By: Stan Lee Itzcoatl.
Keep your website in top performance shape by working closely with your analytics and A/B testing teams.
The data gathered by analytics and A/B testing is extremely important to all companies, but sometimes the rush to deploy new projects from these teams creates issues on live websites. Some companies avoid giving these teams the attention and empowerment they need to push their efforts efficiently. Problems that arise from choppy processes include broken pages, slow websites and confusing object rendering on site pages. Avoid these problems and empower your analytics and A/B testing teams by following my simple recommendations below.
Create a process and involve others
Establish a formal process for analytics and A/B testing. Focus on setting up a speedy process that enables these teams to release their changes when they need them without impacting the quality of the live websites. During the established meetings, review a high level schedule of projects coming up. Make certain that everyone is aware of the technical changes that would be made with each project. This will enable the development and QA teams to prepare adequately. Discuss approaches to verifying the projects and ways to insure they don’t impact the rest of the site. The most important parts of the process will be communication and teamwork.
Use powerful tools to proactively identify problems
After the process and communication have been setup, proceed to create a proactive environment. One way to be proactive is to adopt powerful tools such as the developer modes in Firefox and Chrome. These tools can assist you to test analytics and A/B tests to insure they are not slowing down pages dramatically. Your teams need to be familiar with critical path rendering theory to make the most difference. There is also a number of browser plug-ins that function wonderfully to assist you in testing the performance impact of these efforts. Sync up with your analytics and A/B test teams to insure you are all sharing your knowledge around the best tools to use.
Setup automated performance monitoring in Live
Once you are in the Live environment continue the proactive approach by setting up site monitoring tools. These tools will enable you to measure performance and continuously use it for monitoring analytics and A/B test rollouts. Your company likely already has some manner of monitoring tools with these features. Other good assets to use are sites such as WebPageTest. WebPageTest offers an impressive set of tools to monitor and benchmark your site performance on a continuous basis. You can combine WebPageTest with other tools to create automated monitoring and alerts. If a future analytics or A/B test adversely impacts your site then you can notified in a very quick manner.
Show support
Support and empower these teams so that they provide the biggest benefits to your business. Allow analytics and A/B testing the same support that you provide for the development and QA testing teams. Show leadership by helping to create the bridges and relationships that these teams need to be successful. I participated heavily with helping to streamline analytics and A/B testing in many projects. The results were magnificent. I not only helped them to create their best work, I also helped to prevent some of the negative performance impacts that catch us by surprise.
Stanitz LLC provides a full range of software consulting services including development, QA testing, technical SEO and more. If you need assistance with creating a QA testing process around analytics or A/B testing then contact Stantiz today. We focus on speed and results.