Add the visitor’s perspective
Scheduled checks give you a repeatable view of a website. Real visitors bring different browsers, devices and network conditions. A page that loads well in a controlled test can still feel slow to part of your audience.
Visitor experience adds optional measurements from real page views to PageLantern. You can inspect Web Vitals, sample counts and error categories, then filter by page, browser or device to understand which measured experiences need attention.
Choose the site and install its snippet
Open Visitor experience, add the website’s exact HTTPS origin and copy the provided snippet into the site. Subdomains are separate origins. If the site uses a Content Security Policy, allow the PageLantern application origin for scripts and connections. Use the site’s consent controls where applicable.
Collection starts when the snippet loads; enabling the feature alone installs nothing. Choose session sampling between 1 and 100 percent and check the collection state after installation. The workspace distinguishes waiting, receiving, stale, paused and quota-reached states so you can tell a quiet site from a collection problem.
Read the sample count with the measurement
Reports show the 75th percentile for measured page views when a metric has at least 20 samples. Error rates also require enough samples. A missing or insufficient measurement stays unavailable; it is never silently replaced with zero or a healthy result.
Counts describe accepted measurements, not an extrapolation of all website traffic. Each metric has its own sample count, so filtering to a small browser or device group can leave too little evidence. Reports retain 90 UTC calendar days and currently cover document navigations and back/forward-cache restorations, not single-page-app route changes.
Collect useful signals with a limited payload
The collector sends sanitized paths, coarse browser and device categories, Web Vitals and allowed error categories. It does not send cookies, typed values, referrers, URL queries or fragments, error message text or stack traces.
Review your path structure before installation. Generic sanitization cannot recognize every sensitive business identifier; the optional data-page setting lets you supply a route template. Pausing a site stops new accepted collection while keeping existing report history.
Turn measured changes into follow-up work
You can configure a performance threshold and window using an enabled workspace notification channel. Alerts require at least 20 samples, and insufficient data cannot close an active alert. These alerts remain separate from uptime incidents and public status pages.
For client reporting, explicitly select the sites to include in a report pack. Use visitor measurements to describe observed experience, scheduled page-speed checks to investigate repeatable loading changes, and uptime monitors to keep checking availability when traffic is quiet.