“Strangeloop offers the only product that can handle enterprise scale via appliance or cloud, and they are the only company with experience in accelerating global sites."

"We're not an Amazon or a Facebook, who have elite teams of developers who specialize in FEO. With Site Optimizer, we could get the same advanced expertise and insight, via a product."

"With automated front-end optimization, Strangeloop took us much farther, much faster than we could have gone on our own."

"You can spend a lot of time trying to enhance the performance of software functionality, whereas installing the Site Optimizer accomplishes a milestone leap forward that is just amazing."

"We were incredibly impressed at how quickly Strangeloop improved our site's performance. On average, they cut our load time in half – even more in key markets such as Asia and Europe."

"Strangeloop significantly improves the speed of our application, which has resulted in an increase in productivity for our employees, and ultimately has contributed to our bottom line."

“Strangeloop has obviously improved conversion and revenue for us. When you affect conversion by 9%, that is very significant on an annual basis."

"Before testing Site Optimizer, 12% of our site traffic hit our goal of 2-second page load. During our three-month trial run, that number leaped to 87%."

According to Shop.org, between Black Friday and New Year's Eve 2012, online shoppers could spend a record-breaking $96 billion. But how does this number play out in terms of shopper behaviour? Why are more and more people shopping online? How much will they spend via their mobile devices? Why are they more likely to abandon their online shopping carts?

Why are web users so averse to slow pages? As the infographic below demonstrates, it has little to do with impatience and plenty to do with the complexities of human concentration and short-term memory.

A downloadable high-res poster version of the infographics contained in our 2012 State of Mobile Ecommerce Performance.

Our survey of 200 top retail websites found that the median home page took more than 11 seconds to load over 3G for each smartphone.

Our survey of 200 top retail websites found that the Samsung Galaxy S3 (Android) phone surpassed the iPhone 5 on LTE.

Our survey of 200 top retail websites found that a significant number of sites took 20+ seconds to load -- well above the reported user wait time threshold of 4 seconds.

Our survey of 200 top retail websites found that, over 3G, the iPad 2 rendered pages 22% faster than the Samsung Galaxy tablet.

Our survey of 200 top retail websites found that 68 companies -- one out of three -- do not have a mobile-only site.

Our survey of 200 top retail websites found 64 sites either would not direct to the full site or did not have a "view full site" option.

Our survey of 200 top retail websites found that 34% serve the stripped-down mobile site to the Samsung Galaxy tablet.

A downloadable high-res poster version of the infographics contained in our Fall 2012 State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed and Website Performance.

Our survey of 2,000 top retail websites found that the median first view load time is 6.50 seconds on Internet Explorer 9. This is a 9% slowdown from 2011.

The average web page has 5% more requests in 2011 than 2010, an indicator that pages are getting bigger. 

Top sites are slower, not faster, than the rest. Why? They require, on average, 33 more resource requests.

A significant number of sites are still not following core performance best practices.

While 17% more sites use a CDN in 2011 than in 2010, this doesn't equal faster load times. The average site using a CDN is slightly slower than the average site without a CDN.

Internet Explorer 10 edged out Firefox 13 as the fastest major browser, and is 8% faster than Chrome 20.

View and download the poster version of our web performance infographics.

57% of online consumers will abandon a website after waiting 3 seconds for a page to load.

More than half of mobile users expect sites to load as quickly on their mobile devices as they do on their home computers.

There's a distinct difference between perceived speed and actual speed. When it comes to web performance, this difference works against us.

A high-res poster version of our collection of mobile infographics.

Mobile-specific websites offer only a partial solution to mobile performance challenges.

74 percent of mobile users say that 5 seconds is the maximum amount of time they'll wait before abandoning a page.

We are only seeing the beginning of mobile commerce. Forrester predicts 500% growth in the next five years.

In just a few years, the number of mobile-only users will explode from 14 million to 788 million.

In 2010, approximately 81.3 million people used their mobile devices to do everything from make in-app payments to purchasing mobile coupons. By 2014, that number will have grown by 600%.

New data says that more than half of smartphone users have made purchases through their phone.

Between 1995 and 2010, the average web page grew from 14k with 2.3 objects to 484k with 75 objects.

A site that typically earns $100,000 a day could lose $2.5 million in sales this year.

In 2009, Shopzilla became the poster child for web performance when it shaved almost 5 seconds from its page load times and increased revenue by 7-12%.

A mere five years ago, this was one of the earliest reported studies on the relationship between site speed and revenue.

In a 2009 study, AOL found that visitors in the top ten percentile of site speed viewed, on average, 7.5 pages per site visit. Visitors in the bottom ten percentile viewed just 5 pages per visit.

In 2008, Yahoo! reported that making pages just 400 milliseconds slower resulted in a traffic drop of up to 9%.

By making just a few minor tweaks to top landing pages, Mozilla estimated that they drove an additional 60 million Firefox downloads per year.

A downloadable high-res poster version of the infographics contained in our 2012 State of the Union: E-Commerce Page Speed and Website Performance

The average load time was 10 seconds for a user visiting via Internet Explorer 7. Load times for newer browsers were better -- ranging from 7.12 to 7.5 seconds -- but none came close to the ideal 2-second page load.

First view load times (meaning a visitor is visiting the site for the first time) was 10% faster in 2011, while repeat view (returning visitor who may have some page objects cached in their browser) was 20% slower.

The average web page has 8% more requests in 2011 than 2010, an indicator that pages are getting bigger. On top of that, Page Speed scores have declined.

Top sites are slower, not faster, than the rest. Why? They require, on average, 21 more resource requests.

Pages loaded 29% faster in Internet Explorer 9 than Internet Explorer 7. IE9 and Firefox 7 were each about 5% faster than Chrome.

While 17% more sites use a CDN in 2011 than in 2010, this doesn't equal faster load times. The average site using a CDN is slightly slower than the average site without a CDN.

View the six infographics below in high-resolution poster format.

China's luxury consumer base is expected to expand from 80 million to 180 million people by 2020.

In 2015, there will be 780 million internet users in China. Many of these will be mobile internet users, due to the growing numbers of inexpensive mobile devices.

In 2015, China will have 520 million online shoppers, compared to 200 million in the US.

The average load time for luxury brand home pages in urban China is 16.2 seconds. The optimal page load time is 2 seconds.

A page load time of 0.1 seconds gives the illusion of instantaneous response, while 10 seconds makes us lose our train of thought.

Despite the fact that developers would like to phase it out completely, 60% of online shopping in China is done on Internet Explorer 6. 

How, when, and where people spend on Valentine's Day

The Web Performance Today podcast is a weekly series of interviews with the innovators and thought leaders who are driving our increasingly dynamic industry. Hosted by Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby, this series offers valuable insight into the research and trends that drive the web performance space.

As a senior software engineer at Walmart Labs, Aaron Kulick is in the enviable position of being able to pioneer what Walmart is doing with its big data strategy. He and Joshua talked about what it's like working with bigger and bigger data sets, the long term utility of big data, and whether or not there's much room left for innovation and learning on the RUM journey.

In this week's podcast, Joshua welcomes his favourite tech blogger, Lori MacVittie, who's probably forgotten more about web performance than most of us ever knew. Lori talks about her path from technology editor to application delivery evangelist, the wild west of standards around metrics, and why she loves the smell of melted motherboards in the morning.

Mike Belshe is the guy who took on the huge job of making the web faster when he was at Google, and actually won by creating the SPDY protocol. Now, Mike sits at the helm of Twist, a mobile app that could revolutionize the way we say "I'm on my way!" Mike talked with Joshua about Twist, SPDY, and the inner workings of the IETF.

This week's guest is one of the pioneers in proving the business benefits of performance. Several years back, while working at Shopzilla, Tim Morrow presented one of the earliest public case studies proving the link between page speed and business metrics. Now at Betfair, he's leading the charge in creating customer-facing service level agreements for performance. In this week's podcast, Tim and Joshua talk about third-party scripts, tag management, Betfair's exciting new product release, and the pitfalls of betting on Beyonce.

Joshua Marantz is a key mover and shaker at Google, with PageSpeed, mod_pagespeed, and a host of other cool projects. In this week's podcast, he talks about a number of pressing issues: how to handle concerns about 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.

As co-founder of Turbobytes, Aaron Peters is doing some extremely innovative stuff on the CDN front. He and Joshua talk 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.

In this week's podcast, Joshua talks with Torbit CEO Josh Fraser about discovering the performance path, how performance has changed from a technical metric to a business metric, advice for young entrepreneurs, and tech predictions for 2013. (Edited on 01/02/2013).

Not only is Lonely Planet an excellent online resource for travellers, they also take performance very, very seriously. In this week's podcast, Joshua talks with Mark Jennings, Technical Operations Manager at Lonely Planet Online, about how to sell performance within your own company, Lonely Planet's phenomenal growth in mobile traffic, and the secret of not just making your pages fast, but keeping them fast.

As a cornerstone of the Make the Web Fast team at Google, what Ilya Grigorik doesn't know about web performance probably isn't worth knowing. In this week's podcast, he and Joshua talk about why big CDNs need to adopt SPDY, how mobile is the next big frontier for Google, and what it's like sharing an office with Steve Souders.

Eric Goldsmith is a pioneer in the field of data mining and has been analyzing big data from the AOL website for nearly a decade. This week, Joshua talks with Eric about the original days of WebPagetest, why we have to think like data scientists, and how the RUM business has changed in the past seven years.

Up till now in the podcast, Joshua has talked with key players in the web performance solution space. This week, he flips things around and talks to someone who buys the solutions. Geoffrey Smalling is CTO at Wine.com, which is not only world's number one online wine store, but also leads the pack in its forward-looking approach to performance monitoring and optimization. If you've ever wondered how a CTO thinks about performance, Geoffrey offers some great insights.

If you've ever gone to a Velocity conference, you'll know scalability expert Theo Schlossnagle for his brilliant presentations. This week, Joshua talks with Theo about what a scalability expert actually does every day, Theo's tech predictions for 2013, and beer consumption as a data project.

At Velocity EU, Joshua had a chance to talk with Cliff Crocker, formerly senior engineering manager at Walmart.com and currently VP Product at SOASTA. They talked about Cliff's unique performance background, the emergence of real-user monitoring (RUM) and Big Data, and the "creepiness factor" of having access to so much user information.

At the Velocity EU conference last month, Joshua was able to chat with Buddy Brewer, co-founder and CEO of LogNormal. They talked about where real user measurement (RUM) is going, how to teach site owners to learn to love it, and how to take a company from bootstrap startup to acquisition in just one year.

At Velocity EU, Joshua talked to Patrick Meenan, one of the creators of WebPagetest -- the seminal testing tool for the performance industry. They talked about WebPagetest's humble beginnings on a corner of Patrick's desk at AOL, where WebPagetest is going, and why Patrick should never get in the UI business.

At Velocity EU, Joshua met up with Stephen Thair, director of Seriti Consulting, head of the Web Performance Meetup Group in London, member of the Velocity program committee, and organizer of the inaugural London WebPerfDays unconference that followed Velocity EU this year. They talked about what exactly an "unconference" is, how to craft a successful conference pitch, and the most memorable slides of Velocity.

Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby was invited to speak at Web Performance Days in London to present the findings from Strangeloop's 2012 State of Mobile Commerce report. [October 2012]

On October 3 at Velocity EU, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby unveiled the findings from the first study ever conducted of mobile performance over cellular networks. [October 2012]

In this O'Reilly Media webcast, Joshua talks about why measuring 3G performance is important, and what kind of evolution we can expect to see from mobile networks, browsers, site development, and performance best practices in 2013. [September 2012]

In this O'Reilly Media webcast, Joshua talks about why measuring 3G performance is important, and what kind of evolution we can expect to see from mobile networks, browsers, site development, and performance best practices in 2013. [September 2012]

Two years ago, Velocity attendees watched as an unsuspecting website was subjected to automated optimization before their eyes in the workshop "The 90-Minute Optimization Life Cycle" (rated one of the top 10 sessions of Velocity 2010). At Velocity 2012, Strangeloop VP Technology Hooman Beheshti returned, this time to demonstrate – in real time – the impact of advanced mobile optimization techniques on another unsuspecting website. [June 2012]

If you've ever looked for hard data about the combined benefits of a CDN+FEO solution, you'll be interested in the slides from Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby's talk at the 2012 Content Delivery Summit. [May 2012]

Strangeloop VP Technology Hooman Beheshti was invited to co-chair the Cloud Performance Summit at the 2012 Cloud Connect conference. In addition to chairing, Hooman also presented this session, which provides an excellent overview of front end optimization (sometimes known as web content optimization). [February 2012]

Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby was invited to speak to the San Francisco & Silicon Valley Web Performance Meetup about advanced mobile optimization. [January 2012]

In this presentation at the 2011 Velocity Berlin conference, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby discusses research findings on the relationship between faster mobile sites and business metrics such as revenue, page views, and customer abandonment. [November 2011]

This session -- presented by Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby at the 2011 Web Performance Summit -- summarizes the benefits of a faster website or web app, then delves into a series of how-tos for creating a business case for web performance in your organization. [May 2011]

In this session, delivered to the London Web Performance Meetup Group, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby walks through case studies of Strangeloop customers like AutoAnything.com and Artbeads.com, showing how mortal companies have improved performance and achieved measurable success. [May 2011]

Overview of performance automation, including basic terminology and concepts, history, market overview and challenges, and a case study demonstrating automation in action. [October 2010]

Hands-on demo showing the impact of various optimization treatments -- including keep-alives, compression, and caching -- on the Velocity website. [June 2010]

A follow-up to the 2009 presentation of the same name (see below), this presents Strangeloop’s long-term research into the relationship between web performance and business benefits. [June 2010]

Using empirical data gathered from real websites, VP Product Hooman Beheshti looks at the impact of web performance on the key performance indicators that drive various kinds of web businesses. [December 2009]

Companies like eBay/PayPal, Visa, Wine.com, and Petco rely on Strangeloop to speed up their websites and enterprise applications.

Companies looking for a fast, scalable, cost-effective solution for accelerating their website’s performance pick the Strangeloop Site Optimizer.

Mobile Site Optimizer is the only performance solution that addresses the unique needs of mobile users

Online shoppers today are more likely than ever to abandon their shopping carts -- even after taking the time and effort to browse and fill them. Natural Born Conversion Killers is filled with information about shopping cart abdndonment. The report includes information on why it is so common, and how you can fix it.

This holiday season, online shoppers will spend a staggering $96 billion, up 12% from last year. And as always, web performance will play a crucial role in determining which online retailers are most profitable.

In July and September of 2012, we tested 200 leading retail websites and asked the question: how do top sites really perform for mobile users over cellular connections?

In July and September of 2012, we tested 200 leading retail websites and asked the question: how do top sites really perform for mobile users over cellular connections?

In July and August of 2012, we tested the load times and page composition of the home pages of 2,000 leading retail websites. We found the median page load is 9% slower than it was in our November 2011 survey of the same sites. We also found that Internet Explorer 10 served pages 8% faster than Chrome 20. [September 2012]

This report is part of our ongoing commitment to benchmarking and analyzing the performance of leading e-commerce websites. Last year, in our inaugural State of the Union, we were surprised to find that the average load time for the home page of a top 2,000 retail website was 11.21 seconds. This finding flew in the face of the general belief that websites are getting faster. [January 2012]

There is a general assumption in the online retail industry that websites are getting faster. In November 2010, we tested this assumption by conducting performance tests on the home pages of the top 2,000 retail websites, as ranked by Alexa. This report presents the results – the key finding being that retail sites are 60% slower than expected. [January 2011]

While many global markets today are flat or shrinking, China is booming. This success extends to luxury brands, which are struggling to stay afloat elsewhere in today’s tenuous economic climate. [August 2011]

To discuss our new Ecetera partnership, as well as a wide range of web performance topics, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby and Ecetera Solution Architect Erik Schultz had a 40-minute webinar entitled How to Double the Speed of Your Web Applications. [November 2012]

In June, Joshua Bixby was invited to speak at the 2012 Content Delivery Summit about how a combined CDN-plus-FEO solution delivers a truly powerhouse performance boost. Videos of all the Summit sessions are now available. [June 2012]

Mac Slocum of O'Reilly Radar interviews Strangeloop VP Technology Hooman Beheshti about the state of mobile performance at Velocity 2012. [June 2012]

As part of the Velocity podcast series, Mac Slocum of O'Reilly Radar interviewed Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby about measuring and making sense out of increased performance. [April 2012]

In this presentation at the 2011 Velocity Berlin conference, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby discusses research findings on the relationship between faster mobile sites and business metrics such as revenue, page views, and customer abandonment. This data was gathered over many months of the beta of our Mobile Site Optimizer. [November 2011]

Maggie Rulli interviews Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby on CIO Insight. [May 2011]

Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby explains how to automate web performance to a packed house at the New York Web Performance Meetup. [October 2010]

Network World invited Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby to illustrate the performance problems in the current web landscape — from server time and round trips to browser differentiation and user expectations. [June 2010]

In part two of the Network World video, Joshua Bixby talks about the solution landscape, including CDNs and ADCs. He explain why these don't address the opportunity for web content optimization (WCO). [June 2010]

Mac Slocum, Online Managing Editor at O'Reilly, interviews Joshua Bixby at Velocity 2010. They talk about mobile web performance, the difficulties of data gathering, site speed and SEO, and easy ways that "mortal companies" can optimize their site. [June 2010]

In this presentation at the 2010 Velocity conference, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby discusses research findings on the relationship between site speed and key business metrics. [June 2010]

Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby gives an in-depth explanation of 10 of our advanced mobile optimization techniques, including Mobile SuperCache, Touch Event Conversion, and Dynamic Payload Decision Making. [Length: 16:01]

Hooman Beheshti, VP of Product at Strangeloop, walks through how to use free, simple tools -- such as Google Analytics and WebPagetest -- to perform a page speed/revenue analysis of your e-commerce site. [Length: 11:03]

Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby walks you through the steps to create a business case and an action plan for tackling web performance in your company. [Length: 27:20]

Joshua Bixby reviews the most commonly used page test tools, outlining their strengths and weaknesses and what kind of data you can expect from each. [Length: 27:11]

Joshua Bixby demonstrates a fast, effective process for establishing a performance baseline within your industry. [Length: 30:53]

Hooman Beheshti, Strangeloop's VP Product, demystifies waterfall charts – what they are, why they're important, and how to interpret them – in this straightforward, step-by-step tutorial. [Length: 28:55]

Joshua Bixby reviews waterfalls in greater technical detail, demonstrating how to use waterfalls to diagnose and isolate common web application performance problems.[Length: 23:00]

Inspired by our popular blog post of the same name, this webinar goes into greater depth about three speed-zapping third-party culprits on your site. [Length: 19:40]

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a key concern for every web site manager, Page rank can mean the difference between success and failure for a business that depends on internet traffic.

The goals and methods of performance measurement have evolved, along with the development of new techniques for constructing web pages and applications.

This whitepaper summarizes the case for site optimization and provides an overview of strategies and tactics you can use to speed up your sites, with an emphasis on addressing mobile performance issues.

An overview of the performance challenges faced by modern web applications and current approaches to addressing them. This paper then describes Strangeloop's proprietary website optimization technology, its architecture, and its methodology.