Mashable talks to Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby about web speed and the future of mobile ticketing

Following the publication of Joshua's blog post about Opening Day and the performance of leading online ticket agents, Mashable's Sam Laird talked to Joshua about why some sites suffer more than others and what this means for mobile users.

Joshua tested the performance of nine sites across a purchasing transaction, up to but not including checkout. The fastest transaction happened on CheapMLBTickets.com (12.08 seconds) and the slowest was, surprisingly, on the official Major League Baseball site, MLB.com (43.37 seconds). 

Joshua explains this disparity:

So why the big differences in transaction times? By and large, the sites with more resources to download were the ones with the longer delays. Bixby blames that on a “tug of war” between site performance and the desire to host advertising and other images.

"So far the tug of war has been won by the marketers and the image-makers. What's happening is that performance is a key feature and it's kind of being neglected in some cases."

So how can these site owners fix their performance pains?

Bixby says slower sites can improve performance — and subsequently discourage customers abandoning transactions — by streamlining pages to load fewer resources and by cutting the number of pages in the transaction process. As people continue to turn to mobile devices for shopping more frequently — and still prefer to buy via mobile sites over apps — transaction speed will only grow in importance.

Read the full article: Looking for Baseball Tickets? You Might Want to Avoid These Slow Sites

Strangeloop offers two solutions to desktop and mobile performance pains.
Learn more about our Site Optimizer and Mobile Site Optimizer.

Strangeloop VP Technology Hooman Beheshti to speak at Velocity 2012

O'Reilly recently announced the speaker list for its annual Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference, and we are very pleased to announce that our VP Technology, Hooman Beheshti, has been selected to lead a session on advanced mobile optimization. 

Hooman's session, The 90-Minute Mobile Optimization Life Cycle, is a mobile-specific reprise of a workshop he led in Velocity 2010, in which he subjected a site to real-time optimization using the Strangeloop Site Optimizer. The workshop was voted by attendees as one of the top 10 sessions of the conference.

This year, Hooman Beheshti is back, this time to demonstrate – in real time – the impact of advanced mobile optimization techniques (via the Strangeloop Mobile Site Optimizer) on another unsuspecting website. Over the course of the workshop, attendees will witness the mobile optimization life cycle, from start to finish:

• Taking the "Before" shot: Choosing a guinea pig site and benchmarking its current performance, focusing on load time, start render time and round trips.
• Iterating through core best practices, including: Keep-Alive, Compression, Far Future Expiry, and Use a CDN.
• Applying a set of advanced, automated, mobile-specific FEO techniques.
• Taking the "After" shot: Analyzing results using different browsers.
  
  

This session is an opportunity for attendees to get deep insights from an early leader in the performance space. With over 15 years of experience working in the networking technology realm, Hooman is well versed in load balancing, application acceleration, and content delivery networks. He previously served as VP of Technology for Crescendo Networks and CTO for Radware Inc., where his insights and technical expertise helped bring innovative, award-winning networking products to market. A pioneer in the application acceleration space, he helped design one of the original load balancers while at Radware. 

Velocity takes place June 25-27 in Santa Clara, California.

19 Things You Can Do to Make Your Site Faster for Mobile Users [WHITEPAPER]

The launch of the new iPad is an excellent reminder that the mobile web -- once a fringe concern for site owners -- is crowding onto the center stage.

But with the mobile web comes a whole new set of challenges for site owners who care about delivering a speedy experience to their visitors: spotty (or throttled) networks, lower bandwidth, higher latency, smaller memories, and lower processing power.

While the new iPad boasts a more powerful processor than its predecessors, this only slightly mitigates these challenges. A further challenge: iPad users expect sites to perform as fast on their tablets as they do on their desktops. 

Our recent whitepaper -- Mobile Site Optimization: 19 things you can do to make your site faster for mobile users -- summarizes the case for mobile optimization, describes the unique performance challenges posed by mobile devices, and provides an overview of strategies and tactics you can use to speed up your site for mobile users.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn why and how to:

• Consolidate resources
• Use browser caching and localStorage
• Embed resources in HTML for first-time use
• Use HTML5 server-sent events
• Eliminate redirects
• Compress and minify page resources
• Resize images
• Simplify pages with HTML5 and CSS 3.0
• Use idle time to preload resources
• Defer loading and executing non-essential scripts
• Adapt to the type of network connection
• Replace click events with touch events
• Support the SPDY protocol
• And several more mobile-specific performance techniques
  
  

Download the free whitepaper: Mobile Site Optimization: 19 things you can do to make your site faster for mobile users

Did you know we have a newsletter? (A really good one)

Want the latest web performance research, tips, tutorials, and case studies delivered to your inbox (without worrying about being pestered by sales spam)? Last month, we quietly launched the newly re-formatted Strangeloop newsletter -- In the Loop -- and it's gotten great feedback. 

Every two weeks, In the Loop brings you:

• The newest industry research and analysis
• Great case studies
• Useful videos and webinars
• Pro tips and tutorials
  
  

Subscribe today!