Strangeloop Announces Unique Solution for Accelerating Web Sites via the Cloud
Site Optimizer Is Proven to Increase Ecommerce Conversion, Cart Size, Revenue, and Search Engine Ranking – Even for Sites Already Using CDNs and ADCs

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Vancouver, B.C. - June 23, 2010 - In 2010, companies in the US will spend $4.2 billion on site acceleration. Despite this, the average Fortune 500 website still takes 7 seconds to load. Strangeloop today announced the release of Site Optimizer, a powerful web acceleration product that shaves valuable seconds from page load times, resulting in proven ROI.

"Web speed has become the next competitive battlefield for any organization that takes online business seriously,” says Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby. “Consumers demand increasingly faster websites, and there is a growing body of mainstream research that shows a direct relationship between site speed and revenue.”

In 2009, Aberdeen Group found that, on average, a 1-second delay in page load time equals a 7% decrease in conversions. Similarly, the shopping megasite Shopzilla increased revenues by 12% after making its site faster. Even small increases in site speed can have a dramatic impact on the bottom line: Amazon saw a 1% revenue increase for every 100 milliseconds of improvement.

The web performance problem today
Despite the clear impetus to create faster websites, the growing complexity of today’s sites results in increasingly unsatisfactory load times.

At one end of the problem is the size and complexity of how web pages are created. A typical web page is a rich and complex entity, composed of 75+ objects that add up to, on average, a staggering 500k. These pages are composed and served in a single one-size-fits-all format to all site visitors.

At the other end of the problem is the non-standardization of browsers. Every browser has its own unique and exacting demands as to how it prefers to digest and display pages – demands that are unmet as servers deliver the same huge, inefficient, one-size-fits-none pages to all visitors, regardless of their browser type.

The acceleration solution landscape
Of the entire Fortune 500, there is only one site that actually meets the 2-second standard for page load time. This is despite billions of dollars invested in network accelerators (ADCs), content delivery networks (CDNs), and in-house development projects.

ADCs are designed to reduce payload and provide server offload, while CDNs bring content closer to users. While both of these solutions are valuable tools in a company’s performance toolkit, neither addresses the performance problem from the browser perspective. Up until now, this issue has represented a huge and untapped opportunity for web performance optimization.

Site OptimizerTM is the first product to tackle the core of today’s performance problem via the cloud
Site Optimizer is a web acceleration product that offers enterprises – from ecommerce sites to SaaS delivery – a powerful set of features that work together to provide roundtrip reduction, rapid rendering, and dynamic browser caching. Site Optimizer analyzes every page of a site from the browser’s perspective and optimizes each page so that it is delivered most efficiently to each browser type.

Site Optimizer works in conjunction with other acceleration solutions to compound performance optimization. In a typical scenario, a site that uses a CDN and an ADC finds that it is able to reduce page load time by 30%, from 9.5 seconds to 6.2 seconds. By adding Site Optimizer to the mix, the same site cuts its already accelerated load time by more than half, down to 2.8 seconds.

Site Optimizer is the first such web acceleration product available as a cloud-based service. Because the Site Optimizer service does not require software, server or network changes, it can be implemented easily and yield immediate returns.

“Service-based solutions, which eliminate many of the implementation barriers typically encountered with hardware and software solutions, can offer rapid ROI and quickly deliver business value. Improved website performance can potentially increase the time that a user spends on a site, increase user engagement, increase revenues, and decrease support costs.” says Gartner Research Director Lydia Leong.

Site Optimizer offers fast and immediately measurable results:

"After implementing Site Optimizer, we improved our download speed by 50%, which not only resulted in a better conversion rate of 9% but also increased our cart size by 6%,” says Parag Patel, CTO of leading online auto parts provider AutoAnything. “Both of these increases have directly impacted our bottom line in a very short timeframe." 

Key Facts

  • The Strangeloop Site OptimizerTM is the first acceleration product to address critical web performance problems caused by non-standardized browsers. Site Optimizer analyzes every page of a site from the browser’s perspective and optimizes each page so that it is delivered most efficiently to each browser type.
  • Site Optimizer is available as a virtual appliance and a hardware appliance. It is also offered as a service via the cloud, making it the first such solution to be available in the cloud. Because the Site Optimizer service does not require software, server or network changes, it can be implemented easily and yield immediate returns.
  • Site Optimizer is suitable for any enterprise, from ecommerce and social media to enterprise software and SaaS delivery.
  • Site Optimizer is an integral part of any company’s web performance toolkit. Working together, Site Optimizer, in conjunction with a CDN and an ADC, has been proven to cumulatively reduce page load time by more than two-thirds. A typical implementation sees load times decrease from 9.5 seconds to less than 3 seconds.
  • Site Optimizer has proven ROI, with some companies seeing full ROI within just weeks of implementation. 


Quotes for attribution

  • Lydia Leong, Research Director, Gartner -"Service-based solutions, which eliminate many of the implementation barriers typically encountered with hardware and software solutions, can offer rapid ROI and quickly deliver business value. Improved website performance can potentially increase the time that a user spends on a site, increase user engagement, increase revenues, and decrease support costs.”
  • Jackie Reid, VP Project Services & Program Manager for the Visa Luxury Hotel Collection - "We were incredibly impressed at how quickly Strangeloop improved our site’s performance. On average, they cut our page load time in half – and even more in key markets such as Asia and Europe."
  • Parag Patel, CTO, AutoAnything.com - "The Strangeloop Site Optimizer has had a bottom line impact, increasing our conversions 8.5%. I would not think of not having it at this point. It’s critical to our business."
  • Parag Patel, CTO, AutoAnything.com - "I would tell our competition not to use it. If it’s not our competition, I would recommend focusing your engineering efforts on providing features to customers, and use appliances like Site Optimizer to provide acceleration that is not necessarily feature related, but provides a bottom-line benefit. Focus on your core strengths. Emulating what Strangeloop does for us is not a core strength."
     


Download: Documents, Images, Research

Strangeloop documents:

Strangeloop images:

Strangeloop Logo - (10.5KB, PNG)

Strangeloop Site Optimizer Architecture (154KB, JPG)

Site Optimizer Appliance (2.51MB, PNG)

Research

Research Findings (1.22MB, JPG)
Strangeloop research: Websites are increasingly complex Websites Increasingly Complex (147KB, JPG)
Strangeloop research: User's web speed demands are increasing User Demands Increasing (113KB, JPG)
Strangeloop research: It's a multi-browser world Multi-Browser World (140KB, JPG) 


Links


About Strangeloop

Strangeloop is a leader in providing front-end web optimization solutions that enable companies to speed up the page load times of their websites and enterprise applications. Founded in 2006, Strangeloop’s original product offering was the Strangeloop AS1000, a delivery-focused accelerator for ASP.NET. In 2010, the company launched Site Optimizer, a next-generation web performance solution that offers a powerful set of features that work together to provide roundtrip reduction, rapid rendering, and dynamic browser caching. Site Optimizer is specifically designed to simplify web content optimization from a lengthy and complex coding process into an automated function. Site Optimizer makes Strangeloop’s website optimization capabilities available to companies in different environments: as a hardware appliance, as a virtual appliance, and as a service via the cloud. Strangeloop is based in Vancouver, BC. For more information, visit www.strangeloopnetworks.com.

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