It is essential to load content in a reasonable amount of time. When Are We Online's Website Performance Monitoring Service measures your site's speed, we focus on page load time using a latency check, to let you know that users can interact with your web applications quickly.

Although "pinging" is a successful tactic to see if your website's DNS configuration is correct, and your web server is connecting your domain name to your IP address, it doesn't measure the load time for specific pages or content. In reality, the response time on a ping tells you absolutely nothing about your server. The amount of time it takes a user to see a specific image or web page from your web server is the statistic you need to be monitoring.

In addition, most webmasters or hosting providers will disable "pinging" because it can without wanting to provide an anonymous person with your server's IP address. If your webmasters or hosting provider has disabled "pinging", your web site response time monitoring service will always report that you're having latency issues, falsely alerting you that web site's performance is extremely low.

Second, poor web site response time means that users will be "bouncing" from your website more often. A "bounce" is a single-page visitor to your website. High "bounce rates" reflect to Google and other search engines, that users aren't landing on relevant content when they get to your web site from a search engine result page. How often do you simply leave a web page and go back to the search engine results page when it takes too long to load? Other visitors will do the same thing, raising your "bounce rate" and essentially devalue your content in Google's rankings for specific terms.