Web Site Optimization: Maximum Website Performance

Web site optimization produces highly competitive web sites that out-perform on every measure; traffic, speed, conversion rates, sell-throughs, and, most importantly, return on your investment.

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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.

By Website Optimization on December 29, 2008

Evolution of the Web from 2000 to 2007 – average web object size quintuples since 2000

The Web has changed dramatically over the past seven years. During that time the Web has moved from a static one-way medium toward a dynamic platform for interactive services such as photo and video sharing portals. In a comparative survey of data traces served over the Web from 2000 and 2007, University of Twente researchers found that the nature of web sites has changed (Sadre and Haverkort, 2008).

By Website Optimization on November 30, 2008

O’Reilly Books on Web Performance

There are a number of books published now on Web Performance. Here is a summary of the books available on the topic, mainly from O’Reilly.

By Website Optimization on October 20, 2008

Solid-State Drive Web Server Test – upgrade server speed with benchmarking tools

This article shows how response times improved after upgrading to a new dedicated web server with solid-state drives and faster processors. With the increased load due to our free Web Page Analyzer, we realized that a different server configuration may be necessary. We first benchmarked our current server to establish a baseline. Then we tested a faster server to see the improvement in response times. After the upgrade, the web server tested 35% faster. In a future article, we’ll look at moving the resource hungry analyzer tool to a separate server to improve performance for the WebsiteOptimization.com website.

By Website Optimization on October 17, 2008

Optimize Drop Shadows – minimize image size with graphic optimization of drop shadow and photoshop

Drop shadows add impact to web graphics, but they also impact file size. You can minimize the resulting file size of palette-based images such as GIFs and PNGs by reducing the complexity of drop shadows. This article shows how to create optimized drop-shadows in Photoshop to minimize the size of web graphics.

By Website Optimization on August 18, 2008

The Psychology of Web Performance – how slow response times affect user psychology

Previous research has shown that user frustration increases when page load times exceed eight to 10 seconds, without feedback (Bouch, Kuchinsky, and Bhatti 2000, King 2003)., Newer evidence shows that broadband users are less tolerant of web page delays than narrowband users. A JupiterResearch survey found that 33% of broadband shoppers are unwilling to wait more than four seconds for a web page to load, whereas 43% of narrowband users will not wait more than six seconds (Akamai 2006).

By Website Optimization on May 30, 2008

Inline Images with Data URLs – embed graphics inline with data uri scheme

Inline images use the data URI scheme to embed images directly within web pages. As defined by RFC 2397, data URIs are designed to embed small data items as “immediate” data, as if they were referenced externally. Using inline images saves HTTP requests over externally referenced objects.

By Website Optimization on February 28, 2008

The Cost of Banner Advertising on Web Performance – internet advertising slows web page downloads

Advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry on the Web. The Internet Advertising Bureau reported that web advertising grew by nearly 34 percent in 2006 over 2005, totaling about $16.8 billion (IAB 2007). The yearly growth rate of Internet ads is increasing at 28.6% per year, while the overall ad industry drags along with an increase of only 7.7% a year (Baker 2004).

By Website Optimization on January 31, 2008

Optimize Parallel Downloads to Minimize Object Overhead

With the average web page made up of more than 50 objects (Krishnamurthy and Wills 2006), object overhead now dominates the latency of most web pages (Yuan 2005). Following the recommendation of the HTTP 1.1 specification, browsers typically default to two simultaneous threads per hostname. As the number of HTTP requests required by a web page increase from 3 to 23, the actual download time of objects as a percentage of total page download time drops from 50% to only 14% (see Figure 1).

By Website Optimization on December 26, 2007

Use Delta Encoding to Compress RSS newsfeeds – delta compression saves bandwidth

Delta encoding (also called delta compression) is a way to update web pages by sending the “diffs” or deltas between versions of a web page. The server (proxy or origin) sends only what has changed in the page since the last access. This technique greatly reduces the amount of data that is sent from server to browser. In some cases with pages that change slightly, the deltas are on the order of a few TCP/IP packets. As about 32% of page accesses are first-time visits, about 68% of page visits are eligible for delta compression.

By Website Optimization on November 30, 2007