Use of content delivery networks doesn’t correlate to faster websites for the Alexa Retail 1000

From the blog of Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby:

Here at Strangeloop, we’re in the process of compiling the results of our Alexa 2000 performance study (which I wrote about here) into a formal, more detailed report. I was looking at one of our spreadsheets, which contains all the data about content delivery networks (CDNs), and had a Rainman moment that led to the creation of this scatter graph:

Here you can see the top 1000 retail sites, ordered from left to right. The blue diamonds represent the sites that use a CDN. The red squares represent the sites that don’t. Not surprisingly, CDN use is much more prevalent among the higher-ranked sites, and non-existent among the lower-ranked sites.

Now look at the vertical axis, which indicates the page load times for each site. This is where things get really surprising.

As you probably know, content delivery networks make sites faster by caching content closer to users. Therefore if CDN use automatically correlates with faster-than-average websites, this graph should look profoundly different:

- The blue diamonds should be clustered exclusively in the bottom left sector. Instead, the blue diamonds are almost an identical overlay of the red squares.

- I would also expect that lower-ranked, non-CDN-using sites would have, on average, markedly slower load times, meaning that the red squares on the right side of the graph should be clustered in the top-right corner. But instead you can see that the right half of this graph is almost a mirror image of the the left half.

Read Josh's explanation of these results here.

All I Want For Christmas Is A Faster Mobile Experience

Published in MediaPost, written by Josh Bixby:

The 2010 holiday season is being touted as the shopping season that put mobile on the map, but there's still a long way to go. According to industry benchmarks, mobile sites are slower, not faster, than they were last year. Online retailers may be reporting record m-commerce sales, but this is a questionable victory. There's every reason to believe these numbers would be much greater if mobile sites were faster.

Are mobile sites getting slower instead of faster?

Fifty-eight percent of mobile users expect sites to load at least as quickly on their mobile devices as on their desktops. You would think this expectation would lead to increasingly faster m-commerce sites, but the opposite seems to be the case.

According to industry benchmarks from Gomez and Keynote, mobile sites seem to be getting slower, not faster. Currently, the average m-commerce site loads in 5.47 seconds. A year ago, that number was 4.73 seconds.

There are a few potential culprits here, such as oversized graphics and poorly optimized widgets, but pointing fingers doesn't fix the problem. Site visitors want a fast online experience, not excuses.

Read full article here.

How Fast is Fast Enough to Keep Customers' Attention Online?

Published in 1to1 Media, written by Josh Bixby:

No doubt, you're familiar with the feeling of using a slow site. With each lethargic page you visit, your annoyance escalates. There's a snowball effect at work here, in which the accumulated impact of a site's sluggishness erodes your confidence in it.

But what impact does this erosion of confidence have on a website's success? And what can site owners do to deliver an optimal site to their visitors?

Read the full article here.

Strangeloop helps leading sporting goods website sprint to sub-2-second page load times

Centauro, the largest retail sports apparel chain in Brazil, has implemented the Strangeloop Site Optimizer to accelerate its website, after a trial run of the service immediately reduced page load times by 60 percent.

With more than 120 million page views per month, the Centauro website is a leading ecommerce destination throughout Brazil. The site sells men’s, women’s and children’s shoes, clothing and accessories for a wide range of sports and activities.

"We were very impressed at how dramatically, and how quickly, Site Optimizer delivered results," says Mario Ribeiro, Manager of IT at Centauro. "Implementing the service was incredibly simple. We were up and running within hours. Not only did we immediately see our page load times drop to under two seconds, we also saw a 30% offload from our servers."

The Centauro website is accelerated by Strangeloop’s technology via Exceda, a Brazil-based company that provides acceleration and optimization services for websites and web-based applications. Exceda offers its customers the Strangeloop Site Optimizer service, in conjunction with application delivery controller /content delivery network services, to tackle performance on two fronts:

- Delivery - Delivery-based solutions focus on pushing data to browsers more quickly.

- Transformation - Transformation-based solutions, such as Site Optimizer, focus on analyzing each page of a site from the browser’s perspective and optimizing each page so that it is rendered most efficiently in the browser.

Read the full annoucement.

Strangeloop named Best Company to Work for in B.C. for third consecutive year

"We’re very proud that, in an industry that is notorious for long hours and employee burnout, turnover here is practically nonexistent," says Strangeloop CEO Jonathan Bixby. "The key to long-term success is delivering on the promise of being a great place to work every day, respecting and empowering individuals to be the best they can be. Many of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work. At Strangeloop, we like to make sure those hours are the best they can possibly be."

Read the full news release here.