Arwen Price

Introduction: How the big brand name e-commerce sites handle the heavy traffic on Cyber Monday is always of great interest to our team and our readers. So this year, we decided to run a short experiment on some of the top companies to bring you the best and the worst performers this Cyber Monday. The 28 companies we chose to test included companies who had painful Cyber Monday crashes in previous years, companies who were running fantastic online deals, and companies that are known to have huge volumes of online holiday shopping traffic. Experiment: We ran WebPageTest, an open source […]

1. Cyber Monday is Growing Adobe reported that Cyber Monday e-commerce sales in 2013 reached $2.29 billion – a staggering 16% increase over 2012. comScore reported that desktop sales on Cyber Monday 2013 totaled over $1.73 billion, making it the heaviest US online spending day in history. With these kinds of numbers, only time will tell how long Cyber Monday will continue to grow. But one thing is certain, Cyber Monday is the single most important day of the year for e-commerce businesses. 2. Mobile Shopping is Growing Sites only designed for desktops are missing out on a huge chunk […]

Cyber Monday is a pretty big deal for online retailers. In fact, the previous statement is much too modest. Cyber Monday is the biggest day of the year for ecommerce in the United States and beyond. As the statistics show, Cyber Monday has become a billion dollar juggernaut since 2010 – and it has only continued to grow. Last year alone, Cyber Monday was responsible for over $1.7 billion spent by online consumers in the US, a shocking 18% jump from the year before! Since its inception in 2005, the Monday after Thanksgiving has become a potential goldmine for those […]

This idea of “Net Neutrality” has been all over the news lately. In fact, just a quick google search will turn up numerous articles published in all the top news sources including Washington Post, the NewYorker, Fox News, Huffington Post and NBC News. And after doing some research, its very clear why net neutrality is on the forefront of so many articles- the new rules proposed by the FCC “may be the end of the Internet as we know it” (Gerry Smith, Huffington Post). What is Net Neutrality? Net neutrality is the concept that Internet service providers (ISP’s) should allow […]

There are many companies that design or re-design websites with the goal of increasing conversion rates. What do we mean by conversion rates? SiteTuners defines Conversion Rate as: “The percentage of landing page visitors who take the desired conversion action.” Included in this list are completing a purchase, filling out an information form, or donating to the cause. Almost all companies focus on the design, look, and layout of a website when attempting to increase conversion rates. However, we at LoadStorm want to draw more attention to the role that web performance plays in conversions. Many studies have conclusively shown […]

Mobile web browsing and shopping is growing at a remarkable rate. Sites that aren’t optimized to perform well on mobile devices will miss out on a large part of the market! Check out some surprising statistics on why mobile web performance is so important:

There are several ways we could go about answering this question. Our engineering team could probably write a whole book to explain cloud load testing on a very technical level. On another level, I wanted to explain it using a single graphic. LoadStorm can be explained in 5 simple steps: 1. A tester builds scenarios (also call scripts or playbacks) 2. The LoadStorm controller activates load generation servers 3. Virtual users storm the target application and follow the actions laid out in the scenarios 4. LoadStorm measures the responses of the application (such as response times, errors, and throughput) 5. […]

Instead of passing on the same WPO tips, Web Perf Lab is putting WPO strategies to the test. Along the way, we will be blogging and bringing you the results our real world experiments. It is our goal to share unique, useful tips and tricks that make a difference in web performance. Check out our latest Slideshare describing the concept of the Web Perf Lab: Join the Web Performance Optimization Revolution with WebPerfLab from LoadStorm

Over the next year, our team will be working tirelessly to bring you the best of the best in performance engineering content. We have several experiments we are working on to test and prove what changes really make a difference in web performance and scalability. Our team will be running performance experiments, documenting the results, bringing you the facts and sharing the best tips and tricks we learn along the way. Scott Price: Meet our fearless leader: Scott is VP of Sales, CMO, and Chief Performance Engineer. He is from Lexington, Kentucky and now lives and works in Colorado. Scott […]

If you haven’t heard of “Responsive Design” before this point, I want you to do something for me. If you’re reading this on a desktop, please reach over to the side of your browser window and resize it. Scale the width to about half. Then scale it down further. Keep going until you can’t scale it down any more. Don’t just read on ahead to see where this is going. Seriously, do it right now. Pretty cool, huh? Since I’m assuming you’re reading this on www.loadstorm.com, you may have noticed something interesting happen to the page elements as you scaled. […]