Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby comments on new Google Page Speed service

Google's new Page Speed service is getting a lot of media play, and our president, Joshua Bixby, has been asked by a number of outlets to comment on the story. Here's the coverage to date:

ZDNet: Google gets into the Content Delivery Network business
Bixby also observed that Google Page Speed "features don't today address the most important performance challenges faced by the enterprise. It might speed up individual page but not transactions or flows (i.e. it will probably hurt conversion); enterprise WCO [Web content optimization] companies look across pages and examine user flows to ensure optimal flows instead of pages. Some of the major performance issues facing pages today not solved by the new product include 3rd party tags, consolidation of images, etc."

Web Pro News: Google Page Speed Service Rewrites Your Pages
"[Page Speed] is a very interesting competitive offering to Amazon and some of the small cloud acceleration players like CloudFlare, Blaze, Torbit, and Yottaa," Bixby concludes. "The cloud providers offering basic page-based acceleration features targeted at the small- to mid-market will be faced with a formidable competitor."

Joshua commented further in this post on his blog, Web Performance Today: Google's new Page Speed service: A handy resource for smaller site owners

Read Google's Page Speed Service announcement here.

As mobile users demand speed, mobile sites are getting slower. Where’s the disconnect?

74% of mobile users will bounce after waiting 5 seconds for a site to load, yet the average site loads in 9 seconds. It's no surprise, then, that users are increasingly dissatisfied with their mobile experience.

Mobile fact #1: Between 2009 and 2011, the percentage of mobile users who expect sites to load as quickly on their mobile device as on their desktop grew from 58% to 71%.

[Source: Gomez]

No surprise here. Due to the proliferation of wifi networks and better devices, people’s mobile expectations are increasing.

Mobile fact #2: In 2009, 20% of users said they'd bounce after waiting 5 seconds for a mobile site to load. By 2011, that number jumped to 74%.

[Source: Gomez]

Mobile fact #3: Very, very few leading m-commerce sites load in 5 seconds or less.
According to the Keynote index for retail mobile sites, which tracks the performance of twenty leading online retailers, only one site -- Dell.com -- loaded in less than 5 seconds. The average site loaded in 9.08 seconds. [Source: Keynote]

Mobile fact #4: Mobile sites are getting even slower. In just two months the load time of the average mobile site has ballooned by 20%.
The only thing that is getting faster is the speed with which mobile sites are slowing down. In just a two-month period -- from April 17 to June 19, 2011 -- the Keynote mobile index increased by 1.63 seconds. In other words, in just two months the load time of the average mobile site in the index ballooned by 20%. [Source: Keynote]

What are the causes of slow mobile performance?
There are a number of potential culprits: Too many page objects, bloated images, poorly optimized code, excessive use of third-party tags. The good news is that these performance-leaching problems are all fixable.

Is your mobile website meeting your customers’ expectations?
Send us your URL. We'll analyze its current performance, then we'll accelerate it with our Site Optimizer service and show you how much faster your site can be.

Product review: Site Optimizer is like "Steve Souders in a box"

Our recent partnership with Neustar Webmetrics has been like going on a perfect date with a partner who complements you in every way. Neustar offers unmatched load testing and performance monitoring services. We offer the best front-end content optimization technology on the market. It's a match made in performance heaven.

As part of the getting-to-know-you process, we gave their professional services team a thorough rundown of how our Site Optimizer technology works. Ben Jones, one of Neustar's sales engineers, wrote up his impressions in this product review:

...organizations that are super concerned with web performance (e.g. Google) are using similar techniques and likely spending much more on the human resource cost... Spending a couple hours learning more about the Strangeloop offering will be worthwhile – if nothing else you will likely learn something new about web optimization.

Learn about our partnership with Neustar here and here.

How Site Optimizer solves performance bottleneck #3: Web pages are not optimized for repeat views or flows through sites

It's not enough to optimize your site for first-time visitors. Successful websites and web applications attract repeat users who visit favorite web pages or navigate consistently through a series of web pages.

Looking at our own customer analytics here at Strangeloop, we estimate that upwards of 96% of product page views are "flow views" -- defined as the view of the page when a visitor has previously visited at least one other page on your site. Knowing what path a visitor takes through your site offers huge opportunities for optimizing those pages so that they are served faster. Yet most websites don't take advantage of these opportunities. Instead, they serve the same resources to the same visitors over and over. This causes countless unnecessary server round trips, a major cause of slow page load.

Site Optimizer solves this problem by identifying and taking advantage of repeat visits and flow traffic through your site.

Site Optimizer deploys a number of advanced techniques that optimize repeat views for users and targets the acceleration of page flows through a website. These techniques include:

• Flow-based consolidation of CSS/JS/images - Intelligently consolidates page resources to eliminate duplication and reduce the number of server round trips.
• Repeat view consolidation
• Flow view consolidation
• Browser cache expiry/invalidation - Leverages the browser cache by eliminating unnecessary requests for content and resource validation while ensuring content is kept current. Improves repeat view performance by reducing roundtrips.

These techniques ensure that a visitor never gets the same resource twice. They also guarantee that stale resources are never served to the visitor.

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

Roundup: Why does your brain work better on a faster website?

Have you ever wondered why you seem to think and act more clearly on a fast website? This isn't just your perception. It's actually true, and there's a growing body of research, accumulated over the past 15 years, to prove it.

In our Web Performance Hub, we've rounded up some fascinating articles and studies that show:

• Why "Faster is better" applies almost everywhere, not just in the tech domain.
• Why people have to concentrate up to 50% harder when using badly performing websites.
• Why the average person will perceive the amount of time it takes a page to load as being about 15% slower than the actual load time.
• Why 0.1 second response times give us the illusion of instantaneous page load, while 10-second response times make our attention drift away, possibly permanently.

We've also included articles with tips on how to mitigate our short attention spans.

Find them all here: Web Performance Hub: Psychology and Human Factors.

Case study: PrintingForLess.com cuts web page load times by 40%

We're very happy to add a new case study to our roster of customer success stories. What makes this story especially compelling is the fact that, despite having an average page load time of 5.6 seconds -- which would be considered perfectly acceptable by some site owners -- the team at PFL set their sites higher. Their goal was to hit the 3-second sweet spot, and we're proud that Site Optimizer got them there. 

Says PFL's network administrator and security analyst Mark Currence: "We performed manual performance tuning, but this wasn't an efficient use of our best developers. With automated optimization, Strangeloop took us much farther, much faster than we could have gone on our own."

Read the full case study to find out how we did it.

Are third-party tools secret conversion killers?

Google's new +1 button is the widget du jour, with countless installations since its launch at the beginning of June. But as it turns out, the +1 button could make pages up to two seconds slower, according to performance consultant Aaron Peters.

Just because a widget provider is trusted and well known, that doesn't mean you can assume they’re building fast tools. These tools often get touted as "just a single line of Javascript." I'm here to tell you that "just a single line of Javascript" is a meaningless phrase that third-party tool vendors have invented to make their apps sound easy and low-impact.

Read the rest of Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby's guest post on Unbounce here.

Two Months Later: Has Google's new algorithm cleaned up search results?

From an article written by Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby for TMCnet:

On Feb. 24, Google anounced changes to its search algorithm intended to weed out "shallow and low-quality content" - in other words, content farms, aggregators, and other random web detritus that clutters up your search results...

Immediately after Google's announcement, my thinking was that the algorithm changes are good news for legitimate content providers. This is Google's attempt at leveling the playing field so that users can get access to better, more relevant content, instead of being bombarded by useless pages designed to dupe them into clicking on ads.

Read the full article here (page 10).

Neustar mobile panel discussion

Recently our president, Joshua Bixby, joined an online panel discussion sponsored by Neustar titled, Mobile Marathon: Top KPIs to Keep Mobile Sites "Always Running." You can listen to this virtual roundtable which discussed how to keep mobile sites running here: