As we have seen proven time and again by various customer satisfaction studies, web performance optimization is critical to a successful website or application. Slow sites cause unhappy customers, unhappy customers don’t make purchases and even often share their bad experiences with others. Its clear to see that web performance optimization is key to customer satisfaction. Check out our new slideshare presentation for a clear cut answer to the question: Why is Load Testing Important? And for some surprising statistics on just how important load testing is to ensure customer satisfaction under high traffic. Fast, Reliable Website = Happy Customers […]
Performance Optimization & Page Speed Analysis In my first post I introduced our LoadStorm team’s website optimization project. We discussed the planning, initial testing, and benchmarking stages, as well as some of the potential modifications that are commonly recommended for optimization of websites and WordPress sites in particular. This post will discuss the modifications our team decided to perform on our site, look at the post-optimization tests and how they compare to our benchmarks, and explain the project results. Lastly I would like to highlight the gains in performance the site has achieved and offer suggestions for your own website […]
LoadStorm Website Performance Optimization Project Part 1: Planning, Benchmarking, & Brainstorming I had just started working at LoadStorm when I was contacted by Jessica, an associate from Yottaa.com, which is a company that specializes in web optimization products and services. She asked what I did here and mentioned that our website pricing page was loading slowly, wondering if she could be put in contact with our webmaster. Embarrassed, I explained how I had only just started working as a performance engineering intern here at LoadStorm, thanked her for letting me know about the problem, and then promptly began investigating what […]
Ever wonder if performance optimization is really worth all the effort? Turns out, the answer is clearly YES! Check out our latest infographic for some significant statistics that make it clear how important speed really is!
There are several ways to make your website’s performance great. The three main areas you can work on are hardware (your web server), server-side scripting optimization (PHP, Python, Java), and front-end performance (the interface of the web page i.e. HTML, CSS, JS, J-Query). Today we will focus on the front end performance effects of CSS. We will look at isolating the negative effects of CSS on webpage load time and discuss different techniques to improve webpage performance by tuning your CSS. Combine CSS files Each CSS file you create is a resource that needs to be loaded. For each one […]
We’ve talked before about JPEGs and how well their compression algorithm works on photographs. Today though, I learned something rather interesting: I learned about a technique for using zero quality JPEGs. When saving a JPEG image, you’re usually given the option to set the “quality” of the compression. The higher the quality, the better the image looks. The lower the quality, the more pixelated the image looks, but the higher the compression. (As an example, when saving a large image on my drive, the “Maximum – 12” quality setting made a 1.83MB file, while the 0 quality file was 132KB. […]
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series on image optimization, we discussed ways to optimize raster graphics to get image sizes as small as possible. In this part, we’ll discuss the ways HTML can render its own vector graphics and composite images client-side, making websites load and run faster. There are two ways of going about this: SVG and HTML5’s Canvas element. For most common uses SVG is the faster of the two, but just as with raster image formats these two approaches have their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to performance. Why use vector images? “Raster” […]
In our previous post about image optimization, we talked about the pros and cons of the three major image formats found on the web and when each format should be used to give you the smallest file size with the most acceptable quality. The goal is to improve the performance of our web pages, so optimizing the quality/size ratio will result in better speed by reducing throughput. Today, we’ll be going over some more general tips about things you can do to make your images smaller and easier to download while still retaining an appropriate amount of quality. Dimensions This […]
Almost all websites today have images. Photographs, logos, icons, backgrounds, web pages are now saturated with graphical content. And while this can allow for some incredibly beautiful (and also some downright ugly) websites, the more images a page has to load, the more server calls an HTML script needs to make. Meaning slower load times and frustrated users. This series will focus on things you can do to tweak your images and make them load faster, and that starts with choosing the right file format. JPEG, GIF, and PNG are the three most commonly used formats on the web. Each […]
Yottaa is a customer of LoadStorm’s load testing tool, and they are focused on helping companies speed up their website. They test and monitor thousands of web apps, and they recently compiled web performance metrics that I found interesting. Thus, I share it with you. The data sample comprised 14,000 different sites. They measured several aspects of web performance in metrics for front-end and back-end. The infographic below is well-designed and hopefully will be of value to you.