How do you know you are getting better?

so I’ve been playing for over a year now and my rating has increased steadily over the whole time from about 1100 to 1450. (I played casually before joining site) 

i do a LOT of tactics and some lessons and started attending a club. 

The thing i struggle with with is that I beat most people at my club on a bad day and on a good day I can beat the best players there. So I use chess.com to monitor my improvement. 

But sometimes o fee like I  beating 1500ers with ease and other days I struggle against 1300(could be form I know). I read about rating inflation and was once in the 89th percentile rated 1380 and now I’m 1490 and 82nd percentile??? So I don’t always trust chess.com rating consistency.  I don’t care if th rating is accurate,as long as it is accurate when it refers to my improvement. But I feel like it’s easier to be a 1450 player than it was last year.

How do you monitor your progress reliably?

I measure my progress by height.

You should do it by number of unhelpful responses to posts

can you solve the same tactics as last year easier this year? do you know more endgames? do you know your opening deeper than last year? if you answer yes to all of these than you've made some good progress. knowledge is way more important than any rating.

You're trying to equate success/improvement by an online rating.  They are way to inaccurate, and way to many variables.  If you ant to get an accurate measurement of your improvement, you need to play OTB tournaments.  Now add in the fact, that all you're playing is blitz, and bullet.  How are you supposed to consistently improve when you're not giving yourself time to implement what you're trying to learn?

When you learned how to read.  Did you start by speed reading, or did you start with the basics?

It’s not very good no.

so you say if I play rapid time control or daily that would be more reliable measure? Or just allow me to improve? 

I  avoided longer time controls because there is a lot of talk of people cheating on longer time controls

The percentile dropped because they stopped counting inactive accounts. Like people who joined for 1 day, lost 5 games, then never logged in again.

In the short term you can measure progress by noticing that you're seeing moves or considering ideas that you didn't in the past.

In the long term you can measure it with your rating.

People seem to often get confused. First of all they pretend their peak rating is somehow their true skill. They also round up. So you'll see people saying they're 1600 when they're in top form, but their peak rating on record is 1540 and they're usually 1450.

So because they lie to themselves and because they round up they make topics like "Why am I losing half the time against 1450s?" and the answer is "because 1450 is your real rating"

(I haven't checked your ratings, but from what you say I just assume at least some of this is true for you)

But again, to answer your question, the simple and long term way to measure improvement is by your rating.

Ok so if the website removes 100s of players from the bottom end then everyone drops in percentile but because the active players remain the RATING system is still good tbecause the players you are playing are active anyway.  

Thanks for input

I had not thought about improvement on a website could be related to psychology and time management before. As you say improvements could be in those skills a rather than actual chess. 

Thanks