FREE REPORT: Our Need for Web Speed: It's about neuroscience, not entitlement

Site speed is an increasingly important topic. As a growing body of research is proving, faster websites aren't just nice-to-have -- they're need-to-have. Up to 78% of users say they've felt stress or anger while using a slow website, 44% of users say that slow online transactions make them anxious about the success of the transaction, and 4% of people have thrown their phone while using a mobile site.  

These are among the findings contained in our most recent report, Our Need for Web Speed: It's about neuroscience, not entitlement. Along with the report are a new set of infographics, This Is Your Brain on a Slow Website.

The report and infographics take a closer look at the phenomenon known as "web stress" and explores why page speed is crucial for user happiness and online success.

Highlights include:

• How, at any given moment, three types of memory -- sensory, short-term, and working memory -- conspire to keep us on task. Not only is human memory complex, it's also something we have little control over.
• What "flow" is and how it's hard wired. It's only in the past 40 years that we've imposed an entirely new way to process information on our unsuspecting brains.
• The "doorway effect": Why walking through a door or watching a web page refresh makes us forgetful. Studies have shown that our memories are worse when we enter a new environment through a doorway. The act of going from virtual room to virtual room is similar to the process of navigating from page to page.
• Why 100-millisecond load times should be the ultimate goal for every site owner. The performance industry has load time goal of 100-milliseconds. Although this number seems audacious to some, this report outlines why it is necessary.
  
  

As the report demonstrates, our aversion to slow web pages isn't due to impatience, it is due to the complexities of human concentration and short-term memory. Studies show that 57% of online customers will abandon a site after 3-second. Many users tell others about their negative experiences and never return to the site. Just a 1-second delay can hurt revenues by 7%.

Download the free report: Our Need for Web Speed: It's about neuroscience, not entitlement

See the full set of infographics that accompany this report: This is Your Brain on a Slow Website

Web Performance Digest: October 2012

Contributed by Tammy Everts. 

At the end of each month, we update our Web Performance Hub with a collection of the best articles, case studies, videos, and presentations from around the web performance community.  

This month's Web Performance Digest features a handful of great new links, many of which focus on performance measurement tools and tips. Read about how Google's new Tag Manager reduces the impact of third-party scripts, find out how cleaning up HTML and CSS improves page load, and learn how to get "old-school" with your performance testing.  

New links include:

Web performance and ops - Weekend must-read articles #34
Including another company's roundup within our roundup? It's a bit meta, but Pingdom's weekly collection of links is worth it. Their post covers topics including web development, networking, webops, security, and other "geeky topics". 

Testing your load times the old-school way
With all the advanced technology available for testing page load times, site owners can sometimes lose sight of the real user experience. This post breaks down a few "old-school" testing methods for validating your test results.

Mobile Web Performance 
Mobile is quickly overtaking desktop, which makes mobile performance all the more important. This slide deck from Roland Guelle breaks down why mobile is different, what users want, and why performance matters more than ever. 

Site Speed: Case Studies, Tips and Tools for Improving Your Conversion Rates
The people at Econsultancy have put together a great roundup of case studies, tips and tools from web performance industry leaders. Key topics include user expectations, the impact of slow sites on retail profits, and how site speed affects SEO.

Laura Swanson Webperf Days Case Study: Clean Your HTML and CSS
UX Manager Laura Swanson presents a case study on how cleaning up HTML, CSS and images improved page load time on Dyn.com. She also discusses how code reviews can help maintain performance and how her team benchmarks.

Let's Do Simple Stuff to Make Our Websites Faster
Four easy things you can do to make your website faster. Enough said!

37 Lessons Learned on the Performance Front Lines
Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby recently gave the keynote at WebPerfDays in London. His presentation, entitled "37 Lessons I've Learned on the Web Performance Front Lines", covered key industry findings from the past three years. Check out the slide deck here. 

WebPerfDays: Performance Tools 
Also at WebPerfDays, Steve Souders asked attendees two important questions: 1) What’s your favourite web performance tool, and 2) What tools are missing? He got some interesting responses.

Speed is a feature: Why a Slow Mobile Web Experience Means Lost Revenue 
There's no point creating a content-rich mobile website if the pages take too long to load. In likening high-volume data movement through 3G networks to "trying to shove a pig down a toilet using a Twiglet," one manager cites examples of what is/isn’t an acceptable mobile page size. Perhaps not the most delilcate analogy, but we'll roll with it.

Check out the rest of the Web Performance Hub for hundreds more links to the best selection of performance-related resources on the web.

The best of Strangeloop's Mobile Optimization Hub

Contributed by Tammy Everts.

When we first started gathering and publishing information on the mobile web, smartphones were in their infancy and tablets were still two years away.

Now, just four years later, 1.2 billion people worldwide access the web on mobile devices, and by 2014, mobile browsing is expected to exceed desktop. As for ecommerce, $10 billion will be transacted over mobile devices in 2012, and that number is projected to grow 300% by 2015.

Throughout this change, we've been compiling resources in our Mobile Optimization Hub, and it now contains scores of independent articles, reports, videos, slide decks and presentations related to all things mobile. Here's a quick sampling:

Analysis

Why page size matters even more for mobile web apps
Mobile web applications have many limitations, and the end-user experience can easily be damaged when these limitations are forgotten. This excellent post from dynaTrace outlines why page size matters even more for mobile apps.

Mobile optimization starts with mindset: Hooman Beheshti interviewed at Velocity 2012
Where are we in the mobile optimization life-cycle? What mindset should site owners adopt when boosting mobile performance? Are performance measurements improving? In this video, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum talks to Hooman Beheshti about his unique insight on the current state of mobile.

Responsive web design: Missing the point
A recent post by Brad Frost illustrates that, though mobile browsers are getting better at rendering full websites, creating adaptive sites for mobile users is essential to improving the user experience.

News and research

HTML5 features increase mobile usage by 28%
Static pages needing an upgrade can vastly improve mobile user engagement through the addition of HTML5. The new release features interactive galleries, overlays, and expandable/collapsible boxes, driving up pageviews and decreasing bounce rates.

Mobile website optimization now factors into mobile search ads quality
Google's official announcement that mobile-optimized sites will factor into landing page quality and perform better in AdWords.

Retailers create better designs on their web sites and beyond
Study shows that 44% of online retailers have mobile commerce sites, up from 13% a year ago.

Controversy

Is Nielsen wrong on mobile? Arguments abound
Jakob Nielsen’s assertion that “good mobile user experience requires a different design” is being challenged by a noted mobile expert, who argues that rather than stripping down for mobile, companies should be doing more.

M-commerce site performance hampered by Verizon
"The amount of time it takes to load a page from a web server to a smartphone is dependent on many factors, but the efficiency of a wireless network is a big one—and one that is completely out of the control of a merchant."

The way carriers manage networks can hurt phone performance
Among other things, CNN writer Amy Gahran says that "One of the largest U.S. carriers (unnamed in the study, since the data was made anonymous for legal reasons) appears to be slowing its network speed by as much as 50%."

Make your mobile site faster

Bookmark the Mobile Optimization Hub to stay in the loop on the latest mobile research and resources. To learn how Strangeloop can help accelerate your website across mobile browsers, visit our Mobile Optimizer product page.

Case study: LuckyVitamin.com uses FEO to deliver "5-star service" to online customers

Contributed by Tammy Everts.

"Customers want everything faster," says LuckyVitamin.com president Sam Wolf. "If you can offer it to them, they're going to stick around and spend more."

As a pioneer in the online distribution of health and wellness products, LuckyVitamin.com has put exceptional customer service at the core of its business. Fast page load times are critical to delivering on this commitment. 

Wolf sees faster pages as the digital equivalent of speedy customer service offered in traditional brick-and-mortar outlets. "We've known for a long time that faster pages equal more revenue for our business," he says.

LuckyVitamin.com has a stated goal of "making the time between your final click and the arrival of your package seem like seconds." To achieve this goal, the company's fulfillment team is staffed around the clock 7 days a week, and representatives are always available to offer support.

In the early days, LuckyVitamin.com's developers devoted countless hours to manually optimizing pages for faster performance. But like many companies, they found hand coding to be an arduous task that required the time of their top coders. They began to investigate automated solutions.  

The company was well aware of the challenges in optimizing a complex ecommerce website. The site has rich content for its entire inventory, and utilizes sophisticated merchandising and directed product search facilities. 

After a trial of Strangeloop’s cloud-based Site Optimizer service, the decision was a "no-brainer" for Wolf:

"We liked the Strangeloop implementation process, and it demonstrated results right away. We're not an Amazon or a Facebook, who have entire elite teams of developers who specialize in front-end optimization. But with Strangeloop, we could get the same advanced expertise and insight that Amazon and Facebook have, via a product."

Key benefits:

1. The company has eliminated enough network overhead to offset the Site Optimizer subscription cost.
2. Developer productivity has improved by 10%.
3. Instead of performance tuning, top developers can now focus on feature development.
   
   

Talk to a performance expert

37 Lessons Learned on the Performance Front Lines [SLIDES]

Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby recently gave the keynote at WebPerfDays in London. The presentation, entitled "37 Lessons I've Learned on the Web Performance Front Lines", covered key industry findings from the past three years.

Joshua touched on a wide range of topics including:

• The origins of the web performance optimization industry
• Performance metrics, analytics, and benchmarking
• Mobile latency vs. desktop latency
• M.sites vs. full sites
• Browser usage rates and performance
• Mobile device performance findings
  
  

For more slide decks on web performance optimization, check out past presentations in our Resources section.

Talk to a Performance Expert

State of the Union for Mobile Ecommerce Performance [SLIDES]

Last week at Velocity EU, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby unveiled key findings from the first ever study of mobile web performance over cellular networks.

The 2012 State of Mobile Ecommerce Performance, released October 3rd, details how we tested the mobile web performance of top eccomerce sites over 3G and LTE networks. The report finds answers to questions like:

• How long does the median site take to load in mobile browsers?
• Which sites are fastest for mobile?
• Which mobile operating systems, browsers and devices offer the fastest user experience?
• How much faster are pages served over LTE networks than 3G?
• How does mobile web performance compare to desktop?
  
  

FREE REPORT: 2012 State of Mobile Ecommerce Performance

The median web page takes more than 11 seconds to load for both Android and iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy S3 is faster than the new iPhone 5, and LTE is faster than 3G -- but not by as much as industry experts have claimed.

These were among the findings in our latest report, the 2012 State of Mobile Ecommerce Performance. Hot on the heels of our quarterly state of the union for desktop ecommerce, this is the world's first study to measure the mobile user experience over 3G and LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks.

The State of Mobile Ecommerce Performance is based on tests measuring the page load times of 200 leading ecommerce sites, as ranked by Alexa.com, over 3G and LTE. The tests were conducted in July and September 2012 on six devices: the iPhone 4, iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S smartphone, Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, iPad 2, and Samsung Galaxy tablet. 

Highlights of our key findings include:

• iPad beat the Galaxy tablet on 3G performance, while the Galaxy S3 phone surpassed the iPhone 5 on LTE. Over 3G, pages loaded 22% faster on the iPad than on the Galaxy tablet. Over LTE, pages loaded 9% faster on the Galaxy S3 than on the iPhone 5.
• The median home page took 11+ seconds to load on both iPhone and Android over 3G. At 11.8 seconds for the Galaxy S and 11.5 for iPhone, the median 3G load times for the two most popular mobile operating systems were 40% slower than the median desktop load time (7.1 seconds).
• LTE was 27% faster than 3G, but fell short of industry claims. Some industry experts have stated that LTE networks are, on average, 10 times faster than 3G. The average load time for pages on 3G was 11.7 seconds, compared to 8.5 seconds for LTE -- a significant difference but not of the magnitude predicted by LTE proponents.
  
  

Our CEO, Jonathan Bixby, has this to say about these results:

"While LTE networks have improved mobile performance, pages are still far too slow. The latest mobile user surveys tell us that two out of three mobile shoppers expect sites to load in 4 seconds or less. A page that takes 8.5 seconds to load over LTE is still falling short of user expectations."

We also found some serious usability issues with how site owners are serving pages to their mobile customers. For example, one-third of companies served a stripped-down "m.site" to the Galaxy tablet, despite the fact that tablet owners expect the same online experience on their tablets as they do on their desktops. And 32% of site owners don't give mobile shoppers the option to view the full site. 

In the United States, there are an estimated 115 million mobile users online in 2012, and that number is expected to grow to 176.3 million by 2015. By 2014, mobile internet usage is expected to overtake desktop. By 2015, Cisco estimates that there will be 788 million people worldwide who go online exclusively through their mobile devices.

Download a free copy of the 2012 State of Mobile Ecommerce Performance.

See the full set of infographics that accompany this report: How Fast Do Sites Really Load for Mobile Users?

Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby to unveil new mobile performance findings at Velocity EU

Get ready for an industry first. On October 3 at Velocity EU, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby will be unveiling the findings from the first study ever conducted of mobile performance over cellular networks.

In July and September 2012, Strangeloop conducted an industry first: a mobile performance survey of top ecommerce sites, resulting in a report to be revealed for the first time to Velocity EU attendees. The "2012 State of Mobile Ecommerce Performance" documents how Strangeloop tested top Alexa-ranked retail sites on a variety of mobile devices to find answers to questions like these:

• How long does the median site take to load in mobile browsers? 
• Which sites were fastest?
• Do some mobile OS/browsers/devices offer a consistently faster user experience than others? 
• How much faster are pages served over LTE than over 3G?
• How do all of these findings compare to similar research conducted for desktop performance, published in Strangeloop’s annual Page Speed and Website Performance State of the Union reports?

Attendees will walk away with a clear snapshot of mobile ecommerce performance. Armed with these findings, they can create a compelling argument to focus on mobile optimization within their own organizations.

The report will be available for free download tomorrow. Check back on the Strangeloop blog for details.

Web Performance Digest: September 2012 - Third-party outages, new-and-improved tools, and impatience as digital virtue

Contributed by Tammy Everts. 

At the beginning of each month, we update our Web Performance Hub with a collection of the most compelling articles, posts, videos, and presentations from around the web performance community.  

This month's Web Performance Digest features a handful of great new links. Learn why "unoccupied waiting" is so torturous, get a full report on why webpages are 9% slower in 2012, and find out why page size matters even more for mobile apps.

Big ideas

Why waiting is torture
The New York Times
Ever wondered why elevators have mirrors? This fascinating New York Times article explains why, compares occupied versus unoccupied wait times, and concludes that the human experience of waiting is defined only partly by the "objective length" of the wait.  

Impatience as digital virtue 
Huffington Post
Apple promotes Siri as a digital assistant to schedule our lives and answer our questions, but what does it ask for in return? According to this article, a total redesign of our social sensibilities.

Why CIOs are quickly prioritizing analytics, cloud and mobile
Forbes.com
Shrewd consumers are a byproduct of the digital age. As customers reinvent how they learn about new products, the best-run companies aren't just acknowledging these newly empowered consumers, they're embracing them.

Better tools

Improving site performance with Yslow
New Relic
YSlow is a tool that helps site owners analyze the performance of a website based on 23 best practices. It’s available as a plugin for all major browsers except Internet Explorer, and offers great insight on real world performance. This tutorial is a great introduction for anyone using YSlow for the first time, or for those who want to learn to use it better.

Steve Souders’ browser clear test 
Steve Souders
Ever wonder how much is actually deleted when you "clear" your browser data? This tool by Google performance guru Steve Souders lets you know.

Configuring an ‘all-in-one’ WebPageTest Private Instance
Andy Davies
Using WebPagetest to test a private instance – i.e. a site that isn’t publicly accessible – is reasonably straightforward save for a few small differences. Self-described web performance geek Andy Davies walks us through the process. 

Research and analysis

Third-party issues and the performance ripple effect 
dynaTrace
When Internet Registry and DNS provider GoDaddy experienced a major outage on September 10th, a large number of major US sites experienced little to no performance impact. How could this be? This post breaks down how maintaining DNS control kept them in the clear.

State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed and Web Performance [Fall 2012]
Strangeloop
When Strangeloop began tracking the performance of 2,000 top ecommerce sites in 2010, we never expected to see pages actually getting slower. But despite faster browsers and devices, that’s exactly what’s happening. Follow this link to download the free report.

Why page size matters even more for mobile web apps
dynaTrace
Mobile web applications have many limitations, and the end-user experience can easily be damaged when these limitations are forgotten. This excellent post outlines why page size matters even more for mobile apps.

Check out the rest of the Hub for hundreds more links to the best selection of performance-related resources on the web.

Automating FEO: How much is your developers' time worth?

Contributed by Grant Ellis.

Freeing up the time of top developers is one of the primary benefits of implementing an automated FEO solution. That being said, the question of exactly how much manpower can be saved by automating this process has seldom been properly addressed.

To people in the web performance optimization industry, the answer to this may seem obvious. But for those who haven’t tried optimizing pages by hand, this discussion should be helpful.

First off, who is affected by the issue of developer ROI?

1. Those who write code themselves or have coders on staff.

2. Those who have a financial or productivity-related interest in the performance of a particular website.

3. Those who update or change their website often, and/or have content-rich pages.

Let’s look at Sears.com It’s a good example because the site matters, it’s dynamic, and they care about performance. 

Trying to frame this problem is hard because you can look at it from different angles. What we’ll do is look at a couple of key front-end performance rules as described by Steve Souders in the context of different perspectives.

In this example, we’ll address two key performance practices:

1. Reducing the number of HTTP requests.

2. Adding an ‘expires header.’

Reducing HTTP Requests

Perspective 1: One page, one browser

If a site never changes, performance tuning is much easier. Unfortunately, this strategy won’t work in today’s ecommerce climate, where sites are highly dynamic -- many changing daily. 

To observe how much sites change over time, have a look at tests over the last year from Sears.com as summarized by the HTTP Archive.

Visual: Looking at the video below, you can see how much the site has changed visually over the past year.

Behind the scenes: As the graphs below show, this site is constantly changing. The content changes, the number of requests change, and the number of domains change. Though dramatic, this type of continuous transformation is quite common.

As these graphs illustrate, the basic composition of this page changes dramatically over the year.

Why it's expensive to hand code

Minimizing server roundtrips is a major key to making pages faster. Many of the techniques to minimize roundtrips involve combining objects together into packages. If the content is always changing, then these packages also have to change. Keeping packages updated is arduous and time consuming, not to mention fraught with the potential to make mistakes.

The key ROI from automation for dynamic sites is the ability to offload all of the packaging time and effort onto a computer. It saves time, and it reduces error.

Calculating savings

A few caveats on ROI calculation: Calculating cost savings is best done on a case-by-case basis. The numbers cited in this post are from our experiences working with customers that hand code their pages.

Formula: By implementing automated FEO for resource reduction in this context, we would estimate 5 person-days of dev/QA time saved for every major content change on the site.

Perspective 2: One page, many browsers.

Changing packages as content changes is hard and costly to do by hand. Changing packages to take into consideration the performance nuances within each browser is a nightmare to do by hand.

Why it's expensive to hand code

Browsers don’t all support the same standards. As we’ve observed in the past, they can also change at a moment’s notice with disastrous effects if you are not careful. If you’re going to hand code by browser, not only does your matrix of supported scenarios exponentially increase, so does your QA surface. You also need to stay on top of all new browser developments and patches.

For a modern website with a standard user profile, you would need to do separate packages for at least five browser groups.

Calculating savings

In any large organization that performs FEO by hand (think Google, Facebook, etc.), they have a team of browser experts.

Formula: Depending on the size of your organization, we would factor in at least one browser expert and a 1.5x increase in front-end development time and a 2x increase in QA time if you’re going to undertake a per-browser optimization path.

Perspective 3: One page, many desktops + mobile

You probably already get the point, but it’s critical to break out mobile, as it makes front-end optimization way more difficult. Resource reduction is totally different in a mobile context, so you need a totally different skill set to conduct mobile FEO.

Why it's expensive to hand code

As someone once said: Nothing doesn't change in mobile. Standards change quickly. Browsers change quickly. Handsets have very different capabilities, and testing is a huge pain.

Calculating savings

Most of the organizations we know that perform front-end optimization by hand have a totally dedicated mobile team (on the dev and QA side).

Formula: Calculate at least at 2:1 ratio of front-end desktop to mobile team members and a 2x increase in workload if they are going to perform these tasks by hand. You also need to factor in the costs of all the different devices and related plans.

Perspective 4: Many pages, many browsers

Resource reduction is difficult across pages, and can actually slow you down if done improperly. One of the key benefits of a good automated FEO tool is the ability to juggle all of these different packaging combinations and provide the optimal package.

Why it's expensive to hand code

Given the amount of change seen in a modern site, hand coding in this scenario is nearly impossible. If you’re just going to put a few common files into a package and reference it everywhere, this problem is much closer to perspective 1, but that's not good enough to gain maximum performance.

Calculating savings

The ROI here cannot really be measured in person-power reduction, but simply in the value of site speed. If you're crazy enough to try to do this by hand, be prepared for months of extra development and a whole lot of pain.

Adding an Expires Header

Adding an expires header is easy. All of the difficulty arises from having to add the right header to the right resource and then to deal with version changes.

Imagine a simple example in which you add an expires header of 24 hours to a resource called logo.gif. Now imagine three hours later that the image changes but the name stays the same.

You now have a problem because everyone who has logo.gif cached will not request it again for 24 hours (or, to be exact, 24 hours minus the time elapsed since they first received it). This is a big problem because now you have people seeing stale content, and stale content is not acceptable.

To deal with this issue, organizations often have poor caching headers or else they embark on the long process of building a sub-system to version objects and control expires headers. They also need a vigilant operations staff to find stale content and they need to keep someone glued to the CDN purge tool. (Purging on a CDN is typically done manually or else you need to burn development hours integrating with their APIs. This becomes more complicated if multiple CDNs are in use, since no two are the same.)

Why it's expensive to hand code

Proper object versioning and header management is time consuming and expensive to code. Without it, you risk stale content or more roundtrips because your expires headers are not optimal.

Calculating savings

Building a proper version control and header management sub-system is expensive (think many person-months of effort). You also have to factor in the time you spend manually purging CDN caches, as well as the damage that stale content does to your brand.

Other key considerations

This post just scratches the surface in terms of ROI benefits when it comes to automating FEO. We could go on, but for now here are a few other considerations:

Third-party content

As we know, managing third-party content is costly. It also requires a great deal of vigilance to ensure you don’t have SPOFs or poor performance because of the third-party content you are forced to add to your site. Automating performance offers significant dev ROI because good FEO tools will help manage your third-party tags and place them in the right order. Your FEO vendor should save you countless hours in the trial and error process of moving tags around.

Image sizes and resolution

Images are one of the biggest performance challenges and many organizations spend a great deal of time optimizing their images by hand. One of the big time savers from automated FEO is the ability to have all of this work happen automagically.

Using a CDN

Automatically renaming files so they can be served from a CDN can be time consuming. One of the benefits of automated FEO is the ability to quickly get onto and change CDNs, thus saving devs a lot of time.

Final thoughts: ROI is about more than just short-term savings

Great developers are a key asset, and FEO is a tool best used in conjunction with this talent – not as a replacement. If you run a successful modern ecommerce site, you need great developers working on hard problems. The purpose of automated FEO is to let them work on different problems — in some cases bigger problems.

Offloading the arduous task of automation frees your team to climb bigger mountains and to continue to innovate.

Improve website performance across all browsers, automatically

To learn how Strangeloop can help accelerate your page load times across all major browsers, visit our Site Optimizer or Mobile Optimizer product pages.