Going for gold: Testing the resilience of Olympic websites

As the world gears up for the Paris Olympics, it’s not just athletes who need to be in peak condition.

This Olympics comes hot on the heels of the largest IT outage in history. Recovery efforts from the CrowdStrike outage are still ongoing. Lessons will be learned, no doubt, but at least one takeaway is already evident: the modern web is an oh-so-fragile thing; neglect digital resilience at your peril.

For businesses, especially those partnering with or linked to the Olympics, this period is critical.

Millions of visitors will flock to these sites for updates, scores, and bookings, making it crucial to monitor performance from the end user's perspective.

Given this context, Catchpoint tested the performance of the official Paris Olympics site and key partner pages to ensure they can handle the increased traffic and deliver a seamless user experience during the Olympics. We conducted our tests between 16 and 23 July 2024, focusing on the following performance metrics:

• Response time: Measures how long it takes for the base HTML of a webpage to load.
• Round-trip time (RTT): The time it takes for a packet to travel from the source to a destination and back again.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how long it takes for the largest content element (such as hero images or videos) to load within the user’s viewport.

By monitoring these metrics, organizations can quickly detect and resolve performance issues, ensuring their websites remain accessible and performant during the Olympic rush.

Availability issues on the Olympics homepage

The Paris 2024 Olympics website is the central hub for all event-related information, ticket sales, and live updates.

Alarmingly, during our tests, we detected multiple HTTP 404 responses on the Paris Olympics homepage and partner sites. These errors have the potential to severely disrupt user experience, leading to frustration, lost engagement, and diminished trust in the site.  

Inconsistent network performance

The Olympics homepage shows varying round trip times (RTTs) across different countries. Belgium, New Zealand, and Singapore had the lowest RTTs, indicating top-tier network performance.

However, Countries like India, Sweden, and Italy have higher RTTs, which may significantly impact the user experience for visitors accessing the site.

Round Trip Time (RTT) across different countries

Round trip time anomalies:

• Ping round trip times for connections established via Level3 from Germany and the United States are higher than those from other countries using the same ISP.
• This discrepancy is due to inter-country routing, as the Sankey chart illustrates.
• Traffic from Level3 Germany is routed through Chingford, UK (AS9002), while traffic from Level3 USA detours via El Paso, US (AS174), and Mexico (AS8151) before reaching the destination in the originating city.

Regional response time issues

As seen in the chart above, there are clear regional disparities in network performance.

The Paris Olympics homepage had a significantly faster response time in Europe. North America showed mixed results, with the U.S. outperforming Canada. Africa and South America have the highest response times, indicating potential network performance issues or distance-related delays that could affect user experience in this region.

Top 10 ISPs based on response time‍

Bottom 10 ISPs based on response time

Response time for the Olympics landing page largely depends on wait and load times. As these metrics increase, so does response time across regions. Europe, particularly the Netherlands and the UK, shows the best performance. In contrast, India, Australia, and parts of North America face challenges with higher response times.  

The significant differences in response times across regions highlight the need for targeted optimization strategies to ensure a consistent and seamless user experience globally.  

Spotlight on user experience: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The Paris Olympics homepage shows varying LCP times across regions. Europe shows moderate LCP times, but countries like Hungary and Finland experience higher delays. North America has mixed results, with the U.S. performing better than Canada. Asia's performance varies, with faster times in Israel and Japan but slower in India.

High LCP Regions: South America, particularly Brazil and Colombia, and Oceania have the highest LCP times, indicating a need for optimization.

Olympics homepage – LCP across different countries

Retail performance challenges on shop.olympics.com

‍Shop.olympics.com, the official e-commerce platform for Olympic Games merchandise, faces performance challenges resulting in high LCP times of approximately 3-4 seconds. Here are the main reasons:

• High response time: The server’s slow response is contributing to delayed content loading.
• Slower render start: Critical resources such as CSS, JavaScript, and images are not loading promptly, delaying the initial render and negatively impacting LCP.
• Inefficient lazy loading: The main content (LCP element) is being lazy loaded, causing further delays. Ensuring the timely loading of the main content is crucial for better LCP scores.

• As seen in the screenshot, the hero element on the page is being lazy loaded.
• When the LCP element is lazy loaded, the main image on a web page is not loaded immediately, delaying LCP.

Key partner websites: How well does the supporting cast perform?

Olympic partner websites play a vital role in the games by promoting the event, facilitating ticket sales, showcasing sustainability efforts, digitally transforming operations, and engaging fans through content. These websites serve as gateways for fans, athletes, and stakeholders to connect with the Olympic experience. The performance of these key partner websites is integral to delivering a superior user experience, driving revenue, and maintaining and protecting brand reputation.

Response time disparities among Olympic partner sites

Response times for the Olympics’ partner sites show notable differences.

• Top Performers: Groupe BPCE and Air France exhibit very low response times, ensuring quick and seamless user experiences.
• ‍Areas for Improvement: Abatable and Accor have higher response times, particularly in regions like Australia and India, indicating regional connectivity or infrastructure issues.

Addressing user experience metrics: LCP

When it comes to user experience metrics like LCP, the disparities are even more pronounced.

• Swift loading: Pages like Air France and Groupe BPCE load their main content swiftly, providing a seamless experience.
• Need for improvement: Partners like Accor and Abatable show room for improvement with higher LCP values.

Ensure Internet Resilience with Catchpoint this Olympics

Our analysis of the Paris Olympics website and its key partner pages highlighted several critical performance challenges. During high traffic, it is crucial to find and fix issues before they affect your business.

That’s where Catchpoint comes in.

Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) enables detailed, global visibility across the Internet Stack – the tangled web of distributed network systems that connect your web applications to your users, including BGP, CDN, and DNS services. Our cloud-native platform ensures Internet Resilience across your organization with five enterprise IPM solutions, including a best-of-breed Website Experience Solution.

Website Experience, powered by Internet Performance Monitoring

Not only does Catchpoint’s Website Experience Solution empower you to monitor your site’s speed, usability, and resilience in real-time across various browsers, devices, and global locations, but it also allows you to rapidly identify and fix performance issues before they impact your business.

Key benefits

• Leverage WebPageTest’s extremely accurate synthetic browser testing methods to monitor all your web pages’ key metrics in a single dashboard.
• Find and fix performance complications before they impact revenue.
• Ensure reachability - not just availability.
• Alert the right people when performance thresholds are exceeded.
• Monitor DNS, BGP, CDNs, third-party assets, and other possible bottlenecks from real devices and browsers around the globe.
• Compare and contrast your web pages between releases.
• Compare your website’s performance to your competitors and uncover opportunities for improvement with side-by-side benchmarking tests.
• Leverage real user monitoring (RUM) to paint a precise picture of your user base.

Learn more

• Discover Catchpoint’s Internet Resilience Program
• Read our guide: 5 Ways to prepare your website for high traffic
• Read our blog: Mastering Internet Performance Monitoring: A Best Practices series‍