Alla Gringaus

Web Performance Automation – Josh Bixby

“Speed is the next competitive advantage.” - Steve Souders, Google
Josh Bixby gave amazing talk in the evening watercooler that I host at Time Inc. – regular meetings about technologies, trends and innovations, in historical Time & Life building . “Depending on who you talk to, performance automation can range from the holy grail of performance tuning to a set of programming hacks that will bring down your website. In reality, it is neither of these things.”
Josh covered:
– Different approaches to automation
– Pros and cons of each
– What kinds of performance best practices can or should be automated
– What best practices are better left to hands-on developers
– How “automatic” is performance automation, actually?
– A survey of the automation market today

“Speed is the next competitive advantage.” - Steve Souders, Google

Joshua Bixby on Web performance Automation

Today, my Time Inc. watercooler was very special. I hosted it in the evening, in conjunction with NY Web Performance meetup organized by Sergey Chernyshev.  Joshua Bixby, the author of Web Performance Today , President of Strangeloop Network, was the guest speaker. The meetup had a great turnout – 100 people, both internal from Time Inc., and external. It went very successful – informative, exciting, eye-opening even. By the time the clip will be ready for publishing, you can see Joshua from earlier sessions this year. Watch out Web Performance Automation – makes huge difference in your efforts to optimize the sites. Joshua is amazing!

First Impression and Page Speed

Andy King's Article: Average Web Page Size Quintuples Since 2003

“Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” suggests Dr Lindgaard.

Prior one forms his opinion about the web page, the very least this page has to load into the browser in a blink of a time. Researchers found that the brain influences the user’s initial decision about the page in just a 20th of a second of viewing a web page while shaping up that very first impression (that as we know has a lasting impact). A typical user gets frustrated by the first page he encountered as the one that slows him down, and would not likely continue browsing the remaining pages within a site.

Round-trip time (RTT) is the back-and-forth time required for data transfer. The larger the number of round trips that need to be made is, the longer it’s going to take for a page to load. Also, heavier objects require to split in a larger number of packets for data transfer. 1 packet is almost always 1,500 bytes.  It’s practically unrealistic to expect every object be <= 1.500 bytes, but it certainly helps if the object is optimized for speed and loads in parallel with other objects, as much as possible. Because the latency can be higher at the beginning of a new browser session, it’s important to maintain the load time of the first view (first impression!).

Conclusion - first impression matters. Reduce the weight of the page and the number of requests through objects optimization and parallel downloads.

In the table below, I used 2 characteristics to judge the load quality of the first view among ten homepages of major news sites: # of requests and page size. Google’s Page Speed is the grade.

Akamai study: The Importance of Speed

Response Time (source: Wikipedia): In technology, response time is the time a system or functional unit takes to react to a given input.

According to PR Newswire, Akamai released research study regarding consumer response to travel site performance

• Three second rule – 57 percent of online shoppers will wait three seconds or less before abandoning the site
• Younger travelers are less patient – Generation Y and younger travelers are less patient than older travelers when it comes to page load times.  65 percent of 18-24 year olds expect a site to load in two seconds or less
• Prevention is key – A third of travelers would be less likely to visit a site after experiencing technical problems like slowness or errors on the page.  Business travelers are slightly more likely to have a negative reaction
• Loyalty is not forgiveness – Active loyalty program members are more likely than other travelers to indicate that they would not likely be influenced at all by technical glitches at 34 percent. However, the remaining 66 percent are actually more likely than others to have strong negative reactions.
• Travelers tend to be multi-taskers – 59 percent of consumers do something else when waiting for a travel website to load.  Nearly one in five (19 percent) open another travel site in a new window when made to wait.
• Hidden fees may cost you – 43 percent of online shoppers have abandoned a booking because the final product price and/or fees were higher than they were willing to pay

Google talks Site Speed

In the past few  weeks, it’s become clear that Speed IS the ultimate Google ranking factor. Although the Need for Speed was introduced by Google a year ago, vast majority of websites are still much slower than it’d be required to improve the user experience and reduce the bounce rates. If web developers (mostly front-end) would follow the general front-end best practices, implement the rules for speed and build-in the time and the effort for the optimization in the development process, they’d help their businesses become much more productive, in many different ways.