How Site Optimizer solves performance bottleneck #1: Websites are increasingly complex

In 1995, the average web page contained just 2 objects. That meant just 2 calls to whatever data centers were serving the site.

Today, the average web page contains at least 75 objects. That means 75 server round trips are required to download all of the resources (Javascript, CSS, images, etc.) to the browser.

How Site Optimizer solves this problem

Our proprietary set of acceleration treatments is based on the web performance optimization best practices that have been developed by Yahoo and Google, as well as our own internally developed rules. Rather than having your developers painstakingly code these best practices throughout your site, Site Optimizer automatically applies these best practices across your website or web application, making each page as fast as possible.

These are three of the specific best practices for reducing the number of server roundtrips and making pages smaller:

1. Dynamic Browser Caching

Reduces roundtrips and improves user experience by applying the following treatments:

• Browser Cache Expiry and Invalidation leverages the browser cache to speed up repeat page views by eliminating unnecessary requests for content and resource validation. The browser automatically downloads new resources if/when they change.
• Predictive Browser Cache improves the user experience by intelligently pre-loading the resources that will be needed on subsequent pages.

2. Dynamic Resource Consolidator

Reduces roundtrips by consolidating similar resources into single files, which the browser downloads only once per page. Files are optimized according to browser capability and include techniques such as concatenation, spriting, and using data URLs.

3. Payload Reduction

Reduces bandwidth utilization and improves page load speed by minimizing response and request payload. This treatment uses techniques such as intelligent compression, image compression for mobile users, minification, and the transparent removal and re-insertion of Viewstate data in ASP.NET pages (where applicable).

Learn more about how Site Optimizer works. Better yet, test your site to see how much faster it can be after being Strangeloop-accelerated.

Roundup: 23 performance case studies

From our WPO Hub, we've corralled our favourite industry-wide case studies that show how website performance affects everything from page views to revenue to search ranking.

Find out how:

• Smartfurniture.com improved page speed and got 20% more organic traffic, 14% more page views, and ultimately more sales.
• Edmunds.com shaved its page load time from 9 seconds to 1.4 seconds, and increased revenue by 3%.
• WorkCoachCafe.com reduced page load times from 15 seconds to 5 seconds and cleaned up broken links and redirects, and as a result experienced a 40% traffic increase.

Our roundup also includes classics from Amazon, AOL and Shopzilla, as well as our own favourite case studies from Strangeloop customers. Read them all here.

Do you have a case study to share? Send us the link and we'll add it to the Hub.

Google's HTTP Archive merges with Internet Archive

Published by The Register:

Google's Steve Souders – who founded the HTTP Archive and will continue to run it – announced the merger this morning at the O'Reilly Velocity conference in Santa Clara, California. The ultimate goal of the project is to improve the overall performance of the web by exposing its bottlenecks.

Souders also announced that in merging with the Internet Archive, the project has attracted several big name sponsors, including Google and Mozilla as well as New Relic and Strangeloop. New Relic offers an online service for measuring site performance, while Strangeloop provides a service for accelerating website load times.

Read full article here.

We are proud to sponsor the HTTP Archive, the world's only archive of web performance data

As announced by Google Performance Evangelist Steve Souders at the 2011 Velocity Conference, Strangeloop is very pleased to be sponsoring the HTTP Archive as it grows to track one million of the world's leading websites. The archive will also be moving under the umbrella of the Internet Archive, which has been archiving web page data since 1996.

Launched in March 2011, the HTTP Archive has already yielded compelling findings. In a recent post on his blog, Steve noted that the average page has grown in transfer size and number of requested page objects (e.g. images, CSS, Javascript):

• In November 2010, the average page was 658k and contained 71 objects.
• By May 2011, the average page was 711k and contained 76 objects.

Page size and objects can have a major effect on how fast a website’s pages load. Given that the slowness of a site has been proven to have a negative effect on ecommerce metrics such as revenue, conversion rate, and bounce rate, these findings are significant. Armed with this information, site owners may choose to closely monitor the size of their web pages to ensure that they are not hurting their business.

Over the same time period, Steve notes that the use of Facebook widgets on sites increased from 8% to 13%, while the use of Twitter widgets doubled, going from 2% to 4%.

Read our full announcement here.

Webmetrics + Strangeloop: Identify issues. Fix issues. Make more $$.

We are very excited to announce our newest partnership, with Neustar Webmetrics. Neustar is a global leader in load testing and website monitoring services. Together, Neustar and Strangeloop will provide customers with the ability to quickly and easily identify and fix their website performance problems. 

From Neustar's blog:

Thanks to our new partnership with Strangeloop, Neustar Webmetrics now gives you access to Web content optimization (WCO). In other words, besides testing your site, pinpointing problems and making recommendations, we also demonstrate your improved site performance using Strangeloop tools that make smart fixes and maximize performance.

Webmetrics load testing identifies barriers such as insufficient bandwidth, misconfigurations and server CPU limitations. Strangeloop’s Site Optimizer helps overcome these issues and render pages faster. The bottom line: better search engine results, increased conversions and higher revenue.

Strangeloop is proud to partner with best-in-class service providers -- companies such as Akamai, Level 3, and Exceda -- via our Value Accelerator Partner Program. 

Read the press release here.

SPDY takes a step beyond Google's Walls

Published by CNET:

According to Google's white paper on SPDY, the protocol can cut load times for the top 25 Web sites by between 28 percent and 43 percent over a 2Mbps DSL line and 44 percent to 55 percent over a 4Mbps cable broadband connection. The variation depends on the number of SPDY features enabled and changes such as whether SSL encryption is used.

For its part, Strangeloop said SPDY cuts page-load times by at least half. With Web developers striving to shave every millisecond off that lag, that's a pretty substantial boast--at least for those on the Web using Chrome.

Read full article here.

Strangeloop offers the first Google SPDY Web-site acceleration product

Published by ZDNet:

The Strangeloop package does more than just add the SPDY protocol to your site. According to the company, it includes an “easy-to-implement solution to the complex challenges of WCO.” This “takes HTML that has been optimized for readability, supportability and maintainability and, while retaining these benefits, transforms it to HTML that is optimized for fast page rendering. This involves implementing numerous best practices such as rewriting object names, re-ordering when and how objects are rendered, re-ordering when scripts are executed, and optimizing content based on the requesting browser.” In other words, it sets up your Web page so that you can get the benefits of SPDY’s data request prioritization.

Read full article here.

See you at Velocity!

Velocity is the ultimate web performance event -- like Christmas for performance geeks -- which makes today Velocity Eve. :) We're very excited to once again have a space on the exhibitors floor, and we're looking forward to catching up with our old colleagues and meeting new ones.

We're sending down a veritable who's who list from the Strangeloop management team: Joshua Bixby (President), Jonathan Bixby (CEO), Kent Alstad (CTO), Lee Purvis (VP Operations) and Hooman Beheshti (VP Product). They'll be on hand to talk about our latest research and case studies, as well as product developments, such as our exciting new SPDY integration.

Be sure to come by booth #214 and say hi!

Strangeloop makes web pages even faster with new SPDY integration

That's right. After months of working closely with Google's Chromium Project team, today we're very excited to announce a performance industry first: our Site Optimizer is the first commercial acceleration product to automatically offer the benefits of Google's SPDY protocol, without requiring any changes to your code or servers. These benefits are available immediately to our customers.

For more information, you can read the full release here.

We've also already gotten a nice write-up in MIT's Technology Review.

Welcome to a Faster Web: The first commercial deployment of SPDY, a protocol designed by Google to make websites faster, launches today.

Published by MIT Technology Review:

Website optimization company Strangeloop has built SPDY into its flagship product Site Optimizer, software that sits in between a website and its users, and adjusts the site's code to make pages load more quickly. Strangeloop's customers will have the ability to turn the protocol on easily; in tests, the protocol has sped up websites by 10 to 20 percent.

At first, this will only make a difference for people who visit websites using Google's Chrome browser (the only one that supports SDPY), but Strangeloop expects that it could end up having a big impact on mobile devices as well, since Google is likely to build SPDY into browsers designed for Android.

Read full article here.