The post Web Performance News of the Week appeared first on LoadStorm.
]]> It’s a great week on the internet! This week in web performance the preservation of net neutrality and new announcements from Google and Apple make headlines.
FCC votes to preserve net neutrality, classifying broadband as a utility
Yesterday the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to approve the proposed net neutrality rules for both wireless and fixed broadband. The proposed rules will disallow paid prioritization, as well as the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services. After overwhelming public outcry, this win for advocates of net neutrality is being called “the free speech victory of our times” and “an even bigger win than SOPA”. But the debate looks to be far from over.
Response from Verizon came in both morse code and typewriter font saying the rules were “written in the era of the steam locomotive and the telegraph. In addition, a group of 21 republicans sent a response to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler threatening legislation that would “ensure the antitrust laws are the preferred enforcement method against anticompetitive conduct on the Internet” and that “may include a restriction on the FCC’s ability to regulate the Internet.”
Apple to spend $1.9 Billion on European data centers powered by renewable energy
In what will be Apple’s biggest investment in Europe to date, Apple announced plans to build and operate two new data centers in Denmark and Ireland. Running entirely on renewable energy, the data centers will power several of Apple’s online services for European customers, including the iTunes Store®, App Store℠, iMessage®, Maps and Siri®. The operations are expected to launch in 2017 and will include initiatives to restore native trees to Derrydonnell Forest, provide an outdoor education space for local schools, and create a walking trail for the community. “We believe that innovation is about leaving the world better than we found it, and that the time for tackling climate change is now,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environmental Initiatives.
Apple releases new Playgrounds
The new Xcode 6.3 beta 2 now contains improvements to Swift playgrounds, with inline results, stylized text, and a resources folder. The new playgrounds were made to be useful for authors and educators.
Google introduces a new open source HTTP/2 RPC Framework
Google has introduced a new open source (BSD-licensed) cross-platform library for making remote procedure calls. Built on the recently finalized HTTP/2 specification, gRPC will allow for bidirectional streaming, flow control, header compression, multiplexing requests over a single TCP connection and more. In addition to gRPC, Google has released a new version of Protocol Buffers, an open source binary serialization protocol intended to allow easy definition of services and automatic generation of client libraries. The project has support for several different programming languages (C, C++, Java, Go, Node.js, Python, and Ruby) with libraries for several others (Objective-C, PHP and C#) in development. Google indicated that they have begun to use gRPC internally in order to begin transitioning to HTTP/2.
A look ahead: Barcelona will host Mobile World Congress
The first week of March brings along the exciting 2015 Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona, Spain. The four day event is like the Ted Talks of mobile tech, with thought-leadership keynotes from Mark Zuckerberg and Tom Wheeler, numerous panel discussions, and 1900 technology and product exhibitors. The event will feature the Global Mobile Awards, and App Planet, an opportunity for the mobile app community to come together to learn and network. In addition, all attendees will gain access to 4 Years From Now, a 3 day event focused on startups and corporations, led by globally recognized entrepreneurship and innovation experts.
Other headlines this week:
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]]> https://loadstorm.com/2015/02/web-performance-news-of-the-week/feed/ 0The post AWS Aurora – The Game Changer appeared first on LoadStorm.
]]> Last November, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a new database service, named Aurora, which appears to be a real challenger to commercial database systems. AWS will offer this service at a very competitive price, which they claim is one-tenth that of leading commercial database solutions. Aurora has a few drawbacks some of which are temporary, but the many benefits far outweigh them.Using hardware specially built for Aurora, AWS has come up with a service that tightly integrates database with hardware, Aurora delivers over 500,000 SELECTS/sec and 100,000 updates/sec. That is five times higher than MySQL 5.6 running the same benchmark on the same hardware. This new service utilizes a sophisticated redundancy method of six-way replication across three availability zones (AZs), with continuous backups to AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) to maintain 99.999999999% durability. In the event there is a crash, Aurora is designed to almost instantaneously recover and continue to serve your application data by performing an asynchronous “crash” recovery on parallel threads. Because of the amount of replication, disk segments are easily repaired from other copies that make up the cluster. This ensures that the repaired segment is current, which avoids data loss and reduces the odds of needing to perform a point-in-time recovery from S3. In the event that a point-in-time recovery is needed, the S3 backup can restore to any point in the retention period up to the last five minutes. Aurora also has survivable cache which means the cache is maintained after a database shutdown or restart so there is no need for the cache to “warm up” from normal database use. It also offers a custom feature to input special SQL commands to simulate database failures for testing.
Aurora consists of two types of instances:
Aurora replicas are very interesting. In terms of read scaling, Aurora supports up to 15 replicas with minimal impact on the performance of write operations while MySQL supports up to 5 replicas with a noted impact on the performance of write operations. Aurora automatically uses its replicas as failover targets with no data loss while MySQL replicas can have this done manually with potential data loss. Since these replicas share the same underlying storage as the primary, they lag behind the primary by only tens of milliseconds. For many use cases this might be as good as synchronous.
In terms of storage scalability, I asked AWS some questions about how smoothly Aurora will grant additional storage in the event that an unusually large amount of it is being consumed since they’ve stated it will increment 10GB at a time up to a total of 64TB. I wanted to know where the threshold for the autoscaling was at and if it were possible to push data in faster than it could allocate space. According to the response I received from an AWS representative, Aurora begins with an 80GB volume assigned to the instance and allocates 10GB blocks for autoscaling when needed. The instance has a threshold to maintain at least an eighth of the 80GB volume as available space (this is subject to change). This means whenever the volume reaches 10GB of free space or less, the volume is automatically grown by 80GB. This should provide a seamless experience to Aurora customers since it is unlikely you could add data faster than the system can increment the volume. Also, AWS only charges you for the space you’re actually using, so you don’t need to worry about provisioning additional space.
Aurora also uses write quorums to reduce jitter by sending out 6 writes, and only waiting for 4 to come back. This helps to isolate outliers while remaining unaffected by them, and it keeps your database at a low and consistent latency.
For the time being AWS Aurora is free if you can get into the preview which is like a closed beta test. Once it goes live there are a few things to keep in mind when considering the pricing. You pay an hourly price for each instance (primary and replica). Storage is $0.10 a month per 1GB used, and IOs are $0.20 per million requests.
Backups to S3 are free up to the current storage being actively used by the database, but historical backups that are not in use will have standard S3 rates applied. Another option is to purchase reserved instances which can save you money if your database has a steady volume of traffic. If your database has highly fluctuating traffic then on-demand instances tend to be the best so you only pay for what you need.
For full details, please visit their pricing page.
Currently, the smallest Aurora instances start at db.R3.large and scale up from there. This means once the service goes live there will be no support for smaller instances like they offer for other RDS databases. Tech startups and other small business owners may want to use these more inexpensive instances for testing purposes. So if you want to test out the new Aurora database for free you better try apply for access to the preview going on right now. AWS currently does not offer cross region replicas for Aurora, so all of the AZs are located within a single region. On the other hand, that does mean that latency is very low.
It only supports InnoDB and any tables from other storage engines are automatically converted to InnoDB.
Another drawback is that Aurora does not support multiple tablespaces, but rather one global tablespace. This means features such as compressed or dynamic row format are unavailable, and it affects data migration. For more info about migrations, please visit the AWS documentation page.
During the preview, Aurora is only available in the AWS North Virginia data center. The AWS console is the only means for accessing Aurora during the preview, but other methods such as CLI or API access may be added later. Another important thing to note is that during preview, Aurora does not support encryption at rest, but they plan to add it in the near future (probably before the preview is over). Another feature to be added at a later date is the MySQL 5.6 memcached option, which is a simple key-based cache.
All in all, it sounds amazing, and I for one am very excited to see how it will play out once it moves out of the preview phase. Once it is fully released, we may even do a performance experiment to load test a site that relies on an Aurora DB to see how it holds up. If you’re intrigued enough to try and get into the preview, you can sign up for it here.
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]]> https://loadstorm.com/2015/01/aws-aurora-the-game-changer/feed/ 0The post Optimizing for Mobile Traffic appeared first on LoadStorm.
]]> Every year mobile traffic is growing. This year 41.2% of all cyber monday traffic came from mobile. It’s a trend that every business should start to plan, and develop for.
Based on figures provided by the mobile experts at Flurry, app usage is increasing while mobile web surfing is decreasing. With the growing trend of using apps over web browsing on mobile devices, it is a good idea to consider developing an app. However, developing your own app is usually very time consuming and expensive. For many companies, developing their own mobile app is simply not an option.
As an alternative, responsive web design is much less expensive to develop and easy to maintain. When deciding on which to use, consider your customer demographics and the type of product or service that you’re providing. Do you have analytic data that tells you how much mobile traffic you have so far? How many of your customers do you think will benefit from one of these options?
According to a study by the Aberdeen Group, responsive design websites showed a 10.9% increase in visitor to buyer conversion rates year-over-year, while non-responsive websites only had a 2.7% increase. So if you’re not ready to invest in developing a full-blown mobile app, the evidence supports responsive web design as a cost effective alternative to a mobile app.
For a quick example, click and drag your browser window from full size to very small. You will notice how this website changes based upon the screen size the viewer is using. The goal of responsive web design is to give the customer an experience that is quick and easy to use on whatever size device he or she is using.
Responsive design is a combination of three techniques: fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. Here is an excellent video tutorial to learn the fundamentals of responsive design:
During this video tutorial, the presenter mentions that the images in his test site are fairly large, which allows them to be responsive, but being responsive is not enough. If you really want to cater to your mobile audience, you also need to improve performance by considering the impact quality and file size have. Smashing Magazine has a wonderful article to help guide you in making your site both responsive and a great performer over mobile broadband.
To see how responsive your site is currently, you can visit Matt Kersley’s page.
Or for a more detailed option in testing responsive design, you can use the developer tools in most browsers. This allows you to change the viewing experience so you can select one of many brand name devices, like an iPhone 6 or Galaxy S4, to emulate. To do this in Chrome, you can open your developer tools by right-clicking a page and choosing “inspect element”. Then look to the top left of the tools window for a small icon that looks like a smartphone. Click the icon and the browser view will constrain the viewing area.
This developer tool also shows how easy it is to load test your mobile site using LoadStorm PRO. A recording can be made of the site while using the mobile view, which can then be uploaded and utilized in a load test.
Google prefers that developers use responsive design mostly for requiring less resources and is future friendly. However, Google does not rank responsive design higher over other configurations.
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]]> https://loadstorm.com/2015/01/responsive-web-design/feed/ 0The post Editorial on End of Net Neutrality appeared first on LoadStorm.
]]> The FCC Proposes to End Net NeutralityThis week’s web performance news hits close to home for performance engineers. The concept of “the end of net neutrality” leaked a couple weeks ago and the public response was very strong. Learn more about what net neutrality means to you from our blog post last week. Last Thursday (5/15) the FCC voted on a proposal that will allow internet “fast lanes” for companies willing and able to pay for them. The proposal was accepted by a 3-2 majority vote. The vote was divided down party lines with the 3 democratic commissioners voting for the proposal and the 2 republican commissioners voting against. The FCC will now be taking comments from the public before a final vote on the proposal takes place in July. Read on for an editorial of my opinion of why we all need to rally together and fight this proposal and protect net neutrality:
The principle of net neutrality is that all internet content should be treated equally by internet service providers. The implementation of an open environment and the free exchange of information between people is regarded as sacred and if this proposal were enacted, internet service providers would be able to give some content and websites preferential treatment.
The proposal made by Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the FCC, moves to allow internet service providers (Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon) to offer “fast lanes” to companies who pay for them. Many argue that allowing the ISP’s to determine which sites and content are seen at what speed could lead to both censorship and monopolization of the internet. Censorship is a possible outcome of the proposal as ISP’s will have the legal ability to give some content faster speeds than others. Additionally, an ISP could prevent controversial content from reaching a large audience by denying it access to the “fast lanes”. A form of monopolization could occur as large corporations are able to afford the fast highways while small businesses and start ups are left with just the bumpy back roads. These small businesses have the slowest (and therefore poorer performing) websites and will easily be squelched by large corporations who can afford to pay for the “fast lanes.”
Optimization requires understanding what you’re changing and why, as well as knowledge of useful testing tools and metrics that matter. Each website contains a different framework and serves a different purpose. The innovation and research into the neuroscience of attaining great performance will lose it’s relevance and the progress that has been made will come to a standstill. The piece of web development that is affected by this proposal is how the ISP’s handle the delivery of information to the end users, which is really a critical portion of web development.
For example, if two companies have the same good infrastructure and back-end performance, and Company A can afford to pay for the “fast lane,” its end users will continue to see excellent web performance. However, if Company B cannot or will not pay the ISP’s for the “fast lane,” its end users will see markedly decreased web performance. Therefore, prepare as you might, developing a truly stellar web application will lose its value to large corporations who are able to afford to pay the ISP’s for preferred service.
Quality development and internet competition is at risk. A popular example of the importance of equal internet opportunity is the replacement of MySpace with Facebook. This change would most likely not have been possible without net neutrality as Facebook would not have been able to compete financially. Likewise, new e-commerce sites or social media platforms will not stand a competitive chance, regardless of the benefits they may bring to market.
Nearly 75,000 people have petitioned the White House to protect and maintain net neutrality. You can sign it here now. In addition, the FCC has offered an email address for people to voice their thoughts on the neutrality plans. Please take a minute to email [email protected], which has been set up by the FCC to take public comments on this issue. We want to know what you think about net neutrality too! Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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]]> https://loadstorm.com/2014/05/net-neutrality-editorial/feed/ 0The post Web Performance of Ecommerce Applications appeared first on LoadStorm.
]]> You probably have been wondering why I’ve posted so infrequently over the past year. We have been bombarded with emails and phone calls demanding more blogging that includes my extremely dry, obtuse humor. So, in the interest of global stability and national security, I must acquiesce to the will of the masses.Right. That’s a joke. I’m only slightly more popular than Justin Bieber. If you are a serious tech geek, you’ll need to look up that Bieber reference.
Web performance is why you read our blog, and web performance is my life. I want our blog to contain the most interesting information about load testing, page speed, and application scalability. In order to deliver on that goal, we came up with the concept of using LoadStorm and other tools to gather actual performance data regarding as many web applications as possible.
Thus, the Web Performance Lab was born.
Amazon EC2 General Purpose Types of Server Instances
WPL (I’ll abbreviate because we geeks love acronyms) gives us a playground to satisfy our curiosity. I want to know:
There are hundreds of similar questions that I ponder with Elijah Craig. He and I are very productive in the evenings, and he helps me plan experiments to solve the riddles of web performance that appear to me in visions after a long day of work in the load testing salt mines.
U.S. Online Retail Sales 2012-2017
With over $250 billion of online sales in the U.S. alone during 2013, and with over 15% annual growth, how could we ignore ecommerce? It’s the biggest market possible for our Web Performance Lab to address. The stakes are enormous. My hope is that other people will be as interested as I am.
Cyber Monday 2013 generated $1.7 billion in sales for a single day! What ecommerce applications are generating the most money? I doubt we will ever know, nor will the WPL answer that question. However, some of you reading this blog will want to get your share of that $300 billion this year, and the $340 billion in 2015, so I’m certain that you need to understand which online retail platform is going to perform best. You need to know, right?
Cyber Monday sales data
We have been running some of these experiments during the past few months. Esteban shared some of his results in blog posts earlier. My problem with his work is that some of the conclusions aren’t as solid as I would prefer. I spent some time reviewing his results with him in a conference room recently, and I poked some holes in his logic.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am an Esteban fan. He is a friend and high character guy. That said, we all learn from experiments. We try, we ponder, we learn. That’s how humans gain understanding. As a child you figure out the world by putting your hand on a hot stove. You register that learning experience in your brain, and you don’t do that again. You find out the best ways to accomplish objectives by failing. Just ask Edison. He figured out 1,000 ways how NOT to create a functional lightbulb before he found the correct way. So it is with WPL. We are learning from trying.
Therefore, we are beginning a new series of experiments on ecommerce platforms. We will be publishing the results more quickly and with less filtering. We hope you find it useful and interesting. Please feel free to comment and make suggestions. Also, if you disagree with our statistical approach or calculations, please let us know. Recommendations are also welcome for ways to improve our scientific method employed during the experiments.
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]]> https://loadstorm.com/2014/04/web-performance-ecommerce-applications/feed/ 0The post Infographic: Web Performance Impacts Conversion Rates appeared first on LoadStorm.
]]> 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 that a delay in page load time will negatively affect conversions, check out our latest infographic for a summary of the statistics!
Sources:
1. http://www.aberdeen.com/Aberdeen-Library/5136/RA-performance-web-application.aspx
2. https://econsultancy.com/blog/10936-site-speed-case-studies-tips-and-tools-for-improving-your-conversion-rate
3. http://www.globaldots.com/how-website-speed-affects-conversion-rates/
4. http://www.crestechglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/WhitePaper_AgileBottleneck_Performance.pdf
5. http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2013/12/11/slower-web-pages-user-frustration/
6. http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform
7. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/th/collaboration/webexperience/index.html
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]]> A Look Back at Healthcare.govThe period of time during which individuals are able to take part in the open enrollment end March 31, 2014. The amount of publicity Healthcare.gov received in October last year drew in numerous discussions. The situation has settled down and now we can look back with a clearer picture.
Healthcare.gov was more than just a website. It’s a front-end for an entire set of systems interconnected to exchange data. The system has to make requests to a handful of other agencies checking for citizenship, financial eligibility, IRS, Homeland Security, SSA, etc. Because of the multiple layers Healthcare.gov needed such as:
These were just some of the situations that made the back-end component of Healthcare.gov struggle. In addition, political interest required the site to do the enrollment upfront in order to show the subsidized price to reduce the sticker shock to the American public.
Initially the contractor’s built their system to handle 50,000 people using it at the same time. The number was based on the roll out of the Massachusetts version of the site a number of years ago. When launching a new online system, the peak load will often happen on the first day of launch. Without proper stress testing, many systems will drop dead due to the flood of traffic. For examples of this, Intechnica wrote a blog listing 15 examples of high profiled companies having their website crash due to lack of testing. The lack of QA and proper testing before the live launch of Healthcare.gov was a nightmare for user experience. The multi-hour wait times, blank menus, and so called “prison glitches” which stopped a user from moving forward until they specified how long they had been incarcerated, despite never being incarcerated. The administration expected more states to make their own exchanges to reduce workload on the federal system. The exact opposite happened. Over 60% of the country is coming to the federal exchange instead of a state-run one.
Another failure was also lack of communication. The front end of Healthcare.gov was made by one company, and the back end made by another. They did not adequately communicate with one another during development, so issues have arisen based on the poor communication between the two parts.
The projection of the project was beyond optimistic. A web application of this scale being rolled out for the whole nation isn’t going to be finished. The term finished doesn’t fit too well with software development these days. The publicity to urge millions of Americans to sign up the first day was a standard that was unrealistic especially when the contract expected Healthcare.gov to be flawless on October 1.
Since the launch of Healthcare.gov, the level of pressure to improve the web application has been significant. There is still work being done to improve the system and enhance user experience. The new management system has improved the site stability by lowering the error rate below 1% and allowing a capacity of 50,000 concurrent users.Below are charts and graphs to see the progress of Healthcare.gov after the first month of launch.
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]]> Does Adblock improve your load time?An essential rule is to have ad banners displayed after the main content is displayed. In terms of perception, users wont notice the banner until they find the content they’re looking for on the page. While your web page will most likely download less data, your perception of speed isn’t likely to fluctuate drastically due to the adblock extension. Perhaps testing this would be an interesting experiment!
Adblock takes the div of the ad and gives it a height of 0. You can test this by putting a mini ad on your site and looking at the source code by switching adblock on and off. When the adblock is on, you can display a message that basically says if this height=0, then display a prompt or an alert telling the user that they have adblock on.
Even if loaded correctly, certain HTML elements are still hidden from the page especially if the element class=Ad.
For example, if youI had a whole bunch of images for a page called “apparel design”, and abbreviated them to AD very few of your images will display if you have adblock. AdBlock uses a pretty simple logic to determine what content is advertisment. One of the methods seems to be looking for anything named or prefixed “%ad%” “%banner%”
Here are some elements that adblock plus blocks:
id=”adBanner”: blocked
id=”adbanner”: blocked
id=”adAd”: blocked
id=”bannerad”: blocked
id=”adHello”: not blocked
class=”adAd”: not blocked
id=”adVert”: not blocked
id=”adFixed”: not blocked
id=”adFull”: not blocked
Another method for blocking ads is communication blocking. There are certain servers that host ads.AdBlock just needs to keep a list of all these server addresses and when the browser is ready to retrieve the ads, Adblock steps in to stop the connection. This is when communication to ad-servers are blocked altogether (the client request does not occur). The adblock will block all requests from certain URLs such as Google Adsense. Adblock Plus gets help from various lists such as EasyList to define, customize and distribute rules that maximize blocking efficiency.
User experience is important to retain visitors to your website, but what if your website is generating revenue completely from web ads? Some user complain that ads put their computer at risk, that ads are ugly, irrelevant, and interrupting. Ads also include tracking technology which feels like a major violation of privacy for web users. Usually the best way is to stop users from complaining is making sure your ads are non-intrusive and topical.
Although we may hate ads, they are important to keep the internet free. To help facilitate a middle ground for uses and advertisers, Adblock Plus has set up a program called acceptable ads.Users can allow some of the advertising to not be considered annoying to be viewed. By doing this they support websites that rely on advertising but choose to do it in a non-intrusive way. Adblock Plus also answers the question “which ads are acceptable? To name a few they listed Static advertisements only (no animations, sounds or similar) and preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images
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]]> https://loadstorm.com/2014/03/web-performance-news-for-the-week-of-march-17-2014/feed/ 0The post Performance Tuning : 7 Ways to Spring Clean your Website appeared first on LoadStorm.
]]> Spring is here! Historically, this time of the year is representative of growth and renewal. It’s the perfect time for cleaning up your house, your yard, and your website.Keeping a modern website running smoothly can be time consuming and resource intensive. Modernizing your website may never become effortless, but this process can definitely become more manageable, maybe even enjoyable. This list provides an overview of quick and easy to apply tricks – including information on image optimization, general code cleanup , and using Gzip – to zip through clean up and arrive at a happy site.
Before you start,choose a tool to performance test your website
To be effective in performance tuning, it’s essential to establish a baseline and measure the effect of the changes you make. Otherwise, how will you know if the changes were worthwhile? And, in the future, how will you know what to do again?
We like WebPageTest!
There are a ton of free tools out there. Our personal favorite? WebPageTest! This free, open-source tool makes it easy to analyze the most important metrics, a waterfall view of all requests and resources, and even capture video of rendering. Check out our previous post on performance analysis using WebPageTest.
Every once in a while, I get these annoying pop ups in the center of my screen, while I’m in the middle of watching YouTube videos and scrolling endlessly through Facebook. Ahem, I mean, studying. I usually ignore them. However, updating your web app to the latest version usually yields better performance and speed, and bug fixes. For example, if you use a content management system, make sure you update it regularly.
There’s some debate on whether broken links on a site can harm SEO health. Either way, nobody likes clicking on something that doesn’t work. It gives the impression that the site owner, and even the company, is unprepared. There are several free tools available to help you find these broken links and fix them, including Screaming Frog and Google Webmaster Tools.
On the same token, minimize redirects. Redirects may not be as obvious to users (or even web developers for that matter),but they cause extra delay that can be avoided. Screaming Frog can help to diagnose these occurrences as well.
By now we’ve all heard the popular mantra: The fastest request is one not made. A simple way to minimize requests is to combine code and consolidate multiple files into one. This can also be done by implementing CSS Sprites for multiple images. More information on implementing this strategy can be found here.
Sometimes it’s easier to just comment out the code we don’t need, but after a while, this stuff can just become unnecessary clutter. This is applicable to code, images in a database, old plug-ins, themes, and even the settings/tables left over from an older theme or plug-in that has since been replaced. If you’re not currently using a theme or plugin, get rid of it. You can always download it again later. Chances are you’ve moved on to something sexier anyways.
There are countless image optimization techniques that can be utilized to boost performance, some of which are more complicated than others. Some simple image tuning techniques to start with include cropping and resizing. It’s also important to serve the image at it’s real size, rather than adjusting them on the fly. For example, if your image size is 1000 x 1000, you don’t want to use a markup to display the image at 100 x 100 because this will mean you’re just sending extra bytes. Instead, resize the image in an editor to 100 x 100, and use that smaller file. Additional image tuning techniques include reducing color depth, as well as removing any unnecessary image comments.
This is probably the trickiest thing on the list. Have you removed old revision posts lately? What about unused images?
The average website has grown 151% in the past three years, with an increase in the amount of requests and the size of requests. GZip is a tool that can be used to combat and reduce the weight of the requests. The easiest way to implement it is to stick the script into the PHP of your site’s header. An in-depth explanation of using GZip can be found here.
Ahh.. Don’t you feel better? Now you can measure your results and compare them to your baseline. Even though some of these suggestions aren’t meant to drastically improve the speed of your site, an making incremental improvements and keeping an organized production will reap huge gains in the long run. The best thing you can gain is experience. Post the results of your optimization below! How did these tips work out for your website? Do you have any useful tips for performance tuning your site?
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]]> Brief History: How IE 6 Ruined Internet Explorer’s ReputationIn the early 2000s, IE 6 was the dominant web browsers that reigned supreme due to the lack of competition. This gave them the power to set the standard. Unfortunately, the standard was set all the way down to Satan’s feet. Because there wasn’t any competition at the time, the standard didn’t matter. Web developers had to make their websites compatible with IE. It was never the other way around. The lack of debugging tools, performance optimizations, and upgrades were little to none. IE 6 was released in 2000. For five staggering years, there was hardly an update. We didn’t see IE 7 until 2006. And here we are in 2014 with 22.2% of China still using Internet Explorer 6. Why?
Enforcing piracy laws in China wasn’t (still isn’t) a priority and XP was easy to pirate. The catch was that people had difficulty upgrading IE on a pirated version because Windows was checking to see if the copy was genuine. If pirates got anything newer, they would have to register their copy of Windows and pay for it.
The release of IE 6 was supposed to be the be-all and end-all. When Windows XP was released in 2001, Microsoft required third party hardware manufacturers like Dell, HP, and Gateway to include IE 6 in all copies of XP. If these companies didn’t want IE 6 on their PCs and laptops, Microsoft would not agree to sell them copies of Windows. This move is what also killed Netscape. By removing Netscape off the map, Microsoft increased their browser market share. So, what did the number one web browser do when they were at the top spot? Nothing. Most members on the IE team were reorganized into the MSN division to build MSN Explorer. Since IE 6 had the biggest slice of pie, Microsoft believed that the browser war was over, innovation hit its peak, and the new nemesis to focus on was AOL.
Because Netscape was crushed and IE 6 achieved dominate market share, Microsoft disassembled their IE team and placed everyone on different projects. The belief was that the future of applications would be desktop based. That was one reason why there was a five-year gap between IE 6 and IE 7. The lack of continuous improvement for IE was frustrating for developers. The absence of updating IE lead to bugs and flaws in the browser security which turned IE 6 into an attack vector for hackers. 
Microsoft has been successful because of their their closed solutions which gave them a competitive advantage in the marketplace. They took the word processor and excel market away from WordPerfect and Lotus. Microsoft did this by making their product incompatible with the competition. Word Perfect could not read Word files, and the architecture of Lotus was incompatible with Excel. This strategy from Microsoft was called well EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish). Microsoft would implement a product and eventually enact incompatibilities on it. Finally, Microsoft would have enough power to push any potential competitor out of the market. This business culture that Microsoft was built on would not work for IE.
Firefox was introduced in 2005, one year before IE 7 was introduced. Firefox’s layout engine (Gecko) was heavily dependent on open source libraries. This was an advantage because developers using open source leveraged a passionate community that made a difference in development. Microsoft’s layout engine (Trident) did not fit well with W3C standards, JavaScript implementation, or Java implementation. As a matter of fact, Microsoft originally intended to remove Java off the grid which resulted in a lawsuit.
Firefox first came along by reintroducing tabbed browsing from Opera. They did what IE was failing to do correctly, which was following W3C standards and consistently updated their browser for their users. Once Web developers were able to make pages that followed web standards, IE’s reputation became worse. Microsoft eventually rolled out IE 8, which seemed to compete well against Firefox at the time but they didn’t introduce IE 9 until two years later. This gave Firefox the time to continue gaining more users while consistently patching and send updates to users. IE was simply falling behind the times. With each new update from their competitors, It seemed like IE failed to stay up-to-date against Firefox’s and eventually Chrome’s web standards.
The release of IE 9 was a turn around for IE. Microsoft paid attention to their users and worked better with W3C on following web standards. Their latest IE 11 proved to meet the standards of the web. Is it the best? That’s debatable. Reputation wise, IE still has a long way to go before they can be considered a serious browser.
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