Maintaining high site performance with real-user monitoring (RUM) in Adobe Experience Manager Sites
According to Forbes, 47% of users won’t wait longer than two seconds for a website to load. Those two seconds can be the difference between a conversion and a swift exit. Ensuring optimal site performance is a continuous challenge, especially as demands for more content across more channels continue to evolve.
In this article, we’ll dive into how Adobe Experience Manager Sites with Edge Delivery Services uses a built-in, privacy-first real-user monitoring (RUM) service to easily and proactively maintain high performance.
Why real-user monitoring makes the difference
Where traditional performance monitoring tools rely on synthetic testing or simulations, RUM takes it a step further by capturing data directly from real users’ browsers, including page load times, device type, and user interactions all while maintaining privacy and without relying on cookies.
With Experience Manager Sites, personal visitor information is not collected or made available, so opt-in is not required to enable RUM on your site.
RUM provides real-time data to help you understand how users interact with your website. These insights can be used to measure and maintain optimal site performance to improve Google Lighthouse scores and Core Web Vitals.
Studies show that maintaining optimal site performance improves:
- Search engine optimization (SEO) and traffic: Core Web Vitals affect rankings in search engines. Improving Core Web Vitals helps your site rank higher in search results. Higher rankings on search engines improve your site’s discoverability, therefore attracting more traffic and opportunities to convert customers.
- Bounce rate: Boosting site performance and page load speeds provide a better user experience, reducing bounce rates.
- Engagement and conversion: By connecting with your customers faster, they are more likely to stay, engage, and convert.
How does Experience Manager Sites use RUM?
Our RUM service uses the data collected to monitor and diagnose performance of your digital properties continuously and proactively. RUM collects the key Core Web Vitals metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the time it takes for the largest content (e.g., image, video) to be visible, indicating the perceived load speed for users. An LCP value of less than 2.5 seconds is considered good.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures the time between when a user clicks on your page and receives a response, indicating responsiveness. An INP value of less than 200 milliseconds is considered good.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures how often the page layout changes unexpectedly, indicating visual stability. A CLS value of less than 0.1 is considered good.
By collecting information on Core Web Vitals, the RUM service can identify performance issues. Experience Manager Sites proactively detects and notifies you of any performance dips (e.g., if the LCP increased from 2.5 seconds to 4 seconds and thus, impacting Core Web Vitals) for prompt resolution. Our RUM service also provides the average values for the Core Web Vitals, as well as the percentage of visitors that fall into the good or bad range of these metrics as defined by Google.
Stay on the cutting edge with RUM in Edge Delivery Services
Edge Delivery Services in Experience Manager Sites keeps your site running smoothly, no matter the scale. With edge architecture, phased rendering, and persistent caching your pages will load faster than ever. And the built-in RUM service delivers real-time insights to ensure that site performance is continuously maintained. These tools work together to improve traffic, reduce bounce rates, and increase conversion so you can achieve your business goals.
To learn more about the RUM service in Experience Manager Sites, check out our technical documentation.