Front-end web performance optimization: It isn’t over till it’s over. And it’s never over.
18 Jan 2011
A few days ago, I was talking to a prospective client who is interested in transformation-based performance solutions like Strangeloop’s right now, but who questioned the lifespan of our industry.
“In five years, your industry won’t even exist,” he said. His rationale was that in the future everyone will have applied Steve Souders’s performance rules to their sites, and there won’t be a role for automated performance tools.
To illustrate, he sent me this page, which had been optimized by a team of in-house developers:
Perfect Page Speed score, short waterfall, fast load time — this is pretty much a picture-perfect chart. (If you’re not familiar with waterfalls, here’s a primer on how to interpret them.)
But we ran it through Site Optimizer anyway, to see what we could do. Here’s what we did:
We cut load time by more than half, which is great. But look at our Page Speed score: only 74 out of 100. And we broke ‘Compress Images’.
What does this mean?
There are three takeaways from this exercise:
- The current public-facing performance rules are not complete. We sped up this site by using techniques that are not recognized in the known lists of performance rules. For example, when we consolidate images, in one of the browsers we turn them into a format that Webpagetest doesn’t recognize, so it gives us an F for Compress Images. But we make the page faster. Which matters more: the failing score or the faster page?
- Front-end website optimization will never be static. When done well, it evolves with changes to browsers and to user behavior, so it should always keep getting better.
- The front-end optimization market is evolving faster than the performance measurement tools. I say this not to criticize these tools. I’ve repeatedly gone on the record as a big Webpagetest and HTTPwatch supporter, and I think these tools are essential to our industry. But they are developed as a response to the performance rules. When the rules change or new rules are added, there’s inevitable lag time as the tools evolve to catch up.
The conclusion is one that I keep coming back to: When it comes to site speed, there really is no such thing as fast enough.
Jan 18, 2011 @ 10:08:13
Agree completely – until we have everything at zero time (100ms of seamless interaction is more realistic target), we can’t stop improving.
There is no such thing as picking the number of seconds or using a predefined set of rules – users must feel it.
Jan 18, 2011 @ 10:13:08
This is a nice demonstration of site optimizer.
But this is not THAT easy. (plug in site optimizer then look at the onload time)
What about the progressive rendering of this webpage ?
-> I guess the 506ms download is a big image well that means I do not get any image progressively, just a big one after 0.9s
What about the fact that theses images could be there to anticipate the next web page navigation ?
What if I wanted to have them cached for the next page ?
And then : perhaps you could have better performance (and progressive rendering) with just activating cache like you did on the html (479ms->150ms) and using multiple images.
Like you say, we can’t just use the page speed score to evaluate good or bad performance.
But we can’t just use the “onload” or “start render” times to know if a web page shows fast.
Because the performance of a web page is not just about onload time, it’s a lot more about progressive rendering. This is where automatic tools fails, they can’t ATM evaluate and adjust thei optimizations on this setting
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Jan 18, 2011 @ 10:25:30
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