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 […]
In some cases a customer may use google analytics to look for spikes in the number of page views per hour for a week or month. From this they may want to know how their load test results compare for number of page views. There are a couple of ways to try and calculate the number of page views per hour from a set of load test results using LoadStorm. (These examples are assuming the results came from load tests that were run for 60 minutes) The first, is an estimation from the average number of requests to complete a […]
Which is the best browser? Well, that depends on what you mean by “best”. Fastest startup? Best to run JavaScript? Highest frames-per-second on live applications like streaming media and games? For our purposes, let’s look at which browser loads web pages the fastest. Just for fun. Results Using the results from our previous experiments, we gathered results for the three different browsers we tested: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Internet Explorer 9. The following data points are the results averaged from the results over all the pages we tested, taken only from the Dulles test location. The exact browser versions […]
Recently I compared performance tests of our Contact-Us page for embedding an interactive Google map versus using a simple JPEG screenshot with a hyperlink to the full Google map. What I found was that the interactive Google map on average made our Contact-Us page: 3x Slower Page Load Time 7x Larger (cumulative file sizes) 5x more HTTP requests To start I went to webpagetest.org and ran 11 tests from Dulles, VA on the Chrome browser for a 5 Mbps connection targeting our Contact-Us page with the embedded Google map, and I got some rather slow results considering how many optimizations we had recently done […]
We’ve run many tests on LoadStorm’s WordPress 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 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, we’d […]
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 […]
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
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 with it 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 web performance optimization caching strategies, […]
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 […]