TechCrunch: The slowest tech blog, or one of the fastest? Turns out, it’s both.

In today's blog entry, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby ran side-by-side performance tests of TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOM, Technology Review, and the tech blogs for the New York Times and LA Times. His point: to illustrate why, if you're looking at just the amount of time it takes for your pages to load, you may be focusing on the wrong thing:

When I started writing this post, my intent was to do a bit of performance benchmarking for leading tech blogs. But what started off as a standard benchmarking exercise turned into a great opportunity to talk about another approach to understanding your performance numbers in a meaningful way, and why it’s important to look at your site from as many angles as possible.

Shortly after TechCrunch announced its acquisition by AOL yesterday, some folks in the performance community were quick to suggest that one of AOL’s first jobs should be to improve the site’s performance. People cited that the main page that takes more than 20 seconds to load, making TechCrunch a desperate candidate for performance tuning.

But TechCrunch isn’t the only tech blog out there that readers complain about. So I decided to run some page tests to see how they measure up...

Read the full post on Web Performance Today.

The Shop.org Performance Index: Should you care how you rank?

In his latest blog post, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby conducted performance tests to check out how fast the leading internet retailers' websites stack up:

Joshua goes on to discuss performance benchmarks, how they're misleading, and when they're useful:

"This little exercise serves to illustrate how averages and benchmarks can be misleading. In this case, a small number of slow-performing sites inflated the average page load time to almost 6 seconds. If someone were to focus on just this so-called benchmark and consider their site a performance success if it loaded in 5.914 seconds, they’d be wrong. Almost two-thirds of the sites tested performed faster than theirs."

Read the full post on Web Performance Today.

Are your performance goals audacious enough?

Latest post from the blog of Strangeloop present Joshua Bixby:

"We want you to be able to flick from one page to another as quickly as you can flick a page on a book. So we’re really aiming very, very high here… at something like 100 milliseconds."

~Urs Hölzle, Senior VP Operations, Google

Urs said this at Velocity this past June (you can hear it at 3:45 of this video), and it's resonated with me ever since. I talk a lot about the business value of performance and why there's no such thing as fast enough. But to my knowledge, Google is the only big company out there that has truly internalized this philosophy. In fact, I was down in Mountain View at the Googleplex a few weeks ago, and I heard on more than a few occasions the 100 ms goal spoken about in real terms -- things like "This project will help us get closer to the goal."

I'm not trying to imply that the folks at Google are the only people who care about performance. If you're reading this blog, you clearly care. But the folks at Google are the only people I've met who have a clearly stated performance goal: all pages on their sites will load in 100 ms or less. In fact, they take it one step further and have the audacity to try and get all pages on the world wide web down to 100 ms.

Read the full post on Web Performance Today.

If children are the most demanding web users, why are their sites so slow?

From the latest blog post by Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby:

If web- and app-based learning is the wave of the future, designers and developers will need to develop expertise in the unique online behaviour of children. There's already a lot of data out there, about everything from preferred fonts (14 pt Arial, FYI) to the best kind of "close" button (a big red circle with an X in it). What there's not a lot of: data about children and site speed. It's surprisingly hard to find this information. Like the Victorians, our tendency seems to be to pretend that children are just miniature grownups, and to assume they have the same expectations and behaviours that we do. Are we as misguided as the Victorians?

I did find this recent usability study by user experience guru Jakob Nielsen, but I have to admit, I balked at shelling out $188 just to read the small section on page load times. Instead, I gleaned what I could from the summary, and then did more digging around the web.

Here's what I found:

• Research consistently shows that most children under the age of five have an attention span of between 8 and 15 minutes. Many children have even less.
• Like adults, children are quick to judge a site, and to leave if they deem it no good.
• While adults have some (if limited) patience with waiting for pages to load, children want instant gratification. They expect to see some kind of picture right away when they hit a button.
• A recurring theme in many studies is that children tend to wait for images to completely load on a page before navigating to another page. They don't understand that a complete page load is not needed for the page to be functional. Not surprisingly, all this waiting makes them frustrated and likely to be discouraged from using a site.

Joshua goes on to address the challenge of designing bells-and-whistles-intensive sites for children. He also conducts speed tests on five leading websites for children and gives them a report card. As a group, they earn a C.

Read the full post on Web Performance Today.

Visa Signature Hotels chooses Strangeloop to accelerate elite travel site

Kiwi Collection is a curated collection of more than 2,000 international luxury hotels and resorts, which also powers the Visa Luxury Hotel Collection. Each hotel is individually reviewed before being invited to join this selective network. The Kiwi Collection website allows travelers to research and book their hotels online. The site is tailored toward knowledgeable, discriminating travelers, which means the entire user experience must be impeccable, from the home page through to the booking confirmation page.

“We were incredibly impressed at how quickly Strangeloop improved our site’s performance,” said Jackie Reid, VP Project Services for Kiwi Collection. “On average, they cut our page load time in half – and even more in key markets such as Asia and Europe.”

Before working with Strangeloop, it took up to 22 seconds for key pages to load for Visa Signature Hotels’ online visitors. After implementing the Strangeloop Site Optimizer, average page load times for all visitors dropped to a 6.4 seconds. This is a full 3 seconds faster than the 9.4 seconds that it takes for the average Fortune 500 website to load for international visitors.

Read the full announcement.