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 […]
When Motorola created and implemented the Six Sigma quality assurance methodology, from 1986 to 2001, they reported saving $16 billion, a 4.5% savings, in revenue. This was attributed to Six Sigma’s ability to cut out waste and optimize efficiency within the company. The figures are also impressive because many methodologies promise results, while some only provide more red tape. Like in manufacturing, the need for a formalized methodology in performance engineering remains the same. In performance engineering, we have our own testing methodology and best practices. A performance testing methodology can be a hybrid of the best parts of other […]
Thoughts on Performance Culture The performance culture has changed drastically since it’s early beginning. Notifying everyone of it’s important isn’t important anymore because everyone knows that it is important. Through events like Velocity, the word has gotten out to the mass that performance matters. It matters to the business and the users. As people are becoming aware of web performance, more questions are raised as how to implement a culture of performance in the industry. To answer that, some companies are integrating web performance team into their workforce. The web performance team is usually tasked with scavenging the web application […]
Tis the season…. Why haven’t large corporations learned the value of load testing yet? How could e-commerce sites not be ready to handle the increased traffic for the busiest selling period of the year? Unfortunately, with the high traffic of Cyber Monday, certain websites were unable to meet customer expectations. Ok, let’s be honest – bad web performance cost some sites money and really made buyers angry. Let’s conduct a review to see what we can learn. First, a few relevant statistics: For the five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, online buying from desktop computers totaled $5.3 billion, up […]
The emails from vendors have begun filling my inbox. It’s okay because I want to talk them too. Overall, Velocity 2013 in New York was good for me. A few of the presenters were lacking in quality, and one guy was vulgar and condescending. But there were enough high quality sessions to make it worth the time and money at Velocity. I can remember 7 presentations that were outstanding. These were helpful, practical, entertaining, and/or thought-provoking. It is no coincidence that 5 of these best sessions were given by Google employees. They were prepared, and it was obvious they had the deepest […]
Welcome to the new LoadStorm.com! As you may have noticed, LoadStorm.com has recently undergone a makeover. While the old site was nice, we wanted to do better by utilizing web optimization! Not only does this new design offer a sleek, slim appearance, it is also easier to navigate. We removed quite a few elements from the previous design, but we also added a few new elements into the mix. Where does that leave us performance-wise? Is our new design faster than our old one? Well, we ran several dozen tests on the new design and compared it to the benchmark […]
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. […]
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 […]
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, […]
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, […]