New Relic

June 1, 2022

Don’t Sink Your Website With Third Parties

You’ve spent months putting together a great website design, crowd-pleasing content, and a business plan to bring it all together. You’ve focused on making the web design responsive to ensure that the widest audience of visitors can access your content. You’ve agonized over design patterns and usability. You’ve tested and retested the site for errors. Your operations team is ready to go. In short, you’ve done your due diligence in the areas of site design and delivery that you directly control. You’ve thought of everything… or have you?

Your website may be using more third-party services than you realize. These services use requests to external hosts (not servers you control) to deliver JavaScript framework libraries, custom fonts, advertising content, marketing analytics trackers, and more.

You may have a lean, agile, responsive site design only to find it gradually loaded down with more and more “extras” that are often put onto the site by marketing departments or business leaders who are not always thinking about website performance. You cannot always anticipate what you cannot control.

There are two big questions:

How do you quantify the impact that these third-party requests have on website performance?
How do you manage or even mitigate that impact?

Even if you cannot prevent all third-party requests, web designers can make choices that will have an impact. In this article, we will review what third-party resource requests are, consider how impactful they can be to the user experience, and discuss common optimization strategies to reduce the impact on the user experience. By carefully considering how third-party requests will fit into your website during the design stage, you can avoid the most significant negative impacts.

What Are Third-Party Services?

In order to understand third-party services, it may be easier to start with your own website content. Any resource (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, image, font, etc.) that you host and serve from your own domain(s) is called a “first-party” resource. You have control over what these resources are. All other requests that happen when visitors load your pages can be attributed to other parties.

Every major website on the Internet today relies — to some degree — on third-party services. The third-party in this case is someone (usually another commercial enterprise) other than you and your site visitors. In this case, we are not going to be talking about infrastructure services, such as a cloud computing platform like Microsoft Azure or a content distribution network like Akamai. Many websites use these services to deploy and run their businesses and understanding how they impact the user experience is important.

In this article, however, we are going to focus on the third-party services that work their way into the design of your web pages. These third-party resource requests load in your visitor’s browser while your web page is loading, even if your visitors don’t realize it. They may be critical to site functionality, or they have been added as an afterthought, but all of them can potentially affect how fast users perceive your page load times.

The HTTP Archive tracks third-party usage across a large swath of all active websites on the Internet today. According to the Third Parties chapter of their 2021 Web Almanac report, “a staggering 94.4% of mobile sites and 94.1% of desktop sites use at least one third-party resource.” They also found out that “45.9% of requests on mobile and 45.1% of requests on desktop are third-party requests.”

As it was noted in the report, third-party services share a few characteristics, such as:

hosted on a shared and public origin,
widely used by a variety of sites,
uninfluenced by an individual site owner.

In other words, third-party services on your site are outsourced and operated by another party other than you. You have no direct control over where and how the requests are being hosted online. Many other websites may be using the same service, and the company that provides it must balance how to run their services to benefit all of their customers, not just you.

The upside to using third-party services on your site is that you do not need to develop everything you want to do yourself. In many cases, they can be super convenient to add or remove without having to push code changes to the site. The downside is that third-party requests can impact website visitors. Pages loaded up with dozens or hundreds of third-party calls can take longer to render or longer to become interactive.

What About Fourth-party Or Second-Party Services?

While the earliest, simplest third-party services were simple 1x1 pixel images used for tracking visitors, almost all third-party requests today load JavaScript into the browser. And JavaScript can certainly make requests for additional network resources. If these follow-on requests are to a different host or service, you might think of them as “fourth-party services”. If the fourth-party service, in turn, makes a request to yet another domain, then you get “fifth-party service” requests, and so forth. Technically, all of them might be “third parties” in the sense that they are neither you (the “first party”) nor your site visitor (the “second party”), but I think it helps to understand that these services are even more removed from your direct control than the ones you work directly with.

The most common scenario I see where fourth-party requests come into play is in advertising services. If you serve ads on your website through an ad broker, you may not even know what service will finally deliver the ad image that gets displayed in the browser.

Feeling like this is a little bit out of control? There’s at least one other way that resource requests you have no direct control over can impact your visitors’ experience. Sometimes, the visitor’s browser itself can be the origin of network activity.

For example, users can install browser plugins to suggest coupon codes when they are shopping, to scan web pages for malware, to play games or message friends, or do any number of other things. These plugins can fire off “second-party” requests in the middle of your page load, and there is nothing you can do about it. Unlike third-party services, the best you can do is be aware of what these second-party services are, so you know what to ignore when troubleshooting problems.

Create Your Own Request Map

As a discovery tool, request maps are great for identifying the source of third-party, fourth-party, fifth-party, etc., requests. They can also highlight very long redirection chains in your third-party traffic. Simon Hearne, an independent web performance consultant and one of the co-organizers of the London Web Performance Group, maintains an online Request Map tool that uses WebPageTest to get the data and Ghostery to visualize it.

Ad Blockers Makes Sites Faster

In addition to the browser plugins mentioned above, users love to install ad blockers. While many are motivated simply by a desire to see fewer ads, ad blockers also often make web pages load faster. Maciej Kocemba published research findings from Opera that showed that a typical website with ads could be rendered 51% faster if the ads were blocked.

This is obviously a concern for any website owner that monetizes page impressions with ads. They may not realize it, but users may be motivated to block ads partly to deal with slow third-party and fourth-party resource requests that lead to frustrating experiences. Faster page loads may reduce the motivation to use ad blockers.

The Revenue Trade-off You Need To Think About

Poor performance of third-party services can have other business impacts even if your website does not use advertising. Researchers and major companies have been publishing case studies for years, proving that slower page load experiences impact business metrics, including conversion rate, revenue, bounce rate, and more.

No matter how valuable you think a particular third-party service is to your business, that benefit needs to be compared to the cost of lost visitor engagement. Can a fancy third-party custom font give your site a new look and feel? Yes. Will the conversion rate or session length go down slightly as users see slower page loads? Or will visitors find the new look and feel worth the wait?

How To Identify Problematic Third-Party Services On Your Website

If you are like most websites, about half of the resource requests that load in your customers’ browsers — when they load a page from your website — are third-party requests. Identifying them should be straightforward.

Measuring Performance Impact

To quantify the performance impact of third-party resource requests on the user experience, we need to start by measuring page load performance. Many web performance measurement tools can measure the network load times of individual resource requests, and others can measure the client-side impacts of JavaScript resource requests. You may find that no single tool will answer every performance question you have about third parties. These tools fall into several categories.

Some tools that can be helpful in evaluating the impact of third-party resource requests are what you might describe as auditing tools. The most popular, by far, is the Google Lighthouse report (available in Chrome Developer Tools) and Google’s Page Speed Insights. These tools generally work with data from a single page load but go into some greater depth on impact than the tools designed for ongoing monitoring.

Synthetic web performance measurements use scripts to visit one or more pages on your website from one or more probe locations. Much like a laboratory environment (and depending to some degree on the features offered by the particular tool), you have control over the variables of the measurement. You can adjust what browser is used, the kind of network connection to employ, the locations to test from, whether or not the browser’s cache is empty or full, how frequently to take the measurements, and more.

Because most of the variables remain fixed from one test run to the next, synthetic measurements are great for measuring the impact of change but less capable of accurately or comprehensively identifying real visitor experience. They are more of a benchmark than a true measurement of real user experience. Some of the popular synthetic measurement tools are WebPageTest, SiteSpeed.io, Splunk Synthetic Monitoring, and Dynatrace.

For a more comprehensive measurement of visitor experience, you need Real User Measurements (RUM). RUM systems embed a small JavaScript payload onto every page of your site. The code interacts with industry-standard APIs implemented by modern browsers to collect performance data, augments it with additional custom data collection, and transmits this very high-resolution data about the page as a whole and every resource request.

The data may have some limitations, though — the only data that can be collected is what the APIs support, and Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) restrictions in the browsers limit some details, especially around third-party resource requests. Some of the more popular RUM services are offered by Akamai, New Relic, Dynatrace, and AppDynamics.

What To Measure

Third-party resource requests can impact the user experience in several different ways, depending on whether they load early in the page load process or after the page is mostly complete. The risk you should be looking for with the measurement data you are collecting include:

Delaying initial render
Resources that load prior to the initial page render (or First Contentful Paint) can be the most impactful overall. Many studies have shown that site visitors are more sensitive to delays at this point in the page load experience than any point after some visual progress has been achieved. Look for third-party requests that force new DNS lookups, require establishing connections to new origins, introduce redirection chains, include substantial client-side processing delay, or take a long time to download.
Other blocking effects
Any JavaScript resource that blocks other resources from being requested until its processing is completed is a concern. A third-party font request could cause render-blocking. Look for third-party JavaScript resources that block other JavaScript resources that are not being loaded asynchronously from being requested in a timely manner. Avoid third-party requests that introduce contention for scarce resources like bandwidth or CPU utilization. If a third-party resource request is blocking, consider alternatives or approaches to mitigate the risk if the third party is slower than normal or fails.
Single Points of Failure (SPOFs)
A resource request can be considered a SPOF if the web page fails to load or the load time is disastrously longer should the resource itself fail to load. For example, if a third-party host is down and your request takes 60 seconds to time out, if the initial render of the page is delayed 60 seconds as a result, then this is a SPOF.

Testing The Impact Of Specific Requests

Once you have identified potentially impactful third-party resource requests, measuring the specific performance impact of those requests can be challenging. Trying to separate the impact of a single request from all the others can be akin to trying to break down an alloy into its constituent metals because third-party requests are often made in parallel with first-party requests or third-party requests to other hosts, and they are competing with each other for the limited network, CPU, and memory resources of the client. Even with highly-detailed RUM or synthetic measurement data, it may not be practical.

The best way to approach the problem is through applied testing. Specifically, deliver pages with the third-party request or service as normal, and compare the performance to pages delivered without that particular third-party service but which are otherwise identical.

This is easiest to do with synthetic measurement tools. You can blackhole a particular domain so that the synthetic browser will never make the requests in the first place, simulating a page loading without that service on it. This can inform you about the performance (load times) impact of that third-party service. WebPageTest — a free synthetic measurement service (see the following three figures below for an example) — makes this easy.

A more sophisticated approach is to perform multivariate testing on your production site. In a multivariate test, you serve a version of the page with the third-party tag on it to one segment of your visitor population, and the other segment gets a version of the page without the third-party tag.

By using RUM tools, you can directly measure the real-world performance differences between the two test segments as well as the effects on business metrics (such as bounce rate, conversion or session length). Managing multivariate testing is a significant undertaking, but it can pay off in the long run.

Design Optimizations

Once you have a baseline of your site performance and some tools to test the basic performance impact of key third-party resource requests, it is time to implement some strategies to mitigate the impact that third-party services can have on performance.

Consider Removing Unneeded Services

By far, the most impactful change you can make is to remove any obsolete, unused, or unnecessary third-party tags from your site. After all, no resource loads faster than not making a resource request at all. Ironically, this may also be the most challenging optimization to put into practice. In many organizations, third-party tags or services “belong” to a variety of stakeholders, and finding a way to manage them is as much a cultural challenge as a technical one. Some basic steps to take include:

Audit all third-party requests appearing on your pages on a periodic basis (for example, quarterly).
To make sure you capture all third-party requests, use a RUM service that collects data about every page view. If a third-party domain is showing up in more than a small fraction of page views and you do not already know what it is, find out immediately. New third-party tags may have been added by some stakeholders within your organization, or you may be finding a fourth-party tag because a third-party service changed its behavior. Either way, you need to understand what the third-party tags are and who in your organization is using them.
Keep records on third-party services.
Specifically, you want to know who the internal stakeholder is that “owns” that service and how it gets on the site. Is it hard-coded into the page HTML source? Is there JavaScript injected on the page by a CDN configuration? Are you using one (or more than one) tag manager? When does the contract with that service expire? The important thing is to have all the information on hand to know how to suspend or remove every third-party service if it becomes a performance issue or suddenly stops working, and who in your organization that is going to need to know.
Consider a periodic stakeholders meeting that includes a discussion of all third-party services to review the cost/benefit they introduce to the business. Even if it is still under contract, consider removing third-party services that stakeholders no longer use.

Geographically Align Your Third-Party Services With Your Visitors

If most of your visitors are in Europe, but a third-party service you are using is serving its resource content from the United States, those requests will likely have very slow load times as the traffic must cross an ocean each way. Some third-party services use a CDN of their own to ensure that they are serving requests from locations close to your visitors, but not all will do so. You may need to ensure that you are using appropriate hostnames or parameters in your requests. CDN Finder is a convenient tool to investigate which CDNs (if any) a third-party tag is using.

Loading Scripts Asynchronously

Blocking other resource requests from being made by the browser (often called “parser blocking”) is one of the most impactful (in a negative way) things a third-party resource can do. Historically, browsers have blocked while loading scripts to ensure that the page load experience is predictable. If scripts always load and evaluate in the same order, there are no surprises. The downside to this is that it takes longer to load the page.

Fortunately, identifying and blocking third-party script resources is relatively easy. Both WebPageTest and PageSpeed Insights (free-to-use tools) highlight resource requests that block other resource requests from being made. These tools work on one page (URL) at a time, so you will need to use them on a representative set of URLs to pick up all the blocking tags on your site.

Depending on how the third-party tag gets onto the page, you may be able to change a blocking script into a non-blocking script. Modern browsers support attributes to the script tag that gives the browser flexibility to load resources in a non-blocking manner. These are your basic options:

<script>
Without an additional attribute, many browsers will block the loading of subsequent scripts until after the script in question is loaded and evaluated. With third-party scripts, this is not only a performance concern but also a potential for a single point of failure (SPOF).
<script async>
With async, the browser can download the script resource in parallel with other HTML parsing and downloading activity, but it will evaluate the JavaScript immediately once it is done downloading and pause HTML parsing while the script evaluation happens. If the script evaluation needs to happen early in the page load, this is the best choice.
<script defer>
With defer, the script load will happen in parallel with HTML parsing and the fetching of other resources, and the script will only be evaluated after the HTML is fully parsed. This is the best choice for any third-party tag whose evaluation is less important than a fast render experience for your visitor.

Cascading StyleSheets

Another kind of blocking that can be impactful to the user experience is render-blocking. Cascading StyleSheets almost always block page render while they are being downloaded and evaluated because the browsers do not want to render content on the screen only to have to change how it looks partway through the page load. For this reason, best practice advice is to load CSS resources as early as you can in the page load, so the browser has all the information to render the page as soon as possible.

Third-party CSS requests are uncommon (mostly limited to custom font support), but if for some reason they are part of your site design, consider loading them directly through script tags in the base page HTML or through your CDN. Using a tag manager will just introduce additional delay in getting a critical resource into the browser as quickly as possible.

Some Further Thoughts On Fonts

Like CSS, custom fonts are also render-blocking. Fonts can radically change the visual appearance of text, so browsers do not want to render text on the screen only to have a visually disruptive change mid-page load. Unlike CSS, I see far more sites using third-party resources for their custom fonts, with Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit being the most popular.

Some implementations of custom fonts also involve loading third-party CSS, which introduces additional render-blocking. The resource requests for these fonts (.woff, woff2, or .ttf files, usually) are also not always done early in the page load. This is a problem for performance and a potential single point of failure.

Here are some ideas for managing third-party custom fonts on your site:

Give serious consideration to whether you need custom fonts at all.
Page load times will be faster without them, and if the custom font is almost visually identical to some of the fantastic pre-installed system fonts now available in modern browsers, the brand impression benefit may be outweighed by the cost of slightly slower page loads frustrating your visitors.
If custom fonts are a requirement, consider how to deliver them as first-party resources.
You may be limited by font licensing restrictions in this respect, and serving fonts from your own domains will result in delivering more bytes to visitors from your CDN or ISP, which can increase costs. On the other hand, you no longer have a SPOF vulnerability, you gain control over caching headers, and your visitors can avoid making connections to yet another third-party host and all the delays that it introduces.
If you cannot avoid having third-party fonts on your site, consider using font-display properties in your CSS.
Setting the font-display property to swap (instead of block), for example, allows the browser to use system fonts until the custom fonts can be swapped in. If the visual change of the custom font is not too disruptive, this could be the best choice to give your visitors the content as early as possible while giving them the brand experience when the fonts do load. The fallback value is another choice that can incorporate a shorter blocking period and otherwise before behaving as a swap. The CSS-Tricks website has good documentation on font-display.

Two Script Management Solutions

One interesting approach to managing the performance impact of third parties is to move as many of them as possible to load via Web Workers. The core idea is to reserve the main thread in the browser for your first-party core scripts and let the browser manage and optimize your resource-intensive third-party scripts using Web Workers. Doing this is not trivial since Web Workers are limited to asynchronous communications with the main thread and many third-party scripts except synchronous access to browser resources, such as documents and windows.

A new open-source project called Partytown provides a library that implements a communications layer to make this work. It is still in the early stages of development, and you would want to test extensively for potential weird side effects. It might also not work well with a tag manager system if that’s a part of your architecture.

Akamai Script Management is a solution that uses Service Workers. This service essentially acts as a proxy inside the browser that has knowledge about the third-party services on the site and a policy about how to handle specific third-party requests. The policy can block requests for specific third parties, defer their request to later in the page load, or change the waiting time before throwing a timeout error for a request. If a third-party request is render blocking but that third-party service is down, for example, Script Management can mitigate the impact by reducing the length of time that the browser waits before deciding that the response is never going to arrive.

Conclusion

Third-party resource requests have become an integral part of the web. These services can provide value to your business, but they do come at a potential cost to the user experience.

You need the right tools for detection and measurement and knowledge of the best practices that help reduce the negative impacts of third-party requests.

A great way to start managing the impacts of third-party requests on your site’s user experience is to audit your site to see which and how many third-party domains and requests are being used. Next, use performance measurement tools to identify those that have the potential to degrade the user experience through render-blocking, resource contention, or single points of failure.

As you apply changes to mitigate the impact of third parties, develop a plan to use ongoing testing (such as Real User Measurement Services) to keep on top of site changes and unexpected changes to your third-party services.

By carefully considering how third-party requests will fit into your site during the design stage, you can avoid the most significant negative impacts. With ongoing performance monitoring, you can ensure that new problems with third-party requests are identified early. Don’t sink your website with third parties!

February 16, 2022

Completed Staff Work: Making Recommendations vs Asking for Approval

When I was introduced to the concept of Completed Staff Work, I felt like I had been handed a secret management technique. I had been a manager for several years and never heard of it, so it felt like a big secret when I did. And the idea simply exploded how I thought of my work as a leader.

So, let me share with you one of the most powerful management concepts I’ve encountered: Completed Staff Work. A standard for determining whether or not you’ve done enough work on a problem, the concept of Completed Staff Work involves useful techniques to

September 13, 2021

Easily Connect New Relic (for Free!) with WPMU DEV Hosted WordPress Sites

Use New Relic with WPMU DEV hosting to identify and quickly tackle any performance issues on your WordPress site.

New Relic is a service that hones in on performance and availability monitoring for WordPress. And one of the best perks about it is — it’s free!

With New Relic, you can immediately comprehend application performance and get a complete overview of your operating environment. It’s all very understandable from a single screen — making it perfect for you and your clients.

Combined with WPMU DEV’s fully dedicated hosting, it’s a winning formula for complete Application Performance Monitoring (APM) across all spectrums of your WordPress site!

This article will have an overview of New Relic and how it incorporates with WPMU DEV hosting.

We’ll cover:

What New Relic Does and a Brief Overview
Quick Look at Identifying Performance Issues on Your WordPress Site
Installing New Relic with WPMU DEV Hosting

By the time you read this, you’ll see how New Relic and WPMU DEV can immediately benefit you and your WordPress business by monitoring and tackling any potential issues.

What New Relic Does and a Brief Overview

As I touched on, New Relic helps identify issues with your WordPress’s performance and get a nice glimpse of how smooth everything is operating.

A New Relic overview. — New Relic has a lot of unique features.

In a nutshell, it’s made for Full-Stack Observability, which means it gives you the insight of knowing what’s happening in your digital system, plus why. It’s the entire picture that lets you enable your applications and devices to deliver value to your customers.

This makes it simple, so you don’t have to rack your brain trying to understand your system. New Relic takes the complexity out of it (yippee!).

For the Basic User (free version), you have access to many features, including making custom charts, creating custom dashboards, automatic anomaly detection, running data queries, and enabling alerts.

The free version is excellent in many (or most) circumstances; however, you can always upgrade to activate the additional features. Check out this comparison between free and paid versions to get an idea of what works best for you.

Brief Overview of New Relic APM

We’ll take a look at some of the best features in New Relic APM. This is a quick walk-through of some assets of what’s included and what it can do. Then, we’ll take a look at how to install it with WPMU DEV’s hosting.

There’s a lot to New Relic, so these are just some of the highlights:

Summary
Service Maps
Transactions
WordPress Plugins and Themes
Databases
External Services

Let’s check them out in more detail!

Summary

The Summary is made to provide you a 360-degree view of your WordPress site’s performance.

Here, you can view Transaction Types between Web (e.g. StatusCode) and Non-Web (PHP). You’ll see data for Response Time, Memcached, and MySQL.

The Summary area of New Relic. — Specify what data you want to display in the dropdowns.

Plus, the number of requests per minute is shown in the Throughput chart.

Any errors appear in the Error Rate data. This indicates the ratio of errors to the total number of requests your site processes.

A look at the error rate. — No errors are indicated.

There’s more in the Summary section, such as Apdex Score, Transactions, and Hosts.

The Summary is a great place to get an initial glimpse of your website’s performance and issues.

Service Maps

Service Maps are customizable visual representations of your WordPress site’s architecture. The maps show your app’s connections, plus dependencies. This includes applications, hosts, servers, databases, and more.

They can be accessed via the Explorer tab/Service Map.

The service map. — You can see what is all connected to the account that I have set up.

These maps help you understand how apps and services in your architecture communicate and connect. Also, you can easily see the operational state of your environment.

If you see issues, you can troubleshoot and see what troubles it’s wreaking havoc on down the line with all of your connections.

For more on Service Maps, be sure to check out New Relic’s documentation.

Transactions

With Transactions, you can look in-depth at your Top 5 web transactions, monitoring your web requests. Transactions are defined as one logical unit of work in a software application.

The two foremost transactions that are included are Web and Non-Web. There are also sub-types (e.g. C SDK, Java, and .NET) that can be viewed.

You’re able to code bottlenecks and more that make your site grind to a halt in the Transaction Traces area.

A look at transactions. — See all of the different graphs for your transactions — all in one place!

Customize this area by setting up custom instrumentation, so you can report additional transactions if you’d like.

More information about Transactions can be found here.

WordPress Plugins and Themes

The WordPress Plugins and Themes tab display how much PHP processing time the active themes and plugins are using. You monitor if a plugin or theme is consuming ample time and then handle the issue accordingly.

Sort from the dropdown:

Most time consuming
Slowest average call time
Function call count

A look at time consuming plugins. — In this example, our Defender plugin is the plugin that is most time-consuming.

There are numerous reasons for a plugin or theme to run a high processing time, everything from needing an update, bad installation, and more. It’s essential to investigate thoroughly before simply removing a plugin or theme, taking the most time.

Databases

There’s a lot to observe from the Databases tab. This area will enable you to identify the database tables and queries that take up the most time. It displays an application’s database and cache data.

If any slow queries have been reported, they will be displayed when you select a transaction.

This area has three separate parts:

All-databases overview
Top database operations
Table with all database operations

Filter operations by database vendor, review top database operations, and delete traces.

External Services

With the External Services, you can easily view which external services are consuming an abundance of time. With this information, you can determine if the issue is speed-related or quantity, then resolve the issue.

In general, WordPress sites rely on several external services, so it’s important to keep tabs on any issues that occur from any of them.

And There’s More…

Keep in mind that there’s a LOT more to New Relic, including Events, Errors, Alert Conditions… The list goes on and on. Be sure to check out all New Relic features on their website. Or better yet, install it for yourself!

Quick Look at Identifying Performance Issues on Your WordPress Site

There are many ways to identify and take care of performance issues on your WordPress site with New Relic, as I touched on with its overview. Let’s take a look at an example.

For this instance, let’s say you’re checking out how your client’s plugins are performing.

The most time consuming plugins and themes. — You can see that WooCommerce is the most time-consuming.

As you can see, WooCommerce is taking up the most time in this WordPress ecosystem, followed by RankMath. Then, it’s followed by a lot of addons for WooCommerce.

Consider the options of removing any of these plugins. What plugins are essential? Any that aren’t? Is there anything you can do to help your client’s WordPress site’s performance by removing a plugin? Hmm…

In this case, Query Monitor is running. And it makes sense to disable it.

There’s a big difference between running system-layer benchmarks (e.g. New Relic) and running an application layer, like Query Monitor.

Query Monitor monitors and hooks all calls while WordPress is trying to execute them, so it can add more load time overall since you have to wait for its logging mechanisms to go to work.

Basically, it doesn’t need to be constantly used; therefore, it’s best to disable it.

New Relic features some more examples of identifying and handling performance issues on their blog. It’s worth checking out for another look at how the New Relic system works.

Installing New Relic with WPMU DEV Hosting

Now that you got your feet wet with what all New Relic has to offer, and a glimpse at how to identify and take care of performance issues, here’s how you can quickly and easily get it synced with a hosted site from The Hub.

Keep in mind that you need to host your site with us to use The Hub feature with New Relic. If you’re not hosting with us yet, check out our hosting plans and give us a spin. We have a 30-day money-back guarantee if, for any reason, you’re not happy with our hosting.

Set Up a Free New Relic Account

To get a free New Relic account, you don’t need a credit card or any means of payment put in their system. It’s entirely free unless you want to upgrade at some point.

If you haven’t already, simply head to their website, and sign up for a free account with your Name and Email.

Where you begin the process of setting up a New Relic account. — Got your information added? Click Start Now!

Once you input your information, you’ll get a notification email, and you can set up a password. That’s it!

We’ll now hop into WPMU DEV’s The Hub and start the process from there, then get back into our New Relic account.

Connect a Site to New Relic From The Hub

Since you’re all set up with a New Relic account, connecting to a website that you have hosted in The Hub is a snap.

First off, go to the site that you want to connect to. The quickest way to access your hosted sites is to click the Hosting tab in the dashboard. That will immediately bring them all up.

A list of hosted sites in The Hub. — You can also access your hosted sites under Sites, then Hosted.

On the site you want to include New Relic on, the green cloud icon will get you to where we need to go.

The cloud in The Hub. — I named this website ‘New Relic’ — just for example purposes.

That will take you to a new dashboard, where you will click on the Tools button.

The Tools tab in The Hub. — Tools is where you want to go.

Once clicking on that, scrolling down will get you to the New Relic Monitoring area. If you don’t have New Relic connected, it will indicate that it’s off.

Where you activate your New Relic account in The Hub. — You’ll need to scroll down quite a bit to get to this section.

Clicking in the Off area will open up a pop-up where you have options to Enable/Disable New Relic, add a License Key, and give it an App Name that will appear in New Relic once connected.

Where you enter a key for New Relic in The Hub. — I’ll just name it Nate to keep it simple.

So, how do we go about getting the key? Leave this option open, and we’ll head back into New Relic in a new tab.

Getting the License Key

When logged into your New Relic account, obtaining a license key to add into The Hub and sync your account is just a couple of steps.

Simply go to your icon button in New Relic, that’s located in the upper right corner. When you click on it, it’ll bring up a dropdown that includes API Keys.

Where you get your api keys in New Relic. — There’s a lot more you can do here, but we’ll focus on the API keys for now.

Clicking on API Keys displays all of your API keys. From here, you want to click on one that says LICENSE in it, tap on the ellipsis, and select Copy Key.

Where you copy the key in New Relic. — Be careful. Depending on how many keys you have set up, it’s easy to copy the wrong key or key ID.

Got the key copied? Great! Let’s move on to…

Activating New Relic in The Hub

The screen that we previously were on (Hosting> Tools> New Relic Monitoring) should be there waiting for you (unless, of course, you closed out that tab).

Simply paste the code where it says License Key and, if you haven’t already, give it a name. Once pasted, you’ll switch the Enable/Disable ON (it’ll turn blue) and click Save.

Where you enter the new relic key in The Hub. — Name it anything that you’d like.

And now, you’re ready to…

See Your Data in New Relic

It doesn’t take long for data to start being collected in New Relic and appear on a lot of what we covered already (e.g. Transactions).

The App Name that you gave your website should appear in New Relic almost instantly! Go to the Explorer tab and click on APM. Your new account should appear, along with any existing accounts that you already have set up.

Where the new account is located in New Relic. — You can see the one labeled Nate is already on here in less than a minute.

New Relic will take it from here, letting you know of any performance issues so that you can stay on top of them with ease! They even have mobile app options for Android and iOS.

Out with the Old, In with the New Relic

The old way of looking at your WordPress’s performance, identify and take care of any issues is better than ever. Thanks to New Relic and its easy-to-understand platform, it’s not tough to do.

As you can see, it’s painless and easy to set up, implement, and take advantage of today.

To implement all that we covered in The Hub, be sure to check out our fully dedicated hosting if you’re not hosting sites with us currently.

Enjoy your NEW way of WordPress performance monitoring with New Relic.

January 4, 2021

Modern Operations Best Practices From Engineering Leaders at New Relic and Tenable

As reliability shifts left, more companies are adopting SRE best practices. These best practices don’t only include conducting incident retrospectives. The heart and soul of these best practices are a blameless culture and a desire to grow from each incident.

In a recent industry leaders’ roundtable hosted by Blameless, top experts discussed how teams can embrace SRE best practices and make cultural shifts towards blamelessness. The Executive Fireside Chat members included:

July 12, 2019

How to Use New Relic for Performance Engineering and Load Testing

Performance engineering and load testing are critical parts of any modern software organization's toolset. In fact, it's increasingly common to see companies field dedicated load-testing teams and environments. Many companies that don't have such processes in place are quickly evolving in that direction.

Driven by key performance indicators (KPIs), performance engineering and load testing for software applications have three main goals:

March 4, 2019

Bjorn Freeman-Benson: Three Challenges of Distributed Teams

Distributed team: are they the solution to our staffing problems, or an expensive fantasy? I had the opportunity to sit down with Bjorn Freeman-Benson earlier this month to explore these questions.

Bjorn is an experienced software leader. Highlights of his career include heading up engineering at New Relic as it grew from 3 developers to 330; growing Invision from 60 developers to 350 as its CTO; working on VisualAge Smalltalk at OTI (Object Technology International); and coordinating the open-source Eclipse developers at the Eclipse Organization.

October 1, 2014

20 Must Have Tools For Creating And Maintaining Your Website

Being a web developer or designer nowadays can be both stressful and rewarding. Rewarding because your services are some of the most sought after ones in the current market and stressed because the expectations of your clients seem to increase with each passing day. It’s clear that we no longer need plain, functional websites, but interactive, memorable designs. This is why we’ve compiled a list of 20 of the best tools and services available to help make your job a lot easier.

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HotJar

It’s essential for all developers and designers to know how users are really using their websites. By careful analysis of this information, you will be able to offer your client useful data and help them improve their UX and conversion rate. And HotJar is just the tool to help you accomplish all of this. HotJar is a platform that offers you tools to gather all the information you could possibly require in order to get a complete picture of the way users interact with your website. Unlike its competitors, HotJar offers all its features within a unified dashboard so you’ll be able to review the collected data in one place as opposed to flitting from one screen to another in order to have a good grasp on what’s happening.

As far as what the features offered, HotJar offers you: feedback and exit polls that can help you get first hand information about how user-friendly your website is, online surveys so as to be in tune with what your visitors require, heat maps that show you the areas of interest within your website, funnel and form analysis so that you’ll know what pages or sections prove to be the least interesting to users, full visitor session playback and much more.

Giverz

Giverz is currently hosting a giveaway from which you can get up to 4 bitcoins. Do you need to know more or are you already typing in their name in your search engine? Well, if you do, here’s what Giverz is all about: they are a team dedicated to gathering all the best giveaways available on the Internet and offering them up for grabs to their emailing list. How it works is that you go over to their website, subscribe to the mailing list and join in on the fun. In no time, you will hear about one of their amazing campaigns (be sure to follow them on Twitter and Facebook in order to always be up to date) and the countdown begins. As soon as the timer hits 0 the entire emailing list will receive an email with a link letting them know the giveaway is up for grabs. The fastest ones to click on the link will be the lucky winners, so time is of the essence. What are you waiting for?

ZippyPixels

ZippyPixels is a platform that aims to supply developers and designers with some of the best products available at very reasonable prices. The whole idea started of after the team over at ZippyPixels (who are experienced web developers and designers as well), searched the Internet for a place where they could get the resources they needed without having to pay an arm and a leg. They found none. So the decided to create their own service and keep in close touch with the community they aimed to help. This is how bundles like Grandé came to life. The community asked for a comprehensive bundle that will supply their every need and ZippyPixels was more than happy to oblige. The Grandé bundle offers 160 HD mockups that cover categories such as:

Logos
Books
Flyers and advertisements
Device
Magazines
Stationery and more

Go over to ZippyPixels and take a look at just how awesome these mockups look and start thinking about all the cool ways in which you could use them.

ShrinkTheWeb

ShrinkTheWeb is the tool that all mobile and web developers have been looking for. By using ShrinkTheWeb, they will be able to turn the process of taking screenshots and including them into their websites from a pain into a breeze. This tool has an automated screenshot system that is capable of scaling the pictures to any need, not to mention a speed of capture and delivery that is unmatched across the Internet. All you have to do is write a singe line of code or use an existing plugin and ShrinkTheWeb will set off to do all the hard work. In addition to its screenshot features, ShrinkTheWeb also offers URL to PDF Conversion, Custom Size Previews and Private Label Service that will help you make your website stand out from the crowd. ShrinkTheWeb is not only a free service, it also offers unparalleled tech support in case you need assistance.

BrowseEmAll

Writing code that ensures your website is compatible cross browser is a best practice, but it’s not always the way things go. This is why BrowseEmAll is a tool that will make web developer and designer’s lives all the much easier. By using BrowseEmAll, you will no longer have to test out your website on a variety of browsers, the analysis is done automatically. This tool offers you the possibility to view your website in multiple browsers at the same time and track down compatibility issues faster and easier. Also, BrowseEmAll offers a wide range of mobile simulators that will not only help with the responsive aspect of your website, but they will also help you optimize your website for mobile access. What’s more, you will be able to test your HTML and raw files directly within BrowseEmAll, so you won’t have to upload them to a server beforehand. In conclusion, by using BrowseEmAll you will be able to ensure that your websites will look good on any browser or device.

Paddle

Paddle.com is an eCommerce platform made especially for digital content creators. It has been created with the intention of taking away the boring aspects of eCommerce like payments, file hosting & delivery, taxes and chargebacks to let sellers focus on what they’re really enjoy: creating products.

An analytics dashboard complete with sales stats, customer data and the ability to manage/create products means that sellers can control everything in a single location. And Paddle’s beautiful Overlay Checkout creates a seamless buying experience for customers, since they’re able to complete purchases on the same webpage.

Getting started couldn’t be easier: sellers just need to name and price their product, upload their file and that’s it, they’ll be given a dedicated checkout link they can use to sell their products. Paddle handles the rest! If you’d like an easy way to sell digital content, sign up for free here.

Stamplia

Stamplia Builder is an editor that allows you to modify purchased email templates easily and more efficiently than ever before. Getting started with Stamplia Builder is a quick process and before you know it you will be working on your first template like you’ve been using the editor your whole life. Within the Stamplia Builder you will have access to automatic export of templates into email providers like MailChimp, CampaignMonitor and SendGrid. Also, all the templates you create with this tool will automatically be compatible with the email provider’s editor. In addition to this, you will be able to see your modifications on the email template in a real-time responsive visualization mode and add amazing images with the aid of the faster image editor. When you’ve finished, Stamplia Builder makes sure that the template you have modified will look good both on computer and mobile and you will be able to test it in order to make sure your emails won’t accidentally get into Spam.

DealFuel

A variety of developer tools, an impressive assortment of graphic resources, an extended array of eBooks and eCourses and numerous bundles to gather them all, this is how DealFuel could be described. As you can see, this website is the perfect place to head to regardless of what your needs might be. Here you’re sure to find first rate WordPress themes and plugins, SEO tools and dedicated software for your website. You’ll also find elegant mockups, professional textures, vectors and Photoshop actions for all your visual needs. And don’t forget about the numerous bundles that include a whole selection of useful resources.

What’s more, DealFuel has a dedicated section for freebies that contains some of the best free products that you can find anywhere. And even if it so happens that the product you’ve had your eye on isn’t in the free category, don’t worry too much about it, DealFuel has already negotiated a deal for you that will ensure you get the best possible price for it. And here is an exclusive coupon code that will get you an additional 10% discount over and above the discounted offers – WONDER2014.

RumbleTalk

With RumbleTalk you will be able to add an active HTML5 chat room to your websites in a matter of minutes. The chat rooms offered by RumbleTalk are highly customizable and are sure to fit in seamlessly with any kind of website that requires them. The chat rooms come complete with moderators, SSL and a variety of themes. You also have a choice about the way you integrate them, either by embedding them in a webpage or featuring them as a floating toolbar. Regardless of the way you choose to display them, you can be sure that the chat rooms will be a pleasant experience for all your users as they will be free to add videos and photos straight into the chat room and steer the conversation towards anything they see fit. Don’t hesitate to start your business relationship with RumbleTalk straight away, they are a team dedicated to keeping their customers happy and creating a relationship based on trust and mutual understanding with them.

OOcharts

OOCharts is the API that will help you create your very own Google Analytics dashboard. This tool is completely free and could prove to be invaluable in your future projects. It will help you make chats of your website’s activity, it will queue your requests that exceed the limits of Google Analytics and make sure you get your information reliably, it will cache requests of previous reports so that they’ll load faster next time you call them up and all you need to do in order to get stated is connect your Google profile and make an API key for your website.

Luvly

Luvly is a premium digital marketplace that encompasses an extensive collection of resources that are meant to help you make your website more visually appealing. Since the way your website looks is one of the most important things to your visitors, it is essential that you select only the best tools available for your graphics. This is why Luvly is the perfect marketplace for you. All resources available on this marketplace have gone through a thorough approval process destined to ensure that only the best make it online. The range of requirements that Luvly supplies is impressive. You will find any graphic resources here from mockups, to icons, vectors, patterns, logos and more. They also have dedicated sections for both WordPress and Blogger templates that are sure to respond to all your requirements. What’s more, Luvly is dedicated to helping its community grow and empowering designers, so they organize numerous workshops and tutorials to help them get their feet under them.

CloudCart

In order to create an online store, you need all the expertise you can get. Luckily, CloudCart has the best know-how about making an online store and then some. By employing CloudCart all you’ll have to worry about is having all the products you’re selling in stock and ready to go out to clients as soon as your website comes online. CloudCart will take care of everything required in order to create a successful website for your business. They will provide you with secure hosting, beautiful themes that are completely search engine optimized and make sure that word about your website is spread over a variety of social networks like Twitter or Facebook. What’s more, they will offer you Integrated Payments, 1-click checkout, international payments and a delivery and tax calculator so that you’ll be ready to start selling as soon as your website is live. And, in addition to all of this, you will have advanced reporting tools at your disposal that will let you know how your business is doing at any given time.

Opinion Stage

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Adding opinion polls to your websites can prove to be highly beneficial for their user friendliness level. Opinion Stage allows you to register to their service and add your first poll on your website in under 5 minutes. By using polls provided by Opinion Stage you will be entering a community of users that are currently using on of the best platforms for online surveys available. And that’s no small feat. Opinion Stage not only offers completely customizable polls for your pages, but they also offer an all-encompassing dashboard where you can view all the results gathered by your polls instantly. In addition to this, you have complete freedom to filter these results by a number of criteria and even display them in charts and graphs in order to read them easily. Another cool feature that Opinion Stage provides you is the possibility to monetize your polls by either including ads within them or by promoting other polls from the Opinion Stage network.

WPEka Club

A repository of first-rate WordPress themes and plugins is something that sounds good to a lot of people. WPEka Club is such a place. With a collection of more than 60 themes and plugins that cover a varied array of products for Business, Auctions, Social Media, AdSense, SEO and more, WPEka Club is the perfect place to head to for all the WordPress awesomeness. By opting for their all-inclusive plans that begin at only $27 a month, you will have complete access to the entire WPEka Club collection as well as all the brand new releases that are released while you’re an active member(and the team over at WPEka promises that you will enjoy at least 4 new releases each month). Don’t hesitate to join WPEka Club’s community and enjoy all the premium WordPress themes and plugins as well as one of the best support systems available in the premium WordPress market.

Fiddler

Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy that is guaranteed to make your life a lot easier. By using this tool you will be able to test the security of your website, detect bottlenecks within the communication between server and application and manipulate and edit all your webs sessions. With Fiddler you will be able to put your website to the test regardless of what operating system you’re using (Windows, Mac or Linux), browser or platform (Ruby, Php, Java and more).

Web Starter Kit

If you’re looking to start work on a project that is destined to be used on multiple devices, then the Web Starter Kit is the tool you need. Amongst its features you will find: multi-device responsive boilerplate, living component style guide, live browser reloading and more. Also, by using the Web Starter Kit you will be following the Web Fundamentals guidelines out of the box.

BrowserShots

If you’re looking for a fast way to see how your website looks on a variety of browsers, head on over to BrowserShots. All you have to do in order to get the information you require is enter your website’s URL, choose the browser you need and click Submit. In a matter of minutes you will have a snapshot loaded an ready to be examined.

jQAPI

jQuery is undoubtedly being used to its full potential nowadays and many developers turn to it frequently. This is why it is so important to have access to its documentation easily and within a well structured browser. This is what jQAPI provides, an alternative jQuery Documentation Browser that is available both online and offline and that will make developer’s lives a lot easier.

New Relic is a tool that will help you gather performance data from all your applications and allow you to make informed decisions about their future. Among the products that New Relic offers you’ll find: Application performance manager, native mobile application performance manager, real time big data analytics for business decision making, server monitoring for cloud and data centers and more.

Inspiration Hut

It’s always good to be able to have access to honest reviews and feedback from fellow developers and designers and Inspiration Hut is the place where you can find that. Inspiration Hut features a diverse array of products available for the entire web development and design community and it also encourages this community to share its work with others. By browsing through their gallery you are sure to find numerous resources that will help you in your work. The best part is that most of them are free. Inspiration Hut encourages its community to contribute to its ever-growing repository and create an online go to place that guarantees quality. Among the cool resources you’ll find over at Inspiration Hut are: backgrounds, Fonts, Brushes, Free PSDs, Icons, Mockups, Patterns, Print Templates, Textures, Themes, UI Kits and much, much more. So head on over to Inspiration Hut and enjoy their collection and don’t forget to credit when required.