SpeedProfs.com

Slow websites worse than traffic jams

admin — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 02:52:30 +0000

SpeedProfs.com analyzed the loading time of the top 100 most visited websites with an .nl-extension. This has resulted in some interesting insights and will create hopefully awareness as some result are quite shocking. In this research on the economic impact of slow websites, it turns out that 11 Million Dutch are waiting on average over 10 minutes a day for sites to load. The total waiting time is therefore more than the daily traffic jams in the Netherlands – one of the countries biggest frustrations. One of the big contributor to this is Hyves.nl – a Dutch social network. The research shows – based on several data sources – that Hyves contributes to over 100.000 hour waiting time a day.

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Measuring the mobile web….eh.. How?

admin — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:36:53 +0000

Google’s Profs have no clue

Measuring loading time on the mobile web is hard. Not sure if it was already in the original design, but from a performance measurement perspective they are kind of a black box.

Some companies start to play around and come up with some tools, however there is still no common way on measuring loading time on mobile devices. Latencies caused by providers are often terrible, and despite that, studies and insights into these are limited. Common knowledge and insights all starts with measuring the loading time in a way that everybody believes is the right way. There seems no common ground yet. And without proper indicators it is very difficult to raise awareness, steer and improve loading times. Let alone to understand your ROI of your improvements.

Yesterday Matt Welsh, a software engineer at Google, wrote a comprehensive story about the current status of measuring the mobile web. If you are a bit into the details it is worth a read. Main take-away: his team is aiming to define a common set of robust tools and best practice sharing for mobile loading time measurements. Let’s hope he is making some good progress as we need this drastically.

Launch of Google Page Speed Service

admin — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 21:02:56 +0000

Addition to their Page Speed solutions

An online service that automatically speeds up web pages? That sounds amazing! This is very promising direction that might lead to a world where site owners don’t need to worry anymore about loading times. Google will take care. That sounds to good to be truth. Which it is. But this is still a nice service that is now available. You can try for free as they are still debating about the cost-structure for this.

The service is very easy to set-up and works instantly. As they describe it:

To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times.

What do you think? Is this service putting aside companies like Torbit, Blaze and other page optimizers? And in case you tried it. Did it work for you?

Mobile performance expectations

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:30:34 +0000

On behalf of Compuware (Gomez) Equation Research has surveyed over 4000 global mobile users on performance expectations and behavior. They creatively titled it: “What users want from Mobile”. It is reassuring to read in the introduction of their research that the main item we evangelize at speedprofs.com as well: Speed is important for your business. So it holds for mobile performance.

The survey “What Users Want From Mobile” also revealed how unsatisfactory mobile web and application experiences can negatively shape a consumer’s opinion of an organization.

The most interesting outcome is that 74% is not willing to wait longer than 5 seconds on a page to load. Combining this with the average loading time of mobile web pages this is striking! Did you check your loading time on mobile devices? Serious business is lost and companies need to invest to keep their customers.

And although GIGAOM claims help is on the way because of dual-core chips and 4G networks – this won’t help much yet. And likely once these have become “commodity”, page features and sizes have grown again as well. So it shows to succeed now, as well as in the future, it means you need to spent quality time and resources on optimizing your mobile (web-)application.

Some more conclusions from this survey are nicely shown in this infographic.

Read the original press release or get full access (by leaving all your details) to the survey results.

Hall of Shame in New Zealand

admin — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:54:56 +0000

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Join the monthly WPO Chat

admin — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 23:57:59 +0000

Knowledge exchange between performance experts.

Today the third WPO chat took place with some very interesting topics. WPO chat is an initiative for Web Performance Optimization Professionals. The intention is to use Twitter with hashtag #wpochat. Their official “about” from the website wpochat.org:

The rapidly growing #Webperf worldwide community – at Meetups, Conferences and on Twitter is a lively and engaging grassroots community. The concept of faster websites has broad appeal – and this is why people who like in one of the cities with a meetup or can attend Velocity enjoy the more conversational and social time to learn and share. The mission of the #WPOchat is to provide a regular forum for enthusiasts around the world to come together to learn and share

Aaron Peters from the Netherlands (hoerah!) moderated the third event and the following questions have been discussed:
Q1 We all know we should reduce HTTP requests but does there come a point where a large resource should be split in two?

Q2 How would someone who runs a mid-sized website determine if a CDN makes sense for them?

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We won’t repeat the full discussion as this is perfectly available on wpochat.org. You can read the full Twitter stream. Next chat is scheduled for Monday July 25th at 3pm ET or 8pm London. So block your agenda!

New Relic Infographic — 6 seconds average load time

admin — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:51:34 +0000

New Relic comes up with more Stats & Infographics. This one made quite some impact as it was picked up by several other publishers. Click on the infographic to see the full version on New Relics’ site.

Apple.com homepage twice as fast as Amazon & BestBuy. But.

admin — Thu, 26 May 2011 18:56:05 +0000

CatchPoint, a US based web performance company, published a straightforward explanation on running a web peformance benchmark. They actually explain their benchmark methodology with a case on eCommerce sites, comparing Apple.com, Amazon.com, BestBuy and Newegg.com. What is great here is that Apple shows that a great design can go hand-in-hand with a fast website. And amazingly this benchmark shows that Apple’s homepage loads twice as fast as the other online retailers. However a little caveat is there… The homepage of store.apple.com, the real ecommerce page of the consumer electronic giant, is actually twice as slow as their main home-page, and therefore even slower than Amazon & BestBuy.

See the full benchmark story on catchpoint.

Google gives SSL a speedboost with SSL FalseStart

admin — Wed, 25 May 2011 09:58:33 +0000

Google is sparking new speed initiatives faster than you can update your browser. This week they released a new technology, somewhat clumsily called “SSL FalseStart”. Apparently not invented by their marketing department but by their Chromium developers, this invention reduces a step in the SSL handshake, claiming 30% reduction in latency of SSL connections. And the good thing is, it can be implemented client-side (ie. in the browser) and it works with over 94% of all websites out there.

More details on the Chromium blog.

Site Speed in Google Analytics

admin — Wed, 04 May 2011 19:50:52 +0000

Great news! To further evangelize speed, Google has released their new feature: Site Speed measurements as part of their new Google Analytics offerings. You can find their announcement on their blog. A great step forward. Google Analytics users will gain more insights and control on the performance of their website.

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It will be interesting to see how much it will effect the loading of the site itself. The fact that they only take a sample to measure might give the idea that there is quite some impact. Anybody did some testing on this already?