Web Performance Digest: October 2012

31 October 2012  -   Tags: ,

Contributed by Tammy Everts. 

At the end of each month, we update our Web Performance Hub with a collection of the best articles, case studies, videos, and presentations from around the web performance community.  

This month's Web Performance Digest features a handful of great new links, many of which focus on performance measurement tools and tips. Read about how Google's new Tag Manager reduces the impact of third-party scripts, find out how cleaning up HTML and CSS improves page load, and learn how to get "old-school" with your performance testing.  

New links include:

Web performance and ops - Weekend must-read articles #34
Including another company's roundup within our roundup? It's a bit meta, but Pingdom's weekly collection of links is worth it. Their post covers topics including web development, networking, webops, security, and other "geeky topics". 

Testing your load times the old-school way
With all the advanced technology available for testing page load times, site owners can sometimes lose sight of the real user experience. This post breaks down a few "old-school" testing methods for validating your test results.

Mobile Web Performance 
Mobile is quickly overtaking desktop, which makes mobile performance all the more important. This slide deck from Roland Guelle breaks down why mobile is different, what users want, and why performance matters more than ever. 

Site Speed: Case Studies, Tips and Tools for Improving Your Conversion Rates
The people at Econsultancy have put together a great roundup of case studies, tips and tools from web performance industry leaders. Key topics include user expectations, the impact of slow sites on retail profits, and how site speed affects SEO.

Laura Swanson Webperf Days Case Study: Clean Your HTML and CSS
UX Manager Laura Swanson presents a case study on how cleaning up HTML, CSS and images improved page load time on Dyn.com. She also discusses how code reviews can help maintain performance and how her team benchmarks.

Let's Do Simple Stuff to Make Our Websites Faster
Four easy things you can do to make your website faster. Enough said!

37 Lessons Learned on the Performance Front Lines
Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby recently gave the keynote at WebPerfDays in London. His presentation, entitled "37 Lessons I've Learned on the Web Performance Front Lines", covered key industry findings from the past three years. Check out the slide deck here. 

WebPerfDays: Performance Tools 
Also at WebPerfDays, Steve Souders asked attendees two important questions: 1) What’s your favourite web performance tool, and 2) What tools are missing? He got some interesting responses.

Speed is a feature: Why a Slow Mobile Web Experience Means Lost Revenue 
There's no point creating a content-rich mobile website if the pages take too long to load. In likening high-volume data movement through 3G networks to "trying to shove a pig down a toilet using a Twiglet," one manager cites examples of what is/isn’t an acceptable mobile page size. Perhaps not the most delilcate analogy, but we'll roll with it.

Google's Tag Manager Wants to Make Your Site a Little Bit Faster
The glut of marketing analytics services available to help site owners monitor performance is slowing down websites. With Tag Manager, Google has introduced all-in-one coding that aims to reduce this performance impact by creating single tags that link up with all tag services at once. This interesting TechCrunch article breaks down the features.

Check out the rest of the Web Performance Hub for hundreds more links to the best selection of performance-related resources on the web.

We tend to all hold pre-conceived notions as to which browsers people use at work versus what they use at home. As very little data is available on the subject, these semi-educated guesses are mostly based on anecdotal evidence.
There’s plenty of aggregate data on overall browser usage, but we at Strangeloop wanted to delve further in hopes of answering a few lingering questions: How does usage vary throughout the day? Does everyone switch to Chrome or Safari at night? Do users actually like Internet Explorer?  
Methodology
1. Gathered monthly traffic data from two large North America-based ecommerce sites.
2. Isolated traffic for the four major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.
3. Aggregated data for each day of the week and plotted it on a graph for each site.
4. Aggregated data for each hour of the day and plotted it on a graph for each site.
By the numbers…
Browser usage throughout the week
(pic 1)
(pic 2)
Observations
• The vast majority of visitors used Internet Explorer
• Safari traffic increased dramatically over the weekend
• Weekend traffic flatlined or decreased for every browser except Safari
• Friday is a big browsing/shopping day across all browsers
Browser usage throughout the day
(pic 3)
(pic 4)
Our main observation from these graphs is that Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome use decreases towards the end of the day, just as Safari is trending upwards.  
Takeaways
Though this data represents only two websites, we can comfortably draw two conclusions:
1. Internet Explorer should remain the default browser for testing North American ecommerce sites. Though usage dips at night, the majority of browsing/shopping is still done on this browser.
2. The good times are rolling on Safari. By day’s end, users are flocking to this browser. We don’t know for sure, but some here in the office have theorized that this is due to skyrocketing growth in the iPad market. Either way, the trend is quite prominent. 
Once again, this data represents a very small sample size. We’re still in the early stages of the browser wars, so it remains to be seen if these trends stay consistent. 
For more on the browser wars, check out last month’s post “Has IE8 run its course as a default test browser