This weekend the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots battled to give fans quite possibly the strangest game ending ever. From a one-in-a-million catch, a turnover, and an all out fist fight, this game will go down as one of the most interesting in recent Super Bowl history. Super Bowl Site Performance Game But while we may love football, we all know that this is only half of the competition. At $4.5 million dollars a piece, Super Bowl commercials only get a few seconds to vy for our attention, beat the competition, and make a valuable impression. After previous […] 
WebPageTest (WPT) is a free, open source tool that is used to evaluate web page performance. The great thing about WPT is that it can be utilized by people with all levels of expertise, and has many options for advanced settings and customizations. The public WPT instances cover many scenarios, but private instances can be useful, especially when testing sites that aren’t yet publicly accessible. We decided to install our own private instance of WPT using an Amazon Micro EC2. However, as the WebPerfLab, we couldn’t just leave it at that. Come on, you should know us by now! We […]
National Signing Day Takes Rivals Website Down National Signing Day for high school athletes is like Christmas and birthdays all wrapped into one. Websites like 247Sports.com and Scout.com had their writers covering stories and updating every minute. On one of the biggest day for the recruiting industry, the top dog website Rivals lagged behind. Out of all 365 days, National Signing Day resulted in a strong overflow on their message boards causing a bottleneck that brought down the site. Rivals.com team diagnosed the problem and decided that the best way to stabilize and fix the issue was to temporarily shut […]
Mobile web browsing and shopping is growing at a remarkable rate. Sites that aren’t optimized to perform well on mobile devices will miss out on a large part of the market! Check out some surprising statistics on why mobile web performance is so important:
The Importance of Critical Rendering Path In the field of web performance, professionals would suggest that the critical render path is an important concept. What is the critical render path? Basically, it’s the code and resources required to render an initial view of a web page. The rendering path can be viewed as the chain of events that occur to make your webpage appear on a browser. The “critical” aspect would integrate only the most important components to render only the initial view of your webpage. In order to display a simple web page, the browser goes through a series […]
Recently we decided to upgrade our WordPress core to version 3.7.1 and we figured we would perform some tests to see how the change affected us. I took our baseline of 11 performance tests (using webpagetest.org) and a single load test (using LoadStorm) to compare to our new set of data after upgrading to the new version. It was fun to see how things would perform, but the results were not shocking. There was virtually no difference between the performance tests. The page load time was on average 1.22% slower, and we’re talking tiny fractions of a second so the […]
Numerous articles are being delivered to the internet everyday. Not everyone has the time to read every articles of interest to them. To help facilitate updates in the web performance world, here are a series of summaries to keep readers updated. Akamai Technologies Inc acquires DDOS company Prolexic Akamai will acquire all of the outstanding equity of Prolexic in exchange for a net cash payment of about $370 million. The transaction is expected to occur in the first half of 2014. Although Akamai already has a service to protect online companies from DDoS (distributed denial of service )attacks, CEO Tom […]
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 […]
Update: This information pertains to LoadStorm LITE which we no longer offer. In LoadStorm PRO, you can find the number of times a page was requested from the Pages tab of the test results. To see an example of the LoadStorm PRO test analysis click here. 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 […]
I love this graphic on Altom Consulting’s home page that shows the relationship between when a bug is found and the cost of resolving the problem. Their tagline for the company that relates to this graphic: “We believe in testing as early as possible to minimize the impact and cost of fixing defects.”