Caution: Extreme front-end optimization may lead you off a cliff

Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby talks about how one simple action by Microsoft cost customers millions of dollars in lost revenue in his blog:

Every second counts. Every second earns a customer more money. We are all greedy.

Given the strong correlation between performance and making our customers more money, we are inevitably motivated to move to the extremes of the performance landscape, always striving to eke out as much as we can.

As we move to the extremes, we inevitably start developing techniques and features specific to different browsers. One of the risks in front-end optimization is the fact that, at the end of the day, our work is consumed by a browser — an ever-changing and dynamic animal over which we have very little control.

This is a cautionary tale for those building some of the more sophisticated optimization features directly into their code.

Find out more here. 

CTOEdge: The Trouble with Mobile Computing and the Web

Published in CTOEdge:

There is a lot of buzz lately about mobile devices and alternative traffic sources, and I’d like to take this moment to think about this in the open.

The folks at Strangeloop, a provider of website performance management tools, have published some “back of napkin” research that finds that Steve Souders’ basic theory, originally published in his “High Performance Web Sites” book in 2007, that states that “80 percent of performance issues happen on the front end” is still true. In fact, the folks at Strangeloop have noted that when it comes to mobile applications, the number is closer to 97 percent.

This makes sense since technologies have gotten only more complicated since Souders' book was first published. In addition to there being a lot more general complexity to deal with these days, many websites today make use of backend content management systems (CMS) that add to front-end issues affecting the overall Web experience.

Read full article here. 

Early findings: 97% of mobile end-user response time happens at the front end

From the blog of Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby:

Yesterday I was standing around talking with some of my fellow Strangeloopians, and someone brought up a couple of interesting questions:

- Everyone goes around quoting Steve Souders’s stat that 80% of performance issues happen at the front end, but this quote is almost four years old, dating back to the publication of Steve’s book High Performance Web Sites. Is this number still accurate?

- And what about mobile performance? To the best of our collective knowledge, this area has never been studied.

We’re in the fortunate position of being able to get to the bottom of these questions. We gather and store a lot of data for our customers, so it only took me about five minutes to look at the last five million desktop and mobile transactions (about a week’s worth) in our beacon database. (I stopped at five million because my pivot table in Excel would not handle more and my SQL query skills are non-existent.) These transactions occurred on a dozen or so sites.

Read more on Joshua Bixby's findings here. 

High performing websites [VIDEO]

From the blog of Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby:

Explaining the web performance problem and solution landscape in under five minutes is a serious challenge, but our friends and partners over at Level 3 have done a bang-up job of doing just that. This video is useful for anyone new to the performance scene who is looking for a quick, plain-English overview.

Continue reading here. 

TechNewsWorld: Browser Wars: What is it good for?

Published in TechNewsWorld:

"Browser development has traditionally followed the "waterfall" approach, with development teams spending months on planning, then writing the code, then sending the code to QA to get it as close to perfect as possible, Joshua Bixby, cofounder and president of Strangeloop, told TechNewsWorld."

Google threw a wrench into the works when it decided to use agile development techniques, Bixby stated. That forced most of the other players to follow suit, but Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Microsoft are not in the picture, although they're trying because their browsers are "tied in many ways" to their operating systems.

This link makes it difficult for Redmond and Cupertino to adopt an agile methodology, Bixby suggested.

Read full article here. 

Infographics: Putting a human face on web performance

From the blog of Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby:

If you’ve spent much time in the web performance space, you’re familiar with the stats that make routine appearances in presentations, reports, and *ahem* blog posts. Familiarity can start to breed contempt — or at least boredom — but these numbers are still vital to giving credibility to our industry. Performance is slowly entering the mainstream, but it needs all the help it can get.

With that in mind, we here at Strangeloop wanted to breathe new life into these numbers, so we asked our friend Ben at Pretty/Ugly Design to work with us to create some graphics. It was a really interesting process, in that it got us all to think about what these numbers mean, not just in visual terms, but in human terms. In tech, it’s really easy to lose sight of the fact that, ultimately, what we’re designing are systems for people. For example, it’s easy to say “57% of online users will abandon a slow-loading site after 3 seconds”, but it’s much more compelling to visualize what 57% of a group of people actually looks like.

Read full post here. 

Why Websites Are Slow & Why Speed Really Matters [INFOGRAPHIC]

Published in Mashable: 

Site optimization firm Strangeloop has provided us with a slew of graphically organized stats on just how long pages take to load, why they take as long as they do, and just how long the average Joe or Jane is willing to wait around for your site.

See the rest of the article here. 

Edited to add: View higher-res versions of the infographics, as well as links to the research sources, here.

Mars may be faster, but Venus is easier to navigate

Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby, talks about how men consider website speed more important than women do:

I’m very interested in how (or if) different types of users interact differently with the web, so I was happy to come across this study — via performance consultant Andy King’s blog — that investigates the question: do men and women have different usability priorities?

These preliminary findings suggest that they do. When asked to prioritize five web usability criteria — ease of use, download speed, navigation, accessibility, and customization, men showed a stronger preference for fast web performance, whereas women value ease of navigation.

(Graph courtesy of Andy King)

Read more about the study here. 

BCBusiness: B.C.'s 20 Most Innovative Companies in 2011

Strangeloop Networks, #2 in 2011's Most Innovative Companies in B.C.

There’s been talk for about four years that Strangeloop Networks was on to something big, but it was hard to know if the idea would ever take hold. The company has created software that accelerates the load times of websites by organizing and prioritizing data delivery, though the mechanics of it are a bit of a mathematical mystery. “That’s their secret sauce,” one of our panellists quips. “That’s where all their patents are.” The question was, Will it work in the real world?

Continue reading here. 

This month’s 21 best new web performance links

From the blog of Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby:

It’s always interesting to look back at the performance-related articles, posts, and reports I’ve read over the previous month and try to frame them as a snapshot of our industry. If I were to do that now, I’d say that March wasn’t a month of sexy studies and flashy numbers. Instead, it seemed to mostly be about getting our hands dirty — refining our performance measurement tools and getting into the finer nuances of optimization.

Read the entire post here.