Getting Started

Request Metrics is the fast and easy way to understand your website and your users. Drop our agent into your HTML markup, and we'll get you simplified metrics about how to make your website better, faster, and more effective. Let's go.

Step 1: Create Your Free Account

Click that pretty blue button in the upper right and create a Request Metrics account. You’ll need to provide some basic details about the website you’ll be monitoring, but you can edit these later if you just want to play around. Your account will be active and ready to use right away.

Step 2: Preview Scan

We’ll do a quick scan of your website’s homepage to give you an idea of what Request Metrics can do. We’ll also discover some of the other pages in your website and let you select which ones should be scanned next.

Step 3: Check Your Data

We’ll kick off desktop and mobile scans for all the pages you selected from your website. It should only take a few minutes and you’ll see additional data about your website performance. You can explore all the reports and see how to make your website faster.

Step 4: Install the Agent

Request Metrics is at its best when you install our JavaScript agent into your website. We use this to gather the Real User Experience of people visiting your site. We also gather basic analytics data for you, so we can show you the busiest pages on your site, and scan them regularly for problems.

Tip: You don’t have to install the agent to use Request Metrics. The system will scan the pages you selected every week and give you performance insights from them.

When creating your account, you’ll be prompted to copy the installation snippet. This is a bit of HTML and JavaScript that will install the Request Metrics agent on your website. It looks like this:

<!-- Request Metrics -->
<script>
  (function(t,e,n,r){function a(){return e&&e.now?e.now():null}if(!n.version){n._events=[];n._errors=[];n._metadata={};n._urlGroup=null;window.RM=n;n.install=function(e){n._options=e;var a=t.createElement("script");a.async=true;a.crossOrigin="anonymous";a.src=r;var o=t.getElementsByTagName("script")[0];o.parentNode.insertBefore(a,o)};n.identify=function(t,e){n._userId=t;n._identifyOptions=e};n.sendEvent=function(t,e){n._events.push({eventName:t,metadata:e,time:a()})};n.setUrlGroup=function(t){n._urlGroup=t};n.track=function(t,e){n._errors.push({error:t,metadata:e,time:a()})};n.addMetadata=function(t){n._metadata=Object.assign(n._metadata,t)}}})(document,window.performance,window.RM||{},"https://cdn.requestmetrics.com/agent/current/rm.js");
  RM.install({
      token: "your:token"
  });
</script>

Copy and paste it (replacing “your:token”) into your base HTML page. Most people put this in the <head> tag of their page, so they can send custom events in their code. There are lots of options to customize the installation for your specific use case, but this is a great place to start.

Deploy your website so that visitors start including the performance agent with your website.