Welcome to the LoadStorm Web Performance Lab! Over the course of the next year, we’ll be bringing you the best in practical performance engineering information. Forget passing on information of others, we do our own experiments to make sure the advice we give is as accurate and usable as possible.
This all began with an email suggesting we tune our site to make it faster. After some discussion, we decided that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it right. We also decided to share what we learned in tuning our site. You may have read about it here.
As we continued learning and testing different performance techniques, we decided to make it a regularly scheduled segment of our blog. We’ll be regularly updating and performing tests on our own website. Anything interesting we find in the results (or the process) we’ll be passing on to you.
Here’s how our experiments work: We research the best ways to tune the performance of a website and put those techniques into action on LoadStorm’s site. Once it’s been successfully put in place, we test exactly how well the optimization works by running our website through www.webpagetest.org using an automated script. Finally, after getting our test results in the form of a ton of CSV files, we reverse the changes we implemented to undo the optimization. This allows us to test each optimization independently rather than cumulatively, keeping our tests separate from one another and giving us more accurate data.
In these reports we’ll be discussing not just the data itself, but any quirks, problems, or interesting things about the entire process we encounter along the way. The little things a simple white paper or data analysis wouldn’t tell you, like how difficult it is to combine Javascript files in WordPress or the problems that arise when testing with Webpagetest and how to get around them. Hopefully you can gain some valuable insight from our little experiments for tuning your own website.