The emails from vendors have begun filling my inbox. It’s okay because I want to talk them too. Overall, Velocity 2013 in New York was good for me. A few of the presenters were lacking in quality, and one guy was vulgar and condescending. But there were enough high quality sessions to make it worth the time and money at Velocity. I can remember 7 presentations that were outstanding. These were helpful, practical, entertaining, and/or thought-provoking. It is no coincidence that 5 of these best sessions were given by Google employees. They were prepared, and it was obvious they had the deepest […]
Welcome to the new LoadStorm.com! As you may have noticed, LoadStorm.com has recently undergone a makeover. While the old site was nice, we wanted to do better by utilizing web optimization! Not only does this new design offer a sleek, slim appearance, it is also easier to navigate. We removed quite a few elements from the previous design, but we also added a few new elements into the mix. Where does that leave us performance-wise? Is our new design faster than our old one? Well, we ran several dozen tests on the new design and compared it to the benchmark […]
Sometimes you put so much effort into making your website scalable, efficient and optimized that you start seeing diminishing returns. Sometimes you need to literally think outside the box, or in this case, the server. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) would get us past these limits by putting less pressure on the one web server. If you don’t know much about a CDN, take a look at Dan’s blog post. The Web Performance Lab recently partnered up with Delivergood (a charity supply distributor) to accept the challenge of getting their Magento web store to handle up to 2,000 real-time users. […]
Yes, the holiday shopping season is still far in the future. Wait…Cyber Monday is only 8 weeks away. Yes, that gives you plenty of time before you need to start performance testing your e-commerce site. Or does it? Each year at the beginning of October, we have seen a distinct increase in emails and phone calls asking for help with website performance. This year is no exception. So, we thought we would share a few important statistics about web performance with our readers. Consider these stats from Kissmetrics: 79% of shoppers that are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely […]
We’ve run many tests on LoadStorm’s website and shared the results in different blog posts. These are the first set of experiments for our Web Performance Lab, and we hope you read them because the details can be very helpful to anyone learning about WordPress performance, web scalability and page speed. The results below are focused on page speed measurements – not scalability. We’ve tested several individual optimizations such as page caching and deferring JavaScript. What we haven’t looked at, though, is how well those optimizations work when they’re put together. As we’ve mentioned before, after testing these performance optimizations, […]
Content Delivery Networks are systems designed to increase the capacity of your website. But is it worth implementing? How much does it improve scalability? 10%? 20%? 100%? Would you believe over 300%? How about that it alone quadrupled the amount of throughput our website can handle? Before we delve into the details of the results, we first need to explain what a Content Delivery Network is and how it works, so we can understand why these improvements were so dramatic. How it works A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers that takes advantage of server placement, […]
Would you be surprised if we could DOUBLE THE SPEED of perceived page response by simple tweaking of script references? How about if we could make the browser work more efficiently to download more images in parallel, thereby reducing the page load time to about 3/4 of its original – would you find that exciting? If not, you’re not a performance geek, and you should be reading someone else’s blog. Since you are a perf geek, read on for the cool data. For our optimization experiments, we tested two changes concerning the usage of JavaScript in our WordPress site that […]
Before officially establishing the Web Performance Lab, we did some early performance optimizations of LoadStorm.com. One of those was to install a WordPress plugin called W3 Total Cache (W3TC), which is a plugin designed to enable all kinds of server-side and client-side caching. Two of the features we enabled are types of server caching, and they were “page caching” and “cache preload”. Page caching allows for web pages to be stored in the server’s RAM for faster access times. Cache preloading pre-fills the server cache using an XML sitemap and periodically loads pages into it automatically. For more information regarding […]
An “Entity Tag”, or ETag, is part of HTTP protocol used in conditional GET requests, incorporating caching into the HTTP protocol itself. ETags are meant as an additional way to validate a local cache. The idea is to attach a bit of metadata to the header of each request to uniquely identify a specific version of a resource, allowing the client machine to know if a resource has been changed. When the client makes subsequent requests for the same resource it sends the same ETag in the request header, which the server uses to determine if the resource has changed […]
Taking our benchmarking data was about more than just gathering a solid basis for comparison for our upcoming tests, it was also about interesting discoveries with our existing system. After running 324 tests, we were left with 303 successful results, of which we ended up using 297 since six were thrown out as outliers. Let’s break this down and show you what we found. Performance Tests Our performance tests were all run through www.webpagetest.org, and covered a wide variety of locations and browsers. The connection settings were “Cable (5/1 Mbps 28ms RTT)” for every test. These are the results as […]