Today we’re excited to announce support for Pingdom Real User Monitoring! Pingdom released the service from beta less than two weeks ago.

Pingdom’s Real User Monitoring lets you see exactly how long your pages take to load from your users perspective. They capture timing information about network, DNS lookup and frontend rendering time. They even capture geographic information to show you where in the world your site is slowest.

How can you speed up your site?

As soon as we rolled out the Segment Pingdom RUM integration, we turned it on for ourselves, and honestly I was surprised by what we saw!

See I thought our site was pretty fast, and indeed, it loads in under 3 seconds across the United States and Canada. What I didn’t realize is that we were so slow (10+ seconds!) for some of our customers in Asia and Europe.

In retrospect it’s obvious why: our servers are based in the AWS Oregon datacenter, so we’re slow for the other half of the world. We’ve started looking into Cloudflare as a way to speed up our site in distant countries. Our hope is this will significantly reduce our long-tail load times:

We’ll follow up with post-Cloudflare results soon. In the meantime, head over to your Segment integration page and flip on Pingdom Real User Monitoring. Let’s make the web faster!