2012 predictions: The average web page will hit 1 MB, Google and Siri will face off, and Chrome, Windows 7, and RUM will rise

Wondering who's going to pull ahead in the browser races? Who's the new dark horse in the mobile industry? How will the CDN and RUM industries evolve? Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby puts on his wizard cap and makes a handful of predictions in his latest blog post, starting with prediction #1:

The average web page will surpass 1 MB in size.

Between December 2010 and now, the average web page grew from 716 KB to 965 KB, according to the HTTP Archive. That’s 30% growth in slightly less than one year. This kind of growth is the norm, as pages have grown at a rapid rate since 1995, when the average page size was just 14.1 KB. It’s pretty safe to assume that this growth will continue. We’re going to see sites grow by at least another 30%, taking them well over the 1 MB mark — a number that would have blown our minds 10 years ago. The main culprits: images (which account for more than half of the average page size) and third-party scripts like analytics, ads, and social sharing widgets.

This prediction has already been picked up by GigaOM, BBC News, and TechVibes.

Check out the rest of Joshua's predictions on his blog, Web Performance Today.

You can't get away with a bad mobile experience anymore

Mac Slocum of O'Reilly Radar recently interviewed Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby, and they talked about common mobile optimization mistakes, mobile apps vs mobile sites, whether or not the Kindle Fire will revolutionize front-end optimization, and why the 2011 holiday season caught online retailers with their mobile pants down.

MAC: Should companies be thinking "mobile first" now?

JOSHUA: We talk about "the web" and "the mobile web" as if the two are different, but they aren't. I'm the first to admit that I'm as guilty of doing this as the next person. Using these terms is helpful for discussing differences in how people browse via different devices, but at the end of the day, it's all one web. Users want the same breadth and depth of content, no matter what device they're using. They want a consistent, reliable user experience. They don't want to interact with your site one way at their desks, then learn a whole new way when they're tablet-surfing on the couch, and then learn a third way when they're roaming around with their phones. Site owners who can deliver an experience that feels the same, regardless of the platform, are the ones who are going to own the web of the not-too-distant future.

MAC: Will all phones be smartphones at some point? Or will non-smartphones remain an important segment for years to come?

JOSHUA: It really depends on which market you look at. Last summer, comScore published a survey that showed that, despite the rapid rate of smartphone adoption, 155 million American mobile phone users still don't have smartphones. That's obviously a pretty significant number. But if you take a global view, things flip around and we see that, especially in developing countries, new mobile users are jumping right on the smartphone wagon. This allows users to bypass both dumb phones and the desktop web. It's a whole different way of interacting with the Internet.

I think an even better question might be: How great a disruptor will tablets be to the mobile market? Site owners have been caught with their mobile pants down, so to speak, in their inability to recognize the importance of this market. Forrester did a survey of retailers and found that, on average, about 20% of holiday mobile traffic came via tablets, with some retailers reporting that more than half their mobile traffic came via tablets. But most "mobile-optimized" sites look terrible on tablets. In 2012, site owners are going to be scrambling to catch up with this paradigm shift.

Read the rest of the interview on O'Reilly Radar.

CDN Solutions and Strangeloop team up to bring advanced FEO to Japan

We are very excited to announce our newest partnership, this time with Japan's leading performance solutions provider, CDN Solutions. 

CDN Solutions' expertise is in providing content delivery and traffic management services for web content, streaming media, and web-based applications. This is a perfect marriage with our ability to optimize web content itself. Effective immediately, CDN Solutions will be bundling our Site Optimizer service, which optimizes individual page code so that it can render up to three times faster in a visitor’s browser, with its existing content delivery network (CDN) service.

"Partnering with Strangeloop is a great opportunity to introduce a new web performance solution to our market, and allows us to add a powerful new complementary solution to our current service offerings," said Kazunori Higashiguchi, Director of Sales, CDN Solutions. "Companies come to us to make their sites faster, and today, front-end optimization presents the greatest area where we can deliver significant new acceleration gains. Strangeloop’s Site Optimizer is the most proven FEO solution on the market, allowing us to provide fast ROI for our customers on improved website and application performance."

CDN Solutions joins our growing list of top-tier partners, which includes Level 3, Akamai, Neustar, Exceda, and Seven Group.

• Read the full press release.
• Learn more about our partner program.

VIDEO: How to perform a 5-minute speed/revenue analysis of your e-commerce site

In this video webinar, based on one of our most popular blog posts, Hooman Beheshti, VP of Product at Strangeloop, walks through how to use two free, simple tools -- Google Analytics and WebPagetest -- to perform a page speed/revenue analysis of your e-commerce site. By using browser versions as proxies, you can calculate the relationship between page speed and revenue for your site. These test results can then be used to evangelize performance in your organization.

Test your site

Send us your URL. We'll analyze your site, then show you how much faster we can make it. Find out why companies like eBay/PayPal, Visa, Wine.com, and Petco consider us the only choice in website acceleration.

Case study: Slow shopping cart pages kill conversions. How optimizing just one page got a 66% conversion lift.

In this guest post for the marketing blog Unbounce, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby explains why every page of an entire online transaction needs to be as fast as possible. 

• Only 3 out of 10 shopping carts make it through the checkout process.
• The total cost of abandoned shopping carts has been estimated at over $18 billion a year.
• 1 out of 5 customers will abandon their shopping cart if pages are too slow. That's more than $3 billion in lost sales due to poor performance.
  
  

To illustrate first hand the impact of slow pages on the checkout process and conversions, Joshua walks through a real-world case study with a Strangeloop customer who wanted to experiment with the impact of page slowdown on a 5-step transaction. We did a split test in which we divided traffic into three groups and delivered different load times to each.

What we found: Just a single slow page in a 5-page process significantly hurt conversions. Fixing that page resulted in a 66% conversion gain.

Read the full case study on Unbounce.

Test your site

Send us your URL. We'll analyze your site, then show you how much faster we can make it. Find out why companies like eBay/PayPal, Visa, Wine.com, and Petco consider us the only choice in website acceleration.

Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby invited to speak at Velocity China

This marks Strangeloop's first appearance at Velocity China, which returns this year after its huge success in 2010. The two-day web performance and operations conference takes place next week, on December 6-7.

Joshua will be presenting a session called Case Studies from the Mobile Frontier: The Relationship Between Faster Mobile Sites and Business KPIs, based on his very popular presentation at Velocity Europe last month. 

If you're interested in the rapidly emerging role of online commerce in China, read our report Why Luxury Websites Are Failing Users in China (And Why This Matters to You).