Why do you need website performance monitoring?
Website performance monitoring tells you how fast your site actually feels to real users, and alerts you when it gets slower. It matters for three reasons:
- User experience: users leave sites that feel slow. Google's research suggests bounce rates roughly triple as page load goes from 1 to 5 seconds.
- Search rankings: Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor. A slower site ranks lower, full stop.
- Revenue and conversions: every extra second on checkout pages, product detail pages, or sign-up flows costs you completed transactions.
Performance problems don't announce themselves. A slow database query, a third-party script that times out, a cache that quietly expired, they all drag the site down without triggering an uptime alert. Only performance monitoring catches them.
Oh Dear measures performance on every uptime check (default every minute) and can send alerts when response times cross a threshold or deviate sharply from the recent baseline. We also run daily Lighthouse audits for a deeper look at Core Web Vitals and real-world render performance.
