Is web performance a “green” issue?

In his latest Web Performance Today blog post, Joshua Bixby investigates whether faster sites are green sites:

Analyzing the trade-off between performance optimization and energy use is a huge challenge. It’s not enough to say, "We’re delivering smaller pages and fewer/smaller objects, therefore using less energy. Problem solved!" 

We also have to take into consideration:

• the energy consumed by new machines added to the network to automatically transform web pages,
• the impact on servers as more is offloaded in the network,
• the change in use of a content delivery network,
• the change in energy consumption at the client level based on increased or decreased CPU use,
• the change in energy consumption of the user as they browse more pages and buy more,
• etc., etc.

Read his full post here.

Is it time to give up Internet Explorer 7 as our default test scenario?

From the blog of Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby:

Here at Strangeloop, there’s been a lot of debate lately about what our default browser should be when we run performance tests through Webpagetest. As discussed here previously, we had a very strong argument for using Internet Explorer 7. We’re not ready to abandon it yet, but the idea is under the microscope.

Equally important, we’ve also been debating if the default bandwidth — these days, we test using the DSL setting — is accurate.

Akamai came out with its state of the internet report yesterday, which has made me think about this issue some more.

Read the full post here.

Performance in the cloud: How do we retain control and visibility?

From the blog of Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby:

My head has been in the cloud lately. For the past six months, we’ve been offering Site Optimizer as a cloud-based service, and we recently announced partnerships with Akamai and Level 3 that will extend our cloud relationships.

I’ve been thinking about the general rush to public clouds and wondering if, in the rush, are people giving up too much control? And if so, how do we get some of this control back?

Read the rest of Josh's musings here.

Front-end optimization: It isn’t over till it’s over. And it’s never over

From the blog of Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby:

A few days ago, I was talking to a prospective client who is interested in transformation-based performance solutions like Strangeloop’s right now, but who questioned the lifespan of our industry.

"In five years, your industry won’t even exist," he said. His rationale was that in the future everyone will have applied Steve Souders’s performance rules to their sites, and there won’t be a role for automated performance tools.

To illustrate, he sent me this page, which had been optimized by a team of in-house developers:

Perfect Page Speed score, short waterfall, fast load time — this is pretty much a picture-perfect chart. (If you’re not familiar with waterfalls, here’s a primer on how to interpret them.)

But we ran it through Site Optimizer anyway, to see what we could do. Here’s what we did:

We cut load time by more than half, which is great. But look at our Page Speed score: only 74 out of 100. And we broke ‘Compress Images’.

Find out what this means, read full blog post.

Strangeloop announces new Value Accelerator Partner Program

Strangeloop today unveiled a new partner program that will allow a broad spectrum of technology solutions providers to integrate its unique set of site acceleration solutions within their existing products and services.

"The speed of website and application delivery has emerged as one of the most critical business technology issues of 2011," said Jonathan Bixby, chief executive officer, Strangeloop. "Companies are turning to their existing solution providers and asking them for urgent help in fixing their performance problems. In turn, these providers are turning to us. Because of the uniqueness of Strangeloop’s position in the market, we offer our partners a wealth of opportunities to leverage the value of our product in conjunction with their current offerings."

There are well-established industries that focus on fixing performance at the network and delivery levels. In contrast, there are very few companies that focus on fixing performance at the front end, where 80 percent of problems occur. Strangeloop is the only company that offers automated front-end acceleration solutions – its Site Optimizer suite of products and services – that operate at the scale required by global ecommerce sites and enterprise-wide applications.

Read the full news release here.

Delivering customer experience: Bridging the gap between bricks and clicks at the NRF

In his latest Web Performance Today blog post, Joshua Bixby investigates the online customers experience of 9 retailers who know how to make the in-store customer experience great:

Strangeloop is at the NRF’s Big Show this week (if you’re there, stop by booth 2843 and say hi to Nat, Kerry, and Kelly), so of course I’ve been following the NRF blog closely. This post yesterday jumped out at me: 9 retailers who get customer experience right.

The post highlights companies’ efforts in the bricks and mortar world, focusing on things like great staff and product selection. But since, to my mind, customer experience extends to the online world, I couldn’t resist doing a little cheap and easy performance testing.*

Here’s a screen grab of the first 3 seconds of load time for the home pages of all nine sites:

Read Josh's evaluation of these site's load time here.

Automating complexity: The future of website performance optimization

From the blog of Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby:

The bad news: Performance optimization is going to get harder.

The good news: It doesn’t have to be.

Let me break it down.

Five years ago, when we started Strangeloop, being able to automatically apply the Yahoo and Google performance best practices universally across a website was a monumental achievement. Little did we realize this was just the beginning of a learning curve that has grown infinitely more nuanced.

Browsers began to innovate, which created a new dimension to the problem. Each browser required its own interpretation of the performance rules, with variations existing even between different versions of the same browser. (Domain sharding remains a good example of this, in that it can hurt performance in modern browsers and help performance in older browsers.)

Then last year we went through a process where our customers — having internalized the idea that every second matters — drove us to optimize for user flows and experience, with a hawkish eye on business metrics like revenues and conversions. It became clear that optimizing isolated pages, out of the context of their place in a user’s flow through your site, does not automatically improve performance.

It also became clear that we can’t treat landing pages the same as we treat non-landing pages. As a result, we found ourselves once again changing how we applied performance best practices. (In December, I wrote a case study about this for Stoyan Stefanov’s performance calendar.)

To find out the next steps in the performance evolution, read the full blog post.

Reader Forum: 2011 Web performance predictions for the mobile industry

Published in RCRWireless, written by Josh Bixby:

The past year was a big year for mobile, as network infrastructure expanded and a huge range of devices were released in the market. Now that consumers have their mobile devices in hand, we’re going to find out that their expectations are high as they demand that mobile sites deliver the same functionality and performance they’ve come to expect on their desktops.

1. Companies will generate at least 15% of Web sales via their social presence and mobile applications.

I’ve mentioned this number to a few people and they’ve all looked at me like I’m crazy. But not only do I think this estimate is realistic, it’s even conservative. Here’s why:

According to IDC Retail Insights, mobile shopping “warriors” and “warrior wannabes” (hyper-connected individuals and moderately connected individuals, respectively) will account for $127 billion of the $447 billion predicted to be spent during this holiday season. That’s 28%. Based on these numbers, it’s reasonable to expect that this holiday season will officially break the ice for mobile shopping, and that this consumer behavior will stick in the new year.

It’s also important to note that in Japan, which is just a couple of years ahead on the mobile curve, mobile shopping accounts for 17% of all online shopping. There’s every reason to believe that, as the economy recovers, the United States will quickly catch up.

As for social shopping, I see tremendous growth from group buying sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial. As a form of live social marketing, these are the most widely used online shopping tool – ranking ahead of reviews, retailer emails, price comparison sites, shopping portals and social networks. There are currently more than 500 group buy companies, with new ones being introduced all the time. Groupon, the current leader, is present in more than 100 U.S. cities and 23 countries, and is still in rapid expansion mode. I think we’ve only begun to see the power of group buying and social shopping. 2011 is going to serve up some big surprises.

For more predictions, read the full article here.