and areas for optimization.

Internet Sonar and Stack Map: enhanced visibility for your digital services

Catchpoint’s Internet Sonar and Internet Stack Map provide a unique solution for monitoring the health of your digital services and the Internet dependencies they rely on.

• Internet Sonar continuously tracks external services like DNS, CDN, cloud providers, and ISPs, giving you instant visibility into outages. It allows teams to rapidly determine whether issues are internal or related to third-party services, reducing the time spent troubleshooting and eliminating unnecessary war rooms.
• Internet Stack Map offers a live, system-level dashboard of your entire digital service stack. It automatically discovers all the external services your systems depend on and correlates outages from Internet Sonar with those dependencies.  

You can run synthetic tests on anything within the map, allowing you to correlate performance tests with outages, effectively "connecting the dots" between Internet disruptions and their impact on your services. In fact, you can run synthetic tests using virtually any protocol, from MQTT for monitoring IoT systems to SIP for VoIP testing, along with various protocols for email, connectivity, APIs, and custom protocols to test basically anything on the internet. Additionally, customers can deploy enterprise nodes to run tests from, to, or within their offices, data centers, or other strategic locations.

Together, these tools facilitate rapid issue resolution and bolster Internet resilience across complex, multi-cloud environments, offering visibility that simple web testing tools or traditional APM tools cannot match.

Application Tracing: in-depth performance insights

‍Application Tracing allows users to drill down into performance problems, offering a more granular view of application performance. Users can tie application tracing directly to synthetic tests, allowing real-time analysis of failures and latency.  

By leveraging the OpenTelemetry SDK, teams can collect performance tracing data from applications to pinpoint bottlenecks and latency issues. The overview dashboard for tracing highlights service health with color-coded indicators, delivering immediate insights into performance status.  

Performance-based SLO/XLO monitoring

XLO (Experience Level Objectives) monitoring enables users to measure against experience-level objectives over time. XLO is an emerging term focused on what really matters: the user experience, such as ensuring 99.9% uptime each quarter while also guaranteeing that users in key locations can load a page or complete a transaction in under 3 seconds.

By adopting XLOs, organizations can set targeted goals that align with both business objectives and user expectations. Teams can monitor progress, make adjustments in real time, and continuously optimize performance. This proactive approach helps ensure they meet SLAs and deliver a seamless user experience, ultimately improving service quality and customer satisfaction.

What’s next?

As always, feedback from our Web Performance Experts is essential to shaping the future of WebPageTest. The session was highly interactive, with participants providing valuable feedback and suggestions for future enhancements.  

Catchpoint remains committed to improving WebPageTest while maintaining and contributing to its open-source foundation. WebPageTest.org will continue to serve as a vital resource for the community, while users of the self-serve Catchpoint portal can look forward to new features and capabilities in the months ahead.  

In the next few months, VIP members will soon have an exclusive opportunity to preview the new portal and explore upcoming features firsthand. We’ll provide a summary here along with training resources to ensure a smooth transition. We aimed to maintain consistency in the UI. Stay tuned for more thrilling updates!

Many of the new WebPageTest features within the Catchpoint IPM Platform were demonstrated in our recent webinar. To see these features in action, watch the full webinar recording here.  

We’re excited to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with WebPageTest and to deliver the most powerful web performance monitoring tools on the market.