In the Loop: The Strangeloop Blog

REPORT: State of the Union for Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance [Spring 2013]

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:52:51 -0700

It is a widely held belief that leading ecommerce sites must be getting faster, rather than slower, thanks to our increasingly souped-up browsers, devices, and networks. But is this actually the case? Our latest retail web performance survey indicates otherwise.

Since 2010, we've been measuring the performance of the top 2,000 retail websites (as ranked by Alexa.com). The purpose of this research has been to gain ongoing visibility into the real-world performance of leading ecommerce sites – to learn how these sites perform for visitors sitting at home using the internet under normal browsing conditions.

In December 2012, working with our soon-to-be parent company Radware, we tested the load times (in Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 17, and Chrome 23) and page composition of the Alexa Retail 2000, and then analyzed this data alongside our benchmark data.

The goal was to identify trends and find answers to questions such as:

Assuming that page speed is an increasingly urgent issue for online retailers, has this urgency translated into faster pages over time?
How quickly have retailers moved to adopt core performance best practices, such as using a content delivery network (CDN)?
How do the top 100 retail sites compare to the top 2,000?
How do different browsers compare in terms of page rendering speed, and what does this comparison mean?

The answers -- some of which may surprise you -- are in the report State of the Union for Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance [Spring 2013], which is now available for free download.

REPORT: State of the Union: European Page Speed and Web Performance

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:42:55 -0700

One-third of Europe's top retail websites aren't meeting the performance demands of online shoppers. This was the key finding of a new report released by our parent company, Radware, in conjunction with Level 3 Communications.

A survey of the top 400 ecommerce sites in Europe found that:

The median load time for first-time visitors was 7.04 seconds.
1 out of 4 sites took more than 10 seconds to load.
1 out of 3 pages contained 100+ resource requests. Page resources -- including CSS, JavaScript, and image files -- are the content objects in every web page. Each of these resources represents one server round trip that is needed to pull all the page’s resources to the user’s browser. More server round trips typically equal longer page render times.
79% of sites did not use a content delivery network (CDN). CDNs cache page resources closer to the relevant end users, allowing resources to make shorter round trips and speed up rendering. Yet only 1 out of 5 of the leading online retailers currently uses a CDN.

Radware VP application acceleration Joshua Bixby had this to say about this report:

"These findings are a wake-up call for online retailers in Europe. In today's hyper-competitive retail climate, site owners need to know that 7-second load times are simply much too slow, and they need to realize that shoppers are not oblivious to the issue of page speed. When fully three-quarters of sites are disappointing end users, that number can’t be ignored."

Download the report: State of the Union: European Page Speed and Web Performance

New Web Performance Today podcast: Mike Belshe (Twist)

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:02:42 -0700

Former Googler Mike Belshe is the inventor of one of the most important protocol changes to improve the performance of the web over last ten years -- Google's SPDY protocol -- and it was an honour to welcome him to our virtual studio.

Among other things, SPDY makes pages faster by compressing some page resources, preloading select resources into the user's browser, and extending what the browser can do allowing multiple concurrent streams over a single connection (thereby reducing the number of server round trips).

Mike talked with podcast host Joshua Bixby about the fact that, even at Google, proposing a paradigm-shifting initiative like SPDY can meet with raised eyebrows:

I think the place that I really added value was in the start-up of nature of [SPDY]. Even though I was at Google when we started this project, and everybody wanted the web to go faster inside of Google, we kind of worked around it and said "Hey! We can do this with a better protocol." And people were, like, "A better protocol? You're never going to get that to work. Even if you got Google to do it, who else would do it? Nobody else would support it. It will fail for sure."

Mike and Joshua also talked about Twist, Mike's latest experiment that could change how we think about time, as well as the inner workings of the IETF.

Listen to the podcast
Previous podcasts

New Web Performance Today podcast: Tim Morrow (Betfair)

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:24:27 -0800

Continuing the chain of performance industry pioneers that have visited the podcast so far, this week Joshua Bixby interviews another pioneer: Tim Morrow. Tim was an early evangelizer of the business value of performance and, more recently, he's a strong advocate for creating customer-facing performance promises.

Tim and Joshua sat down and talked about a wide range of topics, including how to take real-time action on customer measurement and why thinking about third-party content keeps Tim up at night.

Listen:

New Web Performance Today podcast: Joshua Marantz (Google)

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:22:27 -0800

Tools like Google's PageSpeed and mod_pagespeed are an integral part of most developers' web performance toolkit. This is why it was such an honour to get Joshua Marantz, one of the key movers and shakers behind these projects, inside our virtual studio.

In this week's podcast, he and host Joshua Bixby crack the hood and talk a bit about the inner workings of PageSpeed and mod_pagespeed -- their similarities and their differences.

They also discussed a number of other burning questions, such as how to handle concerns about front-end optimization (FEO) and site breakage, whether or not browsers and servers will ever take on FEO as an automatic function, and why the performance industry is inundated with people named Joshua.

Listen:

New Web Performance Today podcast: Aaron Peters (Turbobytes)

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:42:47 -0800

The content delivery marketplace is a changing as quickly as it's growing, and in this week's podcast, Joshua was lucky to talk with one of the movers behind this change.

As co-founder of Turbobytes, Aaron Peters is a pioneer in bringing together two hot tech topics: content delivery and real user monitoring (RUM). His company closely monitors the real-world performance of six global CDNs, and then ensures that site owners' content is always delivered by the fastest one.

In this week's podcast, Aaron talks with Joshua about why all CDNs aren't equal all the time, why the upcoming new resource timings API is going to be awesome, and why so many web shops still need to get their performance basics right.

Listen:

Aaron Peters
Previous podcasts

New Web Performance Today podcast: Josh Fraser (Torbit)

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:05:51 -0800

In this week's podcast, Joshua talks with Josh Fraser, CEO of Torbit, a provider of real user measurement (RUM) and dynamic content optimization (DCO) solutions. They talk about discovering the web performance path, how performance has changed from a technical metric to a business metric, advice for young entrepreneurs, and tech predictions for 2013.

Listen

Josh Fraser
Previous podcasts

Strangeloop joins Radware to offer secure, best-in-class, end-to-end acceleration worldwide

Tammy Everts — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:30:30 -0800

We are very excited to announce an enormous milestone in our business: Strangeloop is now part of Radware.

For the past six years, we've put all our energies into building the very best web application acceleration technology on the market. This acquisition allows us to integrate our advanced front-end optimization (FEO) technology with Radware's best-in-class application delivery and network security solutions. Together, our technologies will meet application owners' increasingly urgent demand for highly secure, highly effective, end-to-end acceleration.

This move is a logical next step for our company and our technology, and we're excited to be moving forward with Radware. Both Strangeloop and Radware have their roots in innovation, and our combined track record will provide unique value to our customers.

What does this mean for you?

It's business as usual for our team and for you.

If you're a Strangeloop customer, there will be absolutely no interruption to your service.

You'll continue to receive full 24/7 technical support, and you'll continue to use Strangeloop solutions as standalone products in whatever form you currently use them: appliance, virtual appliance, or cloud.

In the future, you'll also have the option of enjoying our technology integrated as a software module with Radware’s industry-leading Alteon Application Delivery Controller (ADC).

And in the long term, you'll enjoy the benefits of ongoing investment in product development -- allowing you to continue to benefit from using the world's leading application acceleration solution.

If you're a Strangeloop partner, your customers will continue to enjoy Strangeloop solutions.

You'll also have exciting new opportunities to leverage Radware solutions. Radware will be fully onboarding our A-list of partners, as well as offering online training and certification programs for Radware's suite of products.

If you're a member of the performance community, you'll appreciate that this acquisition signals the ongoing evolution of front-end optimization technology.

We're extremely proud of the massive strides we've made in the development of our products over the past seven years. The sophistication -- and the effectiveness -- of our suite of acceleration treatments is second to none, and this will only continue to evolve. We've built an elite R&D team over the years, and these same great minds will continue to lead in FEO innovation, backed by Radware's market leadership and global presence.

Since 2006, everyone here at Strangeloop has made it our mission to put companies at the forefront of acceleration. As part of Radware, we're looking forward to continuing to push the innovation envelope to keep them there.

We welcome your questions during this exciting time!

Our VP Marketing, Marie Clavel, will be happy to take your email questions.

Read more in this blog post from Nir Ilani, Director of Product Marketing at Radware.

Web Performance Digest (January 2013) - Creating a performance culture, performance as design, and 10 website tuning tricks in 60 minutes

Tammy Everts — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 11:26:14 -0800

Every month, we update our WPO Hub with the latest performance-related news, research, tips, and tutorials, and we bring the best links to you in our Web Performance Digest. This month, learn how to set a performance budget, get tips on how to promote a performance culture in your business, and find out which 10 web performance tuning tricks will make a big difference on your site.

Setting a performance budget
Sites are rapidly growing in size. In this post, Tim Kadlec discusses how to create a "performance budget" and why web performance needs to be brought up early on in a project.

Performance as design
There is an assumption that only developers need to concern themselves with performance. Brad Frost explains why it is important to treat web performance as an essential design feature, not just a technical feature.

How much CSS should you have?
Jonathan Klein talks about how much CSS should be on your website and some of the pitfalls when authoring CSS.

Ten web performance tuning tricks in 60 minutes
Strangeloop performance evangelist Richard Campbell walks you through his web performance tuning toolkit and explains different tecniques for making your web pages faster.

Study: Streaming video viewers lose patience after 2 seconds
A recent study by NPR reports that roughly half of high-speed internet users believe 5 seconds is too long to wait for streaming videos.

Creating a Performance Culture
Steve Souders gives great tips for creating a powerful in-house performance culture for companies that may be new to the world of high performance sites.

Moving beyond window.onload()
Another must-read post from Steve Souders. Here he discusses why window.onload isn't the best metric for measuring website speed and gets the ball rolling to find a suitable replacement.

Check out the Web Performance Hub for hundreds more great links.

New Web Performance Today Podcast: Mark Jennings (Lonely Planet)

Tammy Everts — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 10:42:03 -0800

In this week's Web Performance Today podcast, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby talks with Mark Jennings, Technical Operations Manager at Lonely Planet Online.

Lonely Planet is an excellent online resource for travel information, and not surprisingly, they take web performance very seriously. Mark and Joshua talk about how to sell performance within a company, the phenomenal growth in Lonely Planet's mobile traffic, and how to not only make your pages fast, but keep them fast.

Listen:

Mark Jennings

Previous Podcasts

New Web Performance Today Podcast: Ilya Grigorik

Tammy Everts — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 09:56:32 -0800

In this week's Web Performance Today podcast, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby talks with one of the smartest people in the performance industry -- Ilya Grigorik.

What Ilya doesn't know about web performance probably isn't worth knowing. As Developer Advocate and cornerstone of the Make the Web Fast team at Google, Ilya offers great insight into current and future industry trends. He and Joshua talk about why big CDNs need to adopt SPDY, how mobile is the next frontier for Google, and what it's like sharing an office with Steve Souders.

Listen:

Ilya Grigorik

Previous Podcasts

The web performance industry's best roundup of tips, tricks, tutorials, and how-tos

Tammy Everts — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 09:46:39 -0800

Making pages faster is a constantly moving target. With web pages growing larger and increasingly more complex, performance optimization can seem like a daunting task. To help you, we've gone through our Web Performance Hub archives to point you toward some amazing tips, tricks and how-tos from industry experts.

Here's a quick sampling of posts to help you with everything from improving page speed to measuring performance to creating faster buttons for mobile.

Ten Web Performance Tuning Tricks in 60 Minutes
Performance evangelist Richard Campbell opens up his web performance tuning toolkit and walks you through ten different techniques for improving web performance, including reducing payload size, latency, server and client compute times.

How We Improved Page Speed by Cleaning CSS, HTML and Images
Front-end developer Lara Swanson explains how to keep your page load time fast by using best practices and routinely cleaning up your CSS, HTML, and images in this detailed performance optimization case study for Dyn.

Optimize the Performance of Widgets, Buttons and More
Practical tips for fixing performance of common widgets and buttons from Digg, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Google, and more.

How case-sensitivity for ID and ClassName can kill your page load time
Interesting findings from Andreas Grabner, showing how case-sensitivity causes a huge execution time difference in Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Firefox 6.

Speeding Up Your Website’s Database
Good how-to piece that explains how a database can slow down your site and how to speed it back up.

#114: Let's Do Simple Stuff to Make Our Websites Faster
Four easy things you can do to make your website faster.

Using Jdrop to measure mobile performance
A comparison of 11 mobile sites that shows how to use Jdrop to gather, analyze, and share mobile performance data.

Creating Fast Buttons for Mobile Web Applications
Google offers some tips and code for making your mobile buttons faster.

How to make a mobile site seem to load fast—even if it doesn’t
Speed is important in m-commerce. The illusion of speed is almost as good.

Measuring Mobile Performance
Front-end performance consultant Stephen Thair's presentation to the London Web Performance Meetup Group is packed with useful tips and how-tos.

These are just a few of the how-tos you'll find in the Web Performance Hub. See more!

Questions about web performance?

We have the answers. Talk to a Strangeloop Performance Expert today.

New Web Performance Today Podcast: Eric Goldsmith

Tammy Everts — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 09:51:27 -0800

Last week, in the first Web Performance Today podcast installment of 2013, Joshua spoke with the Geoffrey Smalling, CTO of Wine.com. This week, Joshua interviews one of the unsung heroes in the web performance community, Eric Goldsmith.

Eric is a performance evangelist and operations architect at AOL, as well as being a pioneer in the field of data mining. He's also in the enviable position of being able to leverage large-scale analytics technologies to collect and analyze data from AOL's web properties. With his extensive experience in big data and performance, Eric is an influential figure in the performance industry.

In this interview, Eric talks about the early days of WebPagetest, why we have to think like data scientists, and how the RUM world has changed in the past seven years.

Listen:

Eric Goldsmith

Previous Podcasts

Latency 101: Defining the latency problem

Tammy Everts — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 10:59:16 -0800

Latency isn't the only obstacle to delivering faster web pages, but it's definitely one of the major challenges. Yet, if asked, many site owners would be hard-pressed to properly define what latency is, why it's a serious performance issue, and how it can be mitigated.

In the world of web performance, "latency" is the amount of time it takes for the host server to receive and process a request for a page object. The amount of latency is largely dependent on the distance between the user and the server.

To put this in context, if you visit a web page that has 100 objects (CSS files, images, etc), the browser has to make 100 individal requests to the site's host server in order to retrieve those objects. While some of these requests can happen concurrently, depending on the browser being used, the latency penalty can quickly add up.

Even for those sites using a content delivery network (CDN) to cache page objects closer to end users, latency is typically in the 75-140 ms range, equalling up to 2 or 3 seconds (or more) of additional load time. Although this number may seem low, it is significant when you consider that this is just one factor that can slow down your pages.

Latency can become a major problem when site owners try to serve extremely large pages to mobile users. For some mobile users, latency can reach a full second per page object. Multiply that by 300 objects and add a slow 3G network, and it's easy to understand why some pages hang endlessly when you try to view them on your smartphone.

How to mitigate the effects of latency

Tackling latency is a high priority in the web performance industry. There are several ways to do this:

Allow more requests to happen concurrently.
Shorten server round trips by bringing content closer to users.
Improve the browser cache.
Reduce the number of round trips.

Allow more concurrent requests

Newer browsers use multiple connections, which allows the browser to make simultaneous requests to the host server. Since 2008, many browsers have moved from 2 connections per domain to 6.

Google's SPDY protocol extends what the browser can do by adding a session layer atop of SSL. This allows for multiple concurrent streams over a single connection.

Shorten server round trips

Content delivery networks (CDNs) cache content in distributed servers across a region or worldwide, bringing content closer to users and therefore reducing the round trip time.

Improve the browser cache

Browser vendors are also working to improve the browser cache, so that it can (1) store files and serve them where relevant on subsequent pages in a visit, and (2) store and serve files for a repeat visit.

Reduce the total number of round trips

Front-end optimization (either automated or manual) addresses latency by consolidating page objects into bundles. Because fewer bundles means fewer trips to the server, the total latency hit is reduced. For example, a page with 63 objects could see those objects consolidated into 9 resource requests. FEO also leverages the browser cache and allows it to do a better job of storing files and serving them again where relevant. This prevents the browser from making repeat calls to the server.

Solving latency is an ongoing issue. To put it into context, last March, it was announced that a $1.5 billion fiber-optic cable project would connect the UK and Japan to reduce latency by 60 milliseconds. The reason:

The massive drop in latency is expected to supercharge algorithmic stock market trading, where a difference of a few milliseconds can gain (or lose) millions of d0llars.

How Strangeloop tackles latency

Our Site Optimizer and Mobile Optimizer solutions alleviate latency in two key ways:

Consolidate page objects into bundles. Fewer bundles means fewer trips to the server, so the total latency hit is greatly reduced. For example, a page that starts with 63 objects could see those objects consolidated into 9 resource requests.
Leverage the browser cache. Our solutions allow the cache to do a more efficient job of storing files and serving them again where relevant, so that the browser doesn’t have to make repeat calls to the server.

Questions about latency and web performance?

We have the answers. Take a moment to book your phone meeting with one of our Performance Experts.

New Web Performance Today Podcast: Geoffrey Smalling (Wine.com)

Tammy Everts — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 09:03:18 -0800

Until now, Joshua has spoken with key players in the web performance solution space. For the first podcast installment of 2013, he flips things around and talks with someone who buys the solutions -- Geoffrey Smalling, CTO at Wine.com.

With more than a million registered users, Wine.com has been ranked the #1 online wine retailer in the world by Internet Retailer magazine. Geoffrey describes the site as "the intersection between technology and wine".

In this interview, Geoffrey offers insight into how an ecommerce executive thinks about the web -- from cloud technology to performance measurement to mobile development -- and what kinds of worries keep a CTO up at night.

Listen:

Geoffrey Smalling

Previous podcasts

2013 predictions: Your smartphone will get a virus, Android will pull ahead of iOS, and the average web page will hit 2 MB

Tammy Everts — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:29:07 -0800

What better way to kickstart the new year than to make a list of predictions for the year to come? Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby offers his annual predictions for what 2013 will hold for site owners, mobile users, RUM vendors, and browser developers.

1. The average web page is going to hit 2 MB.

In May 2012, the average web page was 1 MB in size. Today, this number has grown to 1280 KB. At this rate of growth, Joshua predicts that a typical page could hit 2 MB by the end of this year -- a fact that would have shocked most people just one year ago. This page growth has serious implications for site owners in terms of bandwidth, and it could seriously hurt the mobile user experience.

2. By the end of 2013, at least half of all North Americans will own a tablet.

As of December 2012, 29% of North Americans owned a tablet. With so many tablet options currently on the market, particularly the proliferation of inexpensive new tablets, that number will it 50% by the end of the year.

2. Global mobile traffic will hit 25% of total internet traffic.

Today, mobile traffic accounts for 13% of total internet traffic. With numbers surging in China and India, that number will rise to 25% or more.

4. 25% of online shopping will be via mobile.

With the unprecedented adoption of tablets, there will be a huge increase in mobile shopping. On Black Friday, mobile phone and tablet shopping increased 6%, representing 24% of Black Friday online shopping. We expect this trend to continue throughout 2013, and 25% will become the norm for everyday mobile shopping.

5. 2013 will be the year your smartphone gets infected with a virus.

It has happen eventually. Either you or someone you know will encounter this problem.

6. Android will pull ahead of iOS smartphone adoption for good.

This will be the year that Android pulls ahead of iOS and stays ahead. Using our own team here at Strangeloop as the proverbial canary in the coal mine, our people have been moving to Android in incredible numbers. This is the most noticeable shift since 2009, when the mass exodus from Blackberry began.

7. Mobile performance will continue to be a major problem.

Mobile sites will still be slow in 2013. Many people still believe that a simplified mobile site is the answer, while others are relying on responsive web design (RWD) for their mobile salvation. The reality is that there's no single magic bullet to improve mobile performance. Companies are going to have to dig deep and apply themselves to finding a combination of solutions that work for their environment and users.

8. This will be a great year for Chrome, an okay year for Internet Explorer, and a bad year for Firefox.

By the end of 2013, Chrome will gain 45% of the worldwide browser market share -- most of which will be at the expense of Firefox. Internet Explorer will hold on to its marketshare, but not grow.

9. Two of the four largest CDNs will be acquired and integrated into larger companies.

There will be big changes in the CDN market this year.

10. Netflix will continue its decline, while Amazon video delivery will ascend.

Amazon has the means to outspend almost everyone for content -- which is exactly what consumers will be looking for.

11. DDOS attack mitigation will dominate the enterprise.

By the end of 2013, 65% of the top ecommerce sites will have a mitigation strategy in place.

12. RUM vendors will finally start to make money.

This will be the year real user monitoring moves to the main stage for analytics vendors. By the end of the year, RUM will be found on 35% of ecommerce sites.

New Web Performance Today Podcast: Theo Schlossnagle

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 09:50:27 -0800

Last week, the Web Performance Today podcast series brought interviews with Buddy Brewer and Cliff Crocker. This week, we have the last installment of 2012 -- a great interview with Theo Schlossnagle.

As CEO of OmniTI, Theo has been in the performance industry since 1997. As a leading expert on scalability, he is a sought-after speaker at tech conferences around the world. Theo sat down with Strangeloop President Joshua Bixby to discuss his tech predictions for 2013, the challenges of running Velocity Beijing, and an interesting beer data project he has been working on.

If you have feedback or suggestions for a future topic or interview subject, email podcast@strangeloopnetworks.com.

New Web Performance Today Podcasts: Cliff Crocker and Buddy Brewer

Tammy Everts — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:20:10 -0800

We're honoured to have such incredible guests on our Web Performance Podcast series. Last week, we launched the series with Patrick Meenan and Stephen Thair. This week, we have great interviews with Buddy Brewer and Cliff Crocker.

Cliff Crocker met with Strangeloop President Joshua Bixby at Velocity EU and discussed Cliff's unique performance background. As a former solution vendor at Keynote, a senior engineering manager at Walmart, and now a solution vendor at SOASTA, Cliff is able to give perspective from both sides of the solution fence. Josh and Cliff also discuss the emergence of real-user monitoring (RUM) and Big Data.

At Velocity EU, Joshua also had a chance to sit down with Buddy Brewer, co-founder and CEO of LogNormal. LogNormal was recently acquired by SOASTA and is considered one of the most innovative RUM tools on the market. Josh and Buddy talked about where RUM is going, how to teach site owners to love it, and how Buddy and co-founder Phil Tellis were able to take their startup from bootstrap to acquisition in just over a year.

If you have feedback or suggestions for a future topic or interview subject, email podcast@strangeloopnetworks.com.

Web Performance Digest: December 2012 - The impact of performance on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Obama campaign's fundraising efforts

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 15:22:45 -0800

In this month's Web Performance Digest, learn how web performance played a central role in President Obama's re-election fundraising efforts, get a full rundown of performance numbers from Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2012, and find out why Facebook is about to slow down (and why that's probably a good thing).

Responsive Responsive Design
24 Ways - December 5, 2012
Summary: Too often, responsive design means poor performance. Tim Kadlec discusses why this doesn't need to be true.

Using RUM to Calibrate your Synthetic Testing
Performance Calendar - December 2, 2012
Summary: Patrick Meenan discusses how to use real user measurement data to improve synthetic monitoring.

Meet the Obama campaign's $250 million fundraising platform
Kyle Rush - November 28, 2012
Summary: For the digital team tasked with online fundraising for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, the stakes were high and the competition was tough. In the end, the campaign generated a record $1.1 billion, with over 60% coming via the web. This post breaks down the technical details of how the digital team made it happen.

Black Friday & Cyber Monday, 2012 - the results are in!
Catchpoint - November 28, 2012
Summary: During Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2012, Catchpoint monitored the web performance of 70 websites. The goal was to compare performance of each site to see how well they handled traffic during the event. The results are in, and they show that online shopping has increased across the board. Check out this post for a rundown of key performance indicators (KPIs) from the day.

Mobile commerce's dirty little secret: it's slow as Minnesota molasses (in the winter)
VentureBeat - November 27, 2012
Summary: "Keynote tracked the speed and reliability of top U.S. e-commerce sites and found that they slowed down dramatically between Black Friday and Cyber Monday."

Web performance, at what cost? Trends for 2013
Newest Industry - November 27, 2012
Summary: While online revenue increased for retailers this holiday season - and few slowdowns or performance hiccups were reported - it's still important for site owners to continuously seek improvements. This article predicts that, in 2013, companies will be more mindful of how their sites perform.

5 reasons your website might slow down this holiday season (or anytime)
Apica - November 21, 2012
Summary: The holidays are always rife with the unforseen online. This holiday season, online revenues will reach record highs, but most of the rewards will go to companies with fast, responsive websites. Here are 5 things that could throw your web performance off course during the holidays.

Every day, Gmail users watch the loading bar for 61 years
Pingdom - November 21, 2012
Summary: The W3C web performance workshop brings together representatives from across the web performance community. Plenty of topics were addressed at this year's workshop, including Beacon API and real user monitoring (RUM) tools. Among the more interesting revelations: Gmail users spend a heck of a long time watching that progress bar.

Why Facebook's about to slow down (and that's probably good)
CNN.com - November 20, 2012
Summary: Facebook is in the process of moving all its North American users (and soon the rest of the world) to HTTPS, the type of secure connection often reserved for online banking or ecommerce transactions. As a result, your Facebook page will likely slow down, but you can opt-out if needed.

The Vanilla Web Diet
Smashing Magazine - November 19, 2012
Summary: Does the web need a diet? Despite years of development and performance advocacy, the internet has a serious obesity problem that's hurting application and page speed. This in-depth article discusses the numerous reasons behind the trend, and finishes with one bold recommendation.

Why Averages Suck and Percentiles are Great
Dynatrace.com – November 16, 2012
Summary: Averages are simple to understand and calculate, but are they effective? This article makes the case that the easy digestibility of averages makes us ignore the real performance characteristics of applications, and that percentiles paint a much more accurate picture.

Average Number of Web Page Objects Breaks 100
WebsiteOptimization.com – November 15, 2012
Summary: In just under 4 years, the average number of objects for a top 1000 web page has doubled from 49.9 to just over 100. Like the data size of a web page, the number of objects has a strong impact on performance, as it increases the number of HTTP requests.

Online viewers start leaving if video doesn’t play in 2 seconds, says study
GigaOm – November 14, 2012
Summary: As revenues decline for “traditional” web advertising mediums like banner ads, video is moving into the spotlight. But - to nobody’s surprise - video surfers are among the least patient web users. After 2 seconds, they start jumping ship. What percentage of viewers have abandoned after 5 seconds? Read on…

Failure to launch universal 4G will cost UK economy £120m this Christmas, warns eBay
Internet Retailing – November 14, 2012
Summary: Slow connection speeds are set to hit the UK economy right in the wallet this holiday season. As this eBay article outlines, the lack of universal 4G poses a major barrier for shoppers looking to complete purchases over their mobile devices.

SSL: The un-optimized frontier
Insouciant – November 13, 2012
Summary: SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) optimization is extremely complicated, but as William Chan argues, “there’s low-hanging fruit everywhere” for site owners willing to try it. In this interesting article, he takes us through an in-depth case study of SSL optimization.

Only 1 out of 5 top ecommerce sites use RUM. Why?
Web Performance Today – November 13, 2012
Summary: RUM (real user monitoring) is technology that uses Javascript to record all user interaction with a website or client interacting with a server or cloud based application. Despite being an incredibly valuable tool for site owners, relatively few are utilizing it. Why?

Why everybody interested in performance should attend CMG ‘12
Alex Podelko – November 8, 2012
Summary: CMG is an annual conference organized by the volunteer Computer Management Group, a volunteer organization. Unlike most conferences, CMG covers almost all aspects of performance, and is filled with workshops and keynote sessions. Alex Podelko breaks down why this year’s conference is a can’t-miss.

Google Chrome: Always getting faster
Google – November 8, 2012
Summary: Google Chrome has seen a 26% speed improvement over the past year, and continues to get even faster. Check out this company release to learn how they do it.

Instagram CEO: The speed of the product dictates how often it’s used
GigaOm – November 7, 2012
Summary: Instagram’s increased speed not only improves the user experience, it makes people want to use the product more – according to CEO Kevin Systrom. This article outlines why application speed correlates to increased usage.

4 Big Data Insights from 42 Billion Page Views
Forbes – November 6, 2012
Summary: New Relic’s recent analysis of 42 billion page views has yielded a number of interesting insights on browser market shares, mobile market shares, mobile device usage, and browser performance. Read on…

Key findings: Revisiting the 14 rules for faster loading websites

Tammy Everts — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 08:47:46 -0800

In 2007, performance guru Steve Souders crystallized the mission of the web performance optimization industry with his groundbreaking book High Performance Websites. Among other things, Steve's book contained 14 core optimization rules that have stood as commandments for our industry.

But with 2007 now many "web years" behind us, we're often asked whether Steve's rules still apply. As one of our customers put it: "Aren't many of the web performance rules described by Steve Souders in 2007 already outdated or made obsolete by browser innovation?"

Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby has spent the past few months revisiting and re-testing Steve's rules. For a detailed breakdown of Joshua's methodology and findings, read Joshua's three-part series of posts (see parts one, two and three) on his blog.

For a shorter summary, read on to learn about Joshua's key findings and to find out which rules have stood the test of time and which are now obsolete.

1. Most of the performance rules have stood the test of time.

Joshua had predicted that many of the rules would still be relevant, but we had also expected that browser evolution would have resulted in a greater gap between the results for older versus newer browsers.

2. Reducing roundtrips still matters.

It doesn't matter how much better modern browsers are at rendering page objects; fewer calls to the server still make a huge difference. For example, seeing that adding an Expires header leads to a 59% improvement in Chrome 19 tells us this technique is still incredibly relevant.

3. A CDN helps in some situations, but not all.

A content delivery network is a must-have for many sites, but it's not a standalone performance solution. Benefits will vary depending on which CDN you choose, as well as things like how your CDN stores content and how far their PoPs are from users.

4. Compression still helps. A lot.

Not only did Gzipping offer benefits in newer browsers, it offered even greater benefits than in older browsers. This is a really compelling finding. It shows that, despite the advances made in modern browsers, modern pages have also changed a lot — meaning that more than ever they can benefit from compression.

5. The location of stylesheets is important, but it depends on the page composition.

Start render really matters and the location of stylesheets is critical.

6. The "avoid CSS expressions" rule is obsolete… for all the right reasons.

It was interesting to see how a rule — avoid CSS expressions — has become so entrenched over time that it is no longer an issue.

7. Unless you're developing for older versions of Internet Explorer, you probably don’t need to worry about avoiding duplicate scripts.

Newer browsers take care of the duplicate script problem — possibly due to the mitigating impact of doing better parallelism and/or more aggressive caching. But be sure to know whether or not a significant portion of your traffic uses IE6 or 7. If they do, then you still need to apply this rule. If you don’t apply it, you could be missing out on an opportunity to make a 15-20% performance gain.

Performance optimization still matters.

Simply put, browser advancement has done little to negate the need for web performance optimization. For obvious reasons, we're relieved to confirm that our solutions are still necessary. :)

To learn how we apply core performance best practices -- along with dozens of our own patented rules -- in our web acceleration products, talk to a Strangeloop Performance Expert.

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Key findings: Revisiting the 14 rules for faster loading websites

1. Most of the performance rules have stood the test of time.

2. Reducing roundtrips still matters.

3. A CDN helps in some situations, but not all.

4. Compression still helps. A lot.

5. The location of stylesheets is important, but it depends on the page composition.

6. The "avoid CSS expressions" rule is obsolete… for all the right reasons.

7. Unless you're developing for older versions of Internet Explorer, you probably don’t need to worry about avoiding duplicate scripts.

Performance optimization still matters.