A few months ago, shortly after joining the Web Performance Lab, I lead a project on site optimization. The site in question was, as mentioned in a couple of earlier blog posts, the Magento-based web store at Delivergood. There were some issues because the Delivergood web store could handle at most 100 concurrent users. Since the Web Performance Lab is all about web performance testing and optimization, we looked into making their web store site more scalable. We had a few ideas about what we could implement with their site to improve page speed and increase scalability. We had done […]
In our previous post about helping the Delivergood Magento store by enabling a Cloudfront Content Delivery Network (CDN) distribution, we saw the benefits that a CDN could provide for their store’s scalability. Let’s go into detail about how you might shape your distribution by asking some questions. Do you want the CDN distribution to take almost all the work off of your main server or only some of it? How busy do you want to keep the CDN distribution? All of these questions determine how much time you will put in obtaining the most out of your Cloudfront distribution. For […]
There are four caching options within W3 Total Cache: Object caching, Page caching, Database caching, and Browser caching. What’s the difference between all these options? What do they all mean? Why does it matter? All were questions we had when we installed the plugin, so we thought we’d share the answers we found with you. What is caching, again? Caching is the act of storing data in such a way that future accesses to that data are faster. Typically caching involves moving data from a slow location to a fast one. The hard drive has hundreds of times more storage […]
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. […]
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 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, […]
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
Data is pretty much meaningless without something to compare it to. I could tell you that a certain individual weighs 246 pounds after dieting, but it makes more sense to also say that they weighed 310 pounds before they started. The effectiveness of the dieting plan can only be shown by comparing before and after. Similarly, in performing our optimization experiments, it just makes sense to gather some “before” data with which to compare our post-optimization speeds. Gathering our benchmark data isn’t quite as simple as putting our servers on a bathroom scale. There are many distinct measures of performance, […]
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 […]