Just launched: The Web Performance Today Podcast!

We couldn't be happier to announce our new podcast series.

The Web Performance Today podcast is a weekly series of interviews with the innovators and thought leaders who are driving our increasingly dynamic industry. The series is hosted by Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby, and offers valuable insight into the research and trends that drive the web performance space.

To launch the podcast series, we have great interviews with Patrick Meenan and Stephen Thair.

Patrick Meenan is one of the driving forces in the web performance industry.  As one of the creators of WebPagetest – the seminal testing tool for the performance industry – Patrick has proven that real-world performance in no way reflects the experience one has from a data center. In his interview with Joshua, Patrick discussed the humble beginnings of WebPagetest and where it is going.

As director of Seriti Consulting, head of the Web Performance Meetup Group in London, member of the Velocity program committee, and the organizer of the inaugural London WebPerfDays, Stephen Thair is working hard to demonstrate the importance of performance in the UK and Europe. In his interview, Stephen explains what makes a great conference pitch and some of the most memorable slides of Velocity Europe.

Go to the Web Performance Today podcast.

Strangeloop named "Best Company to Work for in B.C." for fifth straight year

We are proud to announce that in a province-wide survey of British Columbian employers and their employees, Strangeloop has been named the Best Company to Work for in B.C. for the fifth year in a row. 

Even after five consecutive wins, we're not cocky and we're certainly not going to rest on our laurels. As Birgit Troy, our VP Finance, says:

"This may be our fifth year of winning this honour, but the thrill has in no way diminished. If anything, it's an ongoing validation that we're doing the right things when it comes to finding and keeping the excellent people who are the lifeblood of our company. Our mantra is 'happy people are productive people' and we’re proud to say that our team proves us right every single day."

As in previous years, the competition this year was tough. In the end, what gave Strangeloop the edge was our walk-the-talk focus on ensuring that our people enjoy a healthy work-life balance, which can be easier said than done in the tech industry, particularly in the current economy. 

As one Strangeloop staffer says, "Staff and managers are genuinely interested in my young family and respectful of my role outside of work as a dad. They are also very inclusive and make my wife and son welcome at many social events."

Strangeloop also offers a host of creative, small-budget-big-impact programs such as an office concierge who is charged with organizing weekly and monthly events, Friday ice cream breaks, catered lunches, a fully stocked kitchen, and dress-up parties complete with ping-pong tournaments.

Read the full article at BC Business.

Want to work for the best company in BC? We're hiring!

VIDEO: How to Double the Speed of Your Web Applications

Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby recently joined Solution Architect Erik Schultz of Ecetera -- Strangeloop's newest partner -- for a 40-minute webinar entitled How to Double the Speed of Your Web Applications.

It was an eventful session, with plenty of great insight from the two hosts plus thought-provoking questions from attendees. Joshua started by taking things right back to the basics, outlining the premise of why web performance has a direct correlation to the bottom line of online businesses and why site owners must look at every decision through the lens of "Will this speed up or slow down my website?"

Watch the webinar

If you missed the webinar, not to worry. You can see it in its entirety here:

Check out our other videos

Visit the resources section of our site to see more videos, slides, infographics, case studies and more. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday web performance snapshot

This year's holiday shopping season kicked off with a bang. Here's a snapshot of the ecommerce landscape as it performed between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday:

• Web page response time started to spike as early as Thanksgiving, with page load times doubling for some sites. [source]
• Thanksgiving Day saw a 32% year-over-year increase in online spending, bringing the total for that holiday to $633 million. [source]
• 57 million people shopped online on Black Friday, a 26% increase over 2011. [source]
• Black Friday ecommerce sales set $1 billion record. [source]
• On Cyber Monday, US mobile retail sites slowed dramatically, with an average page load of more than 18 seconds. [source]
• 24% of consumers used a mobile device to visit a retailer's site, up from 14.3% in 2011. Mobile sales exceeded 16%, up from 9.8% in 2011. [source]
• On Cyber Monday, the five fastest sites for desktop users were Apple, Costco, JC Penney, LL Bean, and Dell. The five fastest sites for mobile users were Office Depot, Barnes and Noble, Williams-Sonoma, Buy.com, and Amazon. [source]
• The bulkiest web pages, as tested by dynaTrace, were 5.4 MB in size, contained 215 objects, and had 68 unique hosts. [source]
• Third-party content was a serious performance culprit, as some third-party providers were not prepared for the spike in holiday traffic. [source and source]

The average web page has grown 20% in just six months

The web is growing up. Or at least growing bigger.

Just six months ago, we were noting that the average web page exceeds 1 MB in size and lamenting the inevitable performance slowdowns that would follow. At that point, pages had grown 8% in just 4 months.

Now the HTTP Archive shows that pages have undergone yet another growth spurt. Below you can see the growth in average page size over just two years:

As this graph shows, a typical web page carries a payload that's 20% bigger than it was just six months ago. And this growth shows no signs of slowing. Following this trajectory, pages will hit 2 MB by early 2014.

Though page bloat in and of itself isn’t news, bloat of this magnitude is. This has obvious ramifications for desktop users, but mobile users will be much harder hit.

Keep your website lean and fast

The Strangeloop Site Optimizer uses an advanced set of site acceleration treatments to make sure content-rich pages remain fast and responsive for users. To find out how much faster your pages can be, contact one of our Performance Experts.

WEBINAR: How to Double the Speed of Your Web Applications

Our new partnership with application performance specialists Ecetera is bringing advanced web acceleration to Australian ecommerce vendors.

To discuss this partnership, as well as a wide range of web performance topics, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby will join Ecetera Solution Architect Erik Schultz for a 30-minute webinar entitled How to Double the Speed of Your Web Applications.

Joshua and Erik will cover topics such as:

• Why application speed matters to every business metric you care about
• The different approaches to making a site faster, and the pros and cons of each
• How different technologies complement each other
• Can you do all of this yourself without paying for it?
• Case studies: eBay/PayPal, Drugs.com, and Wine.com
  
  

We would be delighted if you could join us for this webinar on Tuesday, November 27, beginning at 3:30 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST).

Space is limited, so sign up today! Join the webinar.

FREE REPORT: Natural Born Conversion Killers: Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment occurs when web users add products or services to an online shopping cart, only to exit before completing the transaction.

The shopping cart abandonment rate has grown steadily over the years, from 60% in 2006 to almost 80% on Cyber Monday 2011. That figure is expected to reach a record-breaking 90% on Cyber Monday 2012.

Here are a few other startling numbers:

• 70 - The overall percentage of shopping carts abandoned by customers.
• 46 - The percentage of shoppers who say checkout speed affects whether they'll return to a site.
• $18,000,000,000 - The annual cost of shopping cart abandonment.
• $3,000,000,000 - The annual cost of cart abandonment due to slow web pages.

There are many reasons for shopping cart abandonment, such as price shopping, saving items for later, or high shipping costs. But almost 1 in 5 cite slow page speed as the reason for abandoning their cart.

To borrow a football analogy, it's 1st & goal for your website when a customer fills their shopping cart. They're ready to make a final decision. Eliminating distractions such as slow page load times is critical to completing the drive.

To learn why shopping cart abandonment is so prevalent and how you can reduce its impact on your bottom line, download our new report: Natural Born Conversion Killers: Slow pages and shopping cart abandonment.

INFOGRAPHIC: Black Friday and Beyond

This year, between Black Friday and New Year's Eve, online shoppers will send almost $96 billion flowing through reuters, servers, and fiber-optic cables.

Most people will spend this money using traditional desktop or laptop computers, but one out of five will use a mobile device to complete the purchase. Tablet owners will spend 21% more than either desktop or smartphone shoppers, with an average order size of $123.

Shoppers have plenty of good reasons for choosing to spend online:

• 51% of Americans cite the current economy, saying they can get better deals online,
• 1 in 3 want to avoid "the crazy" of bricks-and-mortar stores, and
• 38% plan to use online coupons.
  
  

Web performance is a critical issue for holiday consumers. One out of five shoppers will abandon their online shopping cart, citing slow pages as the culprit. This adds up to $3 billion in lost sales during the holidays alone. And for those shoppers who do complete their purchase, slow checkout pages will cause almost half of them to worry that their transaction has failed.

To give you a sense of what the holiday shopping season means for your business, we've assembled a set of infographics that breaks down what will happen on Black Friday, the holidays, and beyond.

See the full infographic: Black Friday and Beyond: What the 2012 holiday season holds for online shoppers. 

Strangeloop and Amazon CloudFront team up to offer powerhouse FEO+CDN solution to site owners

We are very pleased to announce a partnership with Amazon Web Services, effective immediately, that will bring our advanced front-end optimization (FEO) technology to site owners using Amazon CloudFront.

Amazon CloudFront is the world's fastest growing content delivery network (CDN), giving businesses and web application developers an easy and cost-effective way to distribute content with low latency and high data transfer speeds. CloudFront is a self-service, pay-per-use offering that delivers files to end users using a global network of edge locations. The platform powers websites in 190 countries, with major data centres across the globe.

Available immediately to AWS customers, the Strangeloop Site Optimizer and Mobile Optimizer are cloud-based services that apply self-scaling front-end optimization (FEO) technology automatically across websites, resulting in shorter response times and pages that load up to twice as fast. FEO optimizes HTML to speed up page rendering through treatments such as image compression, resource consolidation, object name rewriting, object re-ordering, and browser cache leveraging. 

Combining content delivery with front-end optimization is a natural marriage for site owners who understand the benefits of making pages faster. Amazon CloudFront shortens server round trips, and FEO reduces page requests and payload. Combined, the two solutions reduce page load times, allowing pages to render up to three times faster than unoptimized pages that do not use a CDN and FEO solution.

Outrigger.com has already experienced the benefits of combining CDN with FEO. According to Dan Wacksman, Senior VP of Global Distribution at Outrigger Hotels and Resorts:

"We chose Amazon CloudFront because of its ability to offer competitive content delivery compared to other higher-cost CDN services. We chose Strangeloop because of its proven expertise in the area of front-end optimization. Together, Amazon CloudFront and Strangeloop cut our page load times in half instantly for both mobile and desktop visitors, without requiring any changes to our site or servers."

The agreement with Amazon Web Services is the latest in a series of key partnerships for Strangeloop. Our relationships with companies such as Level 3, Neustar, and Dell bring our advanced FEO technology to end users through a variety of channels. 

Get started with Site Optimizer and Amazon CloudFront: strangeloopnetworks.com/cloudfront

2012 Holiday Performance Guide: Practical tips for improving your website's performance

This holiday season, Shop.org predicts that online shoppers will spend up to a record-breaking $96 billion. Growth is especially strong among mobile consumers, with roughly 1 in 5 transactions now taking place over smartphones and tablets.

But this spending comes with demands: 18% of shoppers will abandon their carts if pages load too slowly. And just a 1-second delay in load time can hurt revenues by 7%.

With so much on the line, there are several questions every site owner must ask themselves, including:

• How does my site perform for real-world customers?
• Does my site follow core performance best practices?
• Is third-party content hurting my site's performance?
• How can I make my site faster for mobile shoppers?
  
  

As an ecommerce site owner, there are easy steps you can take to make sure your site is fast and user-friendly for holiday shoppers. To help get you there, we've created a guide filled with suggestions for plucking the low-hanging web performance fruit and ensuring you're not missing easy opportunities to make your pages faster.

Download the 2012 Holiday Performance Guide.