Although 80% of web performance problems are typically due to front-end issues (Souders 2009), back-end bottlenecks can slow your site down to a crawl. One thing to watch out for is when static pages load relatively quickly, while dynamic pages load slowly. This article shows what to look for when a server slows down a web site.
Surveys and Statistics
Serving 2012 Olympic Tickets: London2012 15, CoSport 0 – olympic website performance
The race is on to get tickets to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, England. Millions of people (some 2.3 to 2.7 million signed up to request tickets so far) are clamoring to attend events featuring the likes of Michael Phelps, Ian Thorpe, and Usain Bolt. To distribute the load in the initial ticket request phase, Olympic organizers are using a batch system to accept requests over a six week period. Even with this even-handed approach, the servers were under tremendous load in the early hours of this past Tuesday. We investigate and show how performance could be improved.
What to Expect from a Web Performance Audit – get better search engine rankings with website performance audits
With Google now factoring page loading speed into search engine rankings, having a fast website has become even more important. Exactly how much of a factor speed is in search rankings is open to debate, although anecdotal evidence suggests that speed can affect rankings. One of the first steps companies need to take in improving their website speed is a web performance audit. This article details what to expect in a web performance analysis.
Velocity 2010 Web Performance Conference
I just got back from the Velocity 2010 Web Performance and Operations Conference in Santa Clara, California. Now in its third year, the conference is a must-see if you are a web performance or network operations engineer. And engineers were aplenty this year, the conference was sold out with more than 1500 attendees.
Page Speed Factored into Google Search Rankings
Google has incorporated the speed of a web page into its search engine rankings. While
this new signal currently affects only a small percentage of US sites, Google’s announcement officially links performance with search engine marketing.
Memory Markers and the Subjective Duration of Experience – consumer recall of the duration of rich and impoverished experiences in cognitive psychology
Online marketing has evolved from selling products to creating engaging experiences for consumers. New research shows that how long these experiences seem to last, however, depends on how rich the experience and time of recall (Ahn, Liu, and Soman 2009). The “memory marker” model helps explain this phenomenon and the time distortion that some people experience during and after immersive online flow experiences. Web developers need to balance the need to create rich online experiences with tolerable download times and scant distractions.
Web Page Performance Thesis – web page response time measurement, modeling and monitoring
For his doctoral thesis at the University of Glasgow, Thiam Kian Chiew studied web page performance. As part of his research, Chiew explored the different factors that affect web page speed, testing and modeling the key components to web page download times. His findings are summarized below.
Usability Study: Men Need Speed – web usability criteria show gender differences
The importance of download speed, for most Web users, has long been established (King 2008). Fast response times foster higher flow states (Skadberg & Kimmel 2004), higher conversion rates (Akamai 2007), higher perceived trustworthiness (Nielsen 1999), and lower user frustration (Ceaparu et al. 2004). But, previous research has also found that differences in gender, age and computer self-efficacy can moderate user priorities. This article explores the differences among men and women in their desire for speed.
Study: Web Users Prefer Speed Over Customization
Web users want site designs to be both easy to use and helpful, as prior human-computer interaction (HCI) studies have shown. But most such studies haven’t ranked interface design features in achieving these objectives. Since this knowledge can positively impact site design or re-design, this article will ask and answer the question – is there a single interface design feature that maximizes both user goals; usability and utility? If so, how important is this feature compared to others?
Average Top 100 Weblog Performance Survey – results of load size analysis of technorati top 100 weblogs compared to top 1000 websites
How do the top 100 weblogs compare with the 1000 most popular websites? What are the differences in size and performance between these two samples? What conclusions can we draw about advertising use between and within the two surveys? To find out, we updated a survey by Pingdom, an uptime monitoring company based in Sweden, who recently analyzed the top 100 blog home pages listed in Technorati for their size, composition, and web site performance. This article summarizes Pingdom’s findings, adds a CSS analysis, compares the top 100 blogs with the top 1000 websites, and offers some advice.