RapidSpike Scoring (RS Score)

Your RapidSpike Score is currently available on your Weekly Insights report. This score will give you insight into where you rank according to your captured data, other RapidSpike customers, the RapidSpike team’s knowledge and general standard practices in terms of real user experience, page construction, speed, efficiency, uptime and more (eventually!)

It’s important to note that a lower score than an A+ grade might not be a bad thing – much the same as a home energy efficiency report is dependent on the size, age and efficiency of the house. A website RS Score of B is good for a very complex website or very bad if you’ve spent a lot of development time trying to make it fast and speed for you is a key performance indicators in terms of conversion.

The key driver of the RS Score is to ensure you are continuously improving user experience on your digital platform, which in turn will aid both conversion and revenue growth.

It is always worth considering improving your site, much the same as installing better insulation in your roof is a good thing to do as both are good for the environment. For example, you might review the number of elements it downloads and ensuring they are sized appropriately which will be good for your technical SEO and site speed – therefore enhancing your score. Below we further detail the current individual RS Scores that will be added to over time:

Real User Monitoring (RUM) Performance (NEW)

The RUM RS Score is based on your average score taken from all your users, whether they on a fast WIFI connection in a major city or a 3G connection in the middle of nowhere. This means the actual timing can be misleading – for example you can see variations tens of seconds between best and worst.

What you need to improve is the overall RS Score. Look at your data, perhaps IE performance is much worse than Firefox, perhaps many of your users are connected via 3G so you can suppress some of the download files to make your mobile experience much better. Truth be told winning will be by making a thousand improvements, some large, some small. Start with the small stuff, it all helps. The goalposts are shifting all the time, don’t beat yourself up: just get better!

Availability (NEW)

With availability, forget all of the above, your RS Score needs to be the best it can be. You are aiming for 100%, and in many applications this means 100% uptime for users and effective live server by server roll out strategies with the likes of Netflix or Spotify ensuring as close to zero downtime as possible.

For many organisations this means the most effective planned downtime, scheduled windows and ensuring you keep your system up by monitoring security and performance to ensure a seamless experiences, using your real user data to plan the most effective maintenance window possible and ensure your planned availability is 100%.

Future RS Scoring

We will be adding more RS Scores and more detail into the each RS Score over the coming weeks and months. We will also be taking into account more items to ensure your score is relative to your industry, website structure, general good practice, Google scoring, YSlow, expert knowledge and other resources to ensure the score is a really useful tool.

Current RS Score Table

We will add more information to the table over time, adjusting scores as the world changes around us.