Low cost airline easyJet has appointed Site Confidence, the UK’s largest provider of web performance monitoring and load testing services, to monitor the performance of its website easyJet.com.

Published: 26 Sep 2006

Low cost airline easyJet has appointed Site Confidence, the UK’s largest provider of web performance monitoring and load testing services, to monitor the performance of its website easyJet.com.

The 24/7 monitoring service will ensure that easyJet customers can book tickets without the threat of downtime, outages or slow download speeds.

Paul Curtis, commercial systems manager, easyJet, said, “Given the number of bookings we take on a peak day, making sure that the application can withstand the level of hits is extremely important to us. Before implementing web monitoring we knew that customers could be having problems with our website but we had no easy way of identifying what those specific problems were as seen by the customer.”

Curtis admitted that the airline hadn’t recognised the real importance of website performance monitoring until Site Confidence showed it what can be achieved.

“EasyJet.com receives millions of visitors a month, website monitoring will provide easyJet with an insight into the way its customer’s experience the website, as well as highlighting the causes behind slow downloads or outages on its home pages. It will also monitor easyJet’s many partner sites such as insurance, car hire and transfer, ensuring that these partners are meeting the agreed Service Level Agreements (SLA’s),” stated the company.

“Whilst further enhancing the content and partners of easyJet.com, easyJet realised the importance of implementing a full-scale monitoring service which would give visibility of performance across the site. Following a trial in January, easyJet appointed Site Confidence.”

Curtis added, “Our trial with Site Confidence allowed us to view where problems were happening and view what users were experiencing first hand, this made identifying those problems far easier. We also deal with a significant number of third parties, in the form of our insurance, hotels and car-hire partner sites. We’ve never been able to monitor these sites in real time before and had no way of knowing if service levels were being met on a day to day basis. Monitoring these sites means we now have clear reporting and analysis of site performance which we can use when reviewing SLA’s with our partners.”

“Whenever the design team released an image on the site which was far bigger than it should have been, the performance of the site was significantly affected. We are now able to monitor the speed of the site so that whenever it sinks below a certain level we are be able to flag it up and remedy the problem instantly. Monitoring has also saved us considerable time in internal reporting. It used to take hours to obtain and collate the data for performance updates to the Commercial Director. Now it’s a five minute job,” he said.