# Page Speed Monitoring ### What is the purpose of page speed monitoring? It is a fundamental, basic expectation of both your customers and Google's ranking bots that your website will load in under 2 seconds. Anything more than 3 seconds will see a 53% likelihood that the user will leave and your website's ranking will drop. There are many reasons why a website would load slowly. Factors such as the hosting, the underlying software and the content on the page will have an effect. These factors, though, will always affect the loading time of the website. Page speed monitoring is about the sudden changes to your loading time. If your website usually takes 3 seconds to load, if one day it takes 5 seconds, something has happened that needs correcting. It could be due to software or hosting issues, it could be due to malicious factors, whatever it is, it's good to know so it can be remedied. ### How does it function? Our page speed monitoring will periodically load your website and check the time it takes against the benchmark it stored the last time it loaded. The package you choose determines how often the website is monitored. At the top level, your website is monitored every 24 hours. If there is a 20% change in the loading time of your website, you will be alerted. A sudden 20% drop could mean your site has been affected by a large image, faulty script, or plugin issue. This could be a minor issue that resolves itself the next day, or it could be the start of something significant. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://upwatch.gitbook.io/upwatch/readme/page-speed-monitoring.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.