HTTP Archive

The average web page has grown 20% in just six months

15 Nov 2012

10 Comments

The HTTPArchive celebrates its second birthday this month, and it seems fitting to check in and take a quick snapshot of a typical web page. Not surprisingly, pages are bigger. But surprisingly, pages are even bigger than I expected.

Here you can see the growth in average page size over just two years:

Web page growth: November 2010 to November 2012

When I checked last spring, the average page came in at 1042 KB, just over 1 MB. In other words, a typical web page carries a payload that’s 20% bigger than it was just six months ago.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed an interesting trend over the past few years. At this time of year, pages suffer “holiday bloat” as site owners try to stuff in more images, Flash, and rich media, not to mention a fresh crop of third-party scripts for things like ads, analytics, and trackers. Not unlike us Westerners, pages get fatter throughout November and December, and then, interestingly, trim down a bit when they go on a crash diet in January. At the risk of pushing this analogy over the edge, I’ll add that, like all crash diets, the effects don’t last. Before long, pages start puffing up again.

Pages could hit 2 MB in early 2014

When I wrote about page bloat for GigaOM last May, I projected that, at the then-current rate of growth, the average page would hit 2 MB in 2015. Based on this new finding, we need to upgrade that prediction to early 2014:

Projected web page growth: November 2012 to May 2014

Page bloat in and of itself isn’t news. Page bloat of this magnitude is. This has obvious ramifications for desktop users, but mobile users will be much harder hit.

For more insight into the current state of web pages, I recommend you check out Andrew King’s recent post Average Number of Web Page Objects Breaks 100, as well as Catchpoint’s Holiday Shopping 2012 State of Web Performance.

Related posts:

By: Tammy Everts Category: Tags: , , , ,

The 33 best web performance links of Q2 2012

31 Jul 2012

4 Comments

For some reason, I thought that the past few months had been kind of quiet on the research front, so when I started this post, I thought it would be one of my shortest roundups yet. I was pleasantly surprised to watch it grow to become one of the longest!

There are some great case studies here, of both large and small sites, which I love to see. There’s also some truly excellent debate about responsive design and the mobile web, sparked by a post from Jakob Nielsen last spring, as well as some good stuff about the browser wars and third-party content. So enough with the intro. Let’s get into it.

Case studies

Optimizing Retr-O-Mat’s Web Performance

A casual performance optimizer details her efforts to get Retr-O-Mat’s average load times under 2 seconds. Good information for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of front-end optimization (FEO).

Web performance can be beautiful too

After performing poorly in a 2011 web performance comparison of leading retailers, Crate and Barrel made WPO a priority moving forward. This blog post from Catchpoint shows just how “beautiful” their performance has been in 2012.

How the Post is improving site performance

Responding to a flood of user frustrations with their website, the IT team at the Washington Post rolled out a number of performance upgrades to their site over the past year. Find out what they did to improve their page speed by 32.4%.

Tips and how-tos

Building a faster web: Tools, tips, and lessons

If “faster connectivity and more bandwidth won’t save us,” then what will? Google’s Ilya Grigorik shares his insight on making the web faster in this in-depth slide deck, and he draws some very interesting conclusions.

How to Make Progress Bars Feel Faster to Users

The human perception of time is anything but linear, and with just minor visual tricks, it gets even more skewed. After reading this post, you may never trust a progress bar again. :)

The 3 white lies behind Instagram’s lightning speed

More cool perceptual tricks. The “secret sauce” behind Instagram’s stellar user experience is rooted in a combination of coding tricks aimed at giving users a feeling of constant responsiveness. Find out how their site “always pretends to work.”

Mobile

The web only works thanks to reload (and why the mobile web fails)

As Mike Belshe points out, web page resources routinely fail, but thanks to the ever-handy reload/refresh button, we can often solve these problems ourselves. With mobile browsing, however, the rules are different. Find out what this means for the future of HTML 5.

Web first for mobile

Performance evangelist Steve Souders focuses his performance research strictly on the mobile web – not on native apps. Why? He’s got more than a few good reasons.

A taste test of mobile website development

A solid webcast on the complex world of mobile development, touching on topics including Responsive Web Design (RWD), server-side device detection, and HTML5 performance on mobile.

Jakob Nielsen on mobile sites vs. full sites

Jakob Nielsen believes that mobile and full sites should be entirely different entities. Summarizing his argument, he states that “good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users. Two designs, two sites, and cross-linking to make it all work.”

Is Nielsen wrong on mobile? Arguments abound

From Net magazine: Jakob Nielsen’s assertion that “good mobile user experience requires a different design” is being challenged by a noted mobile expert, who argues that rather than stripping down for mobile, companies should be doing more.

Why we shouldn’t make separate mobile websites

More counterpoint to Nielsen’s post. Smashing Magazine’s Bruce Lawson argues that mobile redirection is unreliable, and excluding features for mobile browsers “perpetuates the digital divide.”

Responsive web design: Missing the point

Still more Nielsen backlash: Brad Frost states that, though mobile browsers are getting better at rendering full websites, creating adaptive sites for mobile users is essential to improving the user experience.

HTML5 features increase mobile usage by 28%

Interesting piece explaining how static pages needing an upgrade can vastly improve mobile user engagement through the addition of HTML5. The new release features interactive galleries, overlays, and expandable/collapsible boxes, driving up pageviews and decreasing bounce rates.

Tools

More ways to measure web performance with User Timings

Google Analytics has expanded its collection of Site Speed reports with a new feature called User Timings. The feature enables tracking of specific load times for discrete hits, images, and other user interactions.

New mod_spdy release supports Apache servers

More from Google. The latest version of mod_spdy – an Apache module that adds SPDY server support – is intended to fix bugs found in the original release.

“Speed Index” introduced as new performance metric

The Speed Index metric has been added to WebPagetest, helping measure the speed at which page contents are visually populated. The tool is especially useful for comparing page experience before and after optimization.

Browsers

Browser Speed Tests: Chrome 19, Firefox 13, Internet Explorer 9, and Opera 12

Lifehacker conducts it’s semi-regular browser speed tests, pitting the four titans of desktop browsing against each other in races for startup speed, tab loading times, and other performance indicators.

Which Browsers are the Fastest?

An interesting companion read to the Lifehacker piece, New Relic’s “Speed Wars” study shows that, while IE 9 speeds past other browsers on Windows, Chrome 13 on Mac was overall the fastest experience. In mobile speed tests, the fastest experience was delivered by Blackberry Opera Mini at 2.6 seconds, twice as fast as Safari 5.1 on iPad.

How the Chrome Predictor hides latency from users

Ilya Grigorik demonstrates how Google Chrome hides latency from users. Interesting stuff here.

Internet Explorer market share surges, as IE 9 wins hearts and minds

From Ars Tecnica: “The browser wars are back on in earnest. For the second time in three months, Internet Explorer made large gains, picking up almost 1 point of market share. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all lost out, as Internet Explorer 9 won over new users.”

CDNs

A one-size-fits-all CDN solution isn’t always best

Server configurations come in all shapes and sizes, which means a one-size-fits-all CDN is seldom effective. Find out which Level 3 customer was the beneficiary of a custom CDN solution and how it worked out.

Third-party content

10 Golden Rules for 3rd Party Providers

Murphy’s Law reigned supreme throughout June, with a flood of large-scale outages taking down some of the world’s most popular websites. Given the inevitability of online failures, third-party providers must be prepared to deal with the worst. The folks at Catchpoint outline the 10 Golden Rules by which all third-party providers should live by.

The vendor who flunked the web performance test

Are third-party vendors ignorant to the consequences of slow web performance? According to Catchpoint they are, as they detail a story of one such vendor who was completely unaware of the performance impact of their product.

Average UK website has 14 trackers per page

Interesting findings from TRUSTe: Despite the prevalence of privacy policies, over two-thirds of trackers on UK websites originate from third-party companies, and almost half embed themselves permanently.

Google releases +1 button preview – loads 20% faster

Google announced that they’ve improved performance of the +1 button and Google+ badge. By reducing the size of the js/plusone.js loader and making the code smarter, page elements now load 20% faster.

Third-party JavaScript should be loaded asynchronously

Old news to some, but still worth mentioning: Third-party JavaScript should be loaded asynchronously, as it helps avoid slowdowns and can speed up page loads.

Third-party front-end performance, Act 1

Application provider Bazaarvoice is delving into the realm of front-end performance, and provides an interesting third-party perspective.

Opinions and analysis

Performance Nightmare: Nasdaq & the Facebook IPO

When Facebook began trading on May 18, 2012, a series of performance failures on Nasdaq.com caused a huge headache for the company. This article from Intechnica asks how much these badly timed hiccups cost investors.

More, better, faster: Steve Souders on WPO

Steve Souders kicked off O’Reilly’s Velocity video podcast series with an in-depth discussion of the state of web performance optimization. Key topics included measuring slowness, performance monitoring tools, and whether mobile disrupts performance.

Other research

How complex systems fail

As a complex and interdependent system, the web is prone to catastrophe at the highest levels. In this fascinating paper on resilience engineering, presented at Velocity 2012, Dr. Richard Cook outlines the reasons why all complex systems are intrinsically hazardous, why disaster is always just around the corner, and how failure-free operations still require experience with failure.

The growing epidemic of page bloat

I don’t usually pimp my own writing here, but this information is too important not to share. I wrote a piece for GigaOM showing that the average page size is now over 1MB, according to the HTTP Archive. At current growth rates, the average page could hit 2MB by 2015, which is a really big deal, especially for mobile users.

How fast are websites around the world?

Some fascinating findings here. Google’s Site Speed Reports provides detailed latency data for page load times by separating data according to device, location, and industry.

These links were all sourced from Strangeloop’s Web Performance Hub, which contains hundreds (and by now, possibly even thousands) of industry-wide links, organized by topic, source, research type, and industry. It’s a pretty good resource, if I do say so. If you have any new links to recommend, let me know.

http://t.co/EHbRdT6r
10 Golden Rules for 3rd Party Providers [article]
Catchpoint – June 26, 2012
Summary: Murphy’s Law reigned supreme throughout June, with a flood of large-scale outages taking down some of the world’s most popular websites. Given the inevitability of online failures, third-party providers must be prepared to deal with the worst. Find out the 10 Golden Rules by which all third-party providers should operate by.
http://t.co/LGYUpGn1
End-to-end optimization: Taking content delivery to the next level [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June 27, 2012
Summary: Strangeloop Networks is thrilled to announce the launch of our latest product, Network Accelerator. Learn all about how this product works, what it does – and most importantly – why it’s a major step forward for content delivery networks.
http://t.co/T4z69s7k
How complex systems fail [research paper]
CTALab.org – June 26, 2012
Summary: As a complex and interdependent system, the web is prone to failure and catastrophe at the highest levels. In this fascinating paper on resilience engineering, Dr. Richard Cook outlines the reasons why all complex systems are intrinsically hazardous, why catastrophe is always just around the corner, and how failure-free operations require experience with failure.
http://bit.ly/LzGPqN
Mobile optimization starts with mindset: Hooman Beheshti interviewed at Velocity 2012
O’Reilly Media – June 25, 2012
Summary: Where are we in the mobile optimization life-cycle? What mindset should site owners adopt when boosting mobile performance? Are performance measurements improving? In this video, Strangeloop Technology VP Hooman Beheshti offers his unique insight on the current state of mobile.
http://t.co/Vnced8tq
The 90-Minute Mobile Optimization Life Cycle [slides]
Strangeloop Networks – June 25, 2012
Summary: Strangeloop Technology VP Hooman Beheshti wowed attendees at this year’s Velocity Conference with a presentation on the mobile optimization life cycle. For those who missed it, be sure to check to check out these fascinating slides.
http://bit.ly/Nu1gCi
Ghosts of Velocities Past: 9 presentations that are still relevant today [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June 20, 2012
Summary: Velocity’s short (yet incredibly important) history is filled with memorable moments, and these 9 presentations from past conferences remain relevant today. Perhaps not trendsetting anymore, but certainly trend affirming, which may just be better.
http://bit.ly/MFuxMR
My recent post on SEOMoz: 13 Questions (and Answers) About Google, Site Speed, and SEO [article]
SEOmoz – June 18, 2012
Summary: In this article, Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby breaks down how site speed and performance metrics affect Google page ranks. For anyone who has ever wondered how Google manages to make performance metrics affect SEO, this article is a must-read.
http://mz.cm/M24fGc
Introducing: New Browser Tax feature for our ecommerce customers [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June 14, 2012
Summary: Ever wish you could arbitrarily tax your customer base for failing to stay current, with zero repercussions? With the new Strangeloop Browser tax, your wish is now a reality!
http://bit.ly/NC5Q65
Optimizing Retr-O-Mat’s Web Performance [blog post]
Finding Marbles – June 9, 2012
Summary: For the “WPO guy’s wife,” average load times just aren’t good enough. In this post, a blogger and casual performance optimizer details her efforts to get Retr-O-Mat’s average load times under 2 seconds. Great information for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of WPO.
http://t.co/k0lXkniG
Browser Speed Tests: Chrome 19, Firefox 13, Internet Explorer 9, and Opera 12 [article]
Lifehacker – June 12, 2012
Summary: It’s a battle of startup times, tab loading times and other KPIs between the four titans of Windows browsing. Lifehacker’s speed tests are always entertaining for what they’re not afraid to say, and this article is no exception.
http://bit.ly/Nb2ibS
Marrying CDNs with front-end optimization for maximum acceleration [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June 12, 2012
Summary: Front-end optimization (FEO) has been weaving its way further into content delivery networks (CDNs) over the past two years, and the dynamic between these two technologies continues to evolve. In this video presentation, Strangeloop’s Joshua Bixby breaks down the benefits of combining these performance solutions.
http://bit.ly/L3aatz
How the Chrome Predictor hides latency from users [article]
Igvita.com – June 4, 2012
Summary: Google Chrome features countless tools for supercharging load times, but when those aren’t enough, the browser can hide latency from users. Find out how!
http://bit.ly/Nw6ZMh
Building a faster web: tools, tips, and lessons [slides]
Igvita.com – June 3, 2012
Summary: If “faster connectivity and more bandwidth won’t save us,” then what will? Google’s Ilya Grigorik shares his insight on making the web faster in this in-depth slide deck, and draws some very interesting conclusions.
http://bit.ly/L0eERH
The “performance poverty line”: What is it and why does it matter? [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June , 2012
Summary: The “performance poverty line” is the point at which business metrics have sunk so low, load times cease to matter. But how is this line measured? Does it differ between industries? And most importantly: is there hope?
http://bit.ly/NJAqs2
A one-size-fits-all CDN solution isn’t always best [article]
Level 3 – June , 2012
Summary: Server configurations come in all shapes and sizes, which means a one-size-fits-all CDN is seldom effective. Find out which Level 3 customer was the beneficiary of a custom CDN solution.
http://bit.ly/M9P5xt
Why the Facebook outage is (yet another) wakeup call for site owners [blog post]
Web Performance Today – June , 2012
Summary: The hazards of running third-party scripts are well documented, but the May 31st Facebook outage was another stern reminder. In this post, Strangeloop’s Joshua Bixby discusses all things third-party, including rogue content and common performance pitfalls caused by third-party content.
http://bit.ly/JQj7GX
The web only works thanks to reload (and why the mobile web fails) [article]
Belshe.com – June , 2012
Summary: Web page resources routinely fail, but thanks to the ever-handy reload/refresh button, we can often solve these problems ourselves. With mobile browsing, however, the rules are different. Find out what this means for the future of HTML 5.
http://bit.ly/NAAQ3O
How to Make Progress Bars Feel Faster to Users
UXMovement – June , 2012
Summary: The human perception of time is anything but linear, and with just minor visual tricks, it gets even more skewed. After reading this post, you’ll never trust a progress bar again!
http://bit.ly/NcsVfg
Does the average web user waste two days a year waiting for pages to load? [blog post]
Strangeloop Networks – June , 2012
Summary: It may not be true, but in web performance, perception is reality. Web users in the UK are less than pleased about their online experience, but just how cranky are they?
http://bit.ly/LSFIlv

Related posts:

By: Tammy Everts Category: Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Bad news for site owners and mobile users: The average web page is now 1 MB

24 May 2012

47 Comments

I wrote about this at greater length in this post for GigaOM (which also includes some nifty graphs), but want to summarize a few of the key points here.

  • According to the HTTP Archive, which gathers stats on the top million sites in the world (as ranked by Alexa), the average web page has surpassed the 1 MB mark.
  • In the past 18 months, the average web page has grown by 50% — from 702 KB in November 2010 to 1042 KB on May 1, 2012. (Side note: Since I wrote the GigaOM piece, the HTTP Archive has refreshed with new data. The average page is now 1059 KB.)
  • At this rate, the average page will hit 2 MB by 2015.
  • Images and third-party scripts (i.e. analytics, ads, social sharing buttons) are the main culprits.

Mobile users take the hardest hit.

Consequences include being throttled by providers or being hit with massive roaming charges. (For example, earlier this month I bought 25 MB of data from my provider for $100 while travelling in Europe. This works out to $4 per page.)

There’s a head-in-the-sand tendency to assume that just because our devices, browsers, and networks are more powerful than ever, end-user performance must also be getting better.

To disprove this, here’s a graph I created, in which I overlaid two sets of numbers spanning the past 12 months. The red line represents the page size data from the HTTP Archive. The blue line represents the mobile load time index from Keynote. While the two lines represent different data sets, it’s pretty clear that the general trend is up — bigger and slower.

Correlation between web page size and mobile load time

As I’ve said many (many!) times, building a mobile-specific site isn’t the answer.

One-third of a site’s visitors will choose to visit the full site if given the option between the two. That’s because people want the same breadth and depth of content and a consistent user experience, no matter what device they use. Site owners who can deliver a fast, reliable, cross-platform user experience are going to be the ones who own the web of the not-so-distant future.

Related posts:

By: Tammy Everts Category: Tags: , , , , , ,

2012 predictions: The average web page will hit 1 MB, Google and Siri will face off, and Chrome, Windows 7, and RUM will rise

20 Dec 2011

18 Comments

It wouldn’t be December without an avalanche of predictions for 2012. Here’s my contribution.

1. The average web page will surpass 1 MB in size.

Between December 2010 and now, the average web page grew from 716 KB to 965 KB, according to the HTTP Archive. That’s 30% growth in slightly less than one year. This kind of growth is the norm, as pages have grown at a rapid rate since 1995, when the average page size was just 14.1 KB. It’s pretty safe to assume that this growth will continue. We’re going to see sites grow by at least another 30%, taking them well over the 1 MB mark — a number that would have blown our minds 10 years ago. The main culprits: images (which account for more than half of the average page size) and third-party scripts like analytics, ads, and social sharing widgets.

2. Site owners are going to demand more transparency and control over third-party content and scripts.

As the graphs above show, scripts are the fastest-growing area of page growth. In just one year, scripts have grown by 50%, from 115 KB to 172 KB on the average page. As I wrote here a couple of months ago, the average top e-commerce site contains seven third-party scripts, with some sites containing up to 25 scripts. These can have a serious impact on page performance. Poorly optimized third-party scripts can slow down page load by several seconds or even stall it completely.

Currently, most third-party script providers don’t offer real-time monitoring of their scripts, nor do they offer meaningful service level agreements (SLAs). As site owners become increasingly educated about the importance of page speed, they’re going to start demanding that scripts be properly optimized to either load asynchronously (or better yet, load after document onLoad). They’re also going to demand better monitoring, reporting, and accountability from script providers.

3. Chrome will become the dominant browser.

For the past year, we’ve seen Internet Explorer and Firefox slowly dropping in popularity, while Chrome’s popularity has been rising steadily. Right now, IE is still dominant, and Chrome just passed Firefox. Chrome’s success is well deserved. It’s fast, clean, and comparably glitch-free. With Chrome set to unite with Android, which is as much a semantic merger as a technical one, we’re going to see Chrome’s numbers climb sharply.

4. Windows is going to surprise us on mobile.

Everyone thinks it’s an iOS/Android world, but that could all change when we see Windows 7 embedded in the next wave of Nokia devices. I recently had a chance to play around with a Win7 device, and it was pretty slick (which, coming from a die-hard iPhone user, is saying a lot). Remember how Internet Explorer blew Netscape out of the water back in the ’90s? Windows 7 might not be a game changer to quite that extent, but we’re going to see it become a contender in the mobile universe.

5. Mobile consumer behavior will continue to evolve as mobile users’ expectations grow.

Marriott recently reported that 47% of their mobile bookings happen on the same day as check-in. This implies an important paradigm shift among mobile user behavior. Clearly, these users have developed the expectation that they can book on demand and on the go. Mobile users expect 100% availability and quick response. There’s zero “try again later” mentality. They won’t return to a poorly performing site — they’ll bounce to another site that can give them what they want immediately. We’re going to see more of this type of behavior, and site owners are going to have to adjust to the fact that mobile users are even more demanding than desktop users.

6. Companies will focus internally on mobile development.

As I mentioned in this piece on O’Reilly Radar, the 2011 holiday shopping season has proven that the mobile web is no longer a curiosity. Rather than keeping mobile on the sideline, in 2012 companies will grow their mobile teams, and these will eventually match the size and scope of their regular development teams.

7. Amazon Silk is not going to spark a browser revolution.

As I also mentioned in the O’Reilly interview, while Silk offers a performance boost for some tablet content, even its own product manager, Brett Taylor, says of tablet browsing, “It’s not meant to process and crunch a lot of heavy data.” I’ve written many times about the difference between basic versus advanced content optimization. Basic optimization techniques – such as those embedded in Silk – can actually slow down, or even break, pages. Web pages are becoming even more complex, data-intensive, and dynamic. Because of this, advanced content optimization – which takes a big-picture approach to accelerating the entire site — is increasingly emerging as the only reliable way to optimize sites without causing harm.

8. Google and Siri could begin a long face-off.

Google has become synonymous with search, and it would require a massive paradigm shift to dislodge them from this position. Siri has the potential to be a formidable contender. By taking users completely out of keyword-entry mode, and by focusing on local search, Siri is incredibly attractive to mobile users, who are often task-oriented and on the move. But it all comes down to results. Google became dominant in search because it delivered the most relevant results, and it delivered them fast. If Siri can do the same – and to be blunt, right now Siri kind of sucks — then it’ll be interesting to see how Google responds.

9. Companies are going to start shining a spotlight on internal application performance.

2010 and 2011 marked the years when companies realized how important site speed was for their e-commerce sites. Now that everyone has internalized the fact that faster pages equal more revenue, they’re going to take this insight and apply it to their internal web-based applications. There are a lot of studies, dating back as far as 1968, showing that employees can radically increase their productivity — in some cases by more than double — when computer response time is improved by just 2 or 3 seconds. But very few companies did anything with these findings. We’re going to see a renaissance in this kind of research, and we’re finally going to see companies aggressively pursue improving internal performance.

10. The CDN market is going to become a lot more competitive.

Until recently, whole site acceleration or dynamic site acceleration (DSA) was a big-ticket solution offered by one company. Now there’s a growing selection of competitive products backed by innovative companies offering newer technology and, ultimately, faster sites. Unlike the price wars that happened in the video delivery marketplace a few years back, the added value will keep prices and margins at reasonable rates (nothing like the usurious rates currently being charged). The big winners here are going to be savvy site owners, who could see their bills reduced, and their service quality go up.

11. Real user monitoring will make performance testing accessible to smaller, “mortal” companies.

Performance testing is challenging. When synthetic tests (sometimes called backbone tests) were first developed, they came with a pretty major price tag, which meant they could only be embraced by site owners with deep pockets. With the recent proliferation of affordable, quality real user monitoring (RUM) tools, site owners will be able to finally get real insight into their visitors’ behavior — at a decent price.

Agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Related posts:

By: Tammy Everts Category: Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The 25 best new web performance links of Q3

5 Oct 2011

6 Comments

A few people have asked me why I no longer do these monthly link roundups, and I didn’t have a good answer. (Not-good answer: I got busy.) But there have been so many great reads over the past three months that it feels like they really deserve the spotlight.

Not surprisingly, mobile is an even bigger deal than ever. There have been some great new presentations and studies. I was surprised, when digging through my bookmarks, to note just how many case studies there are, including under-the-hood reports from companies like Twitter and Facebook. To me, this is a really inspiring indicator of how much openness and excitement there is in our industry.

We’ve added these to our WPO Hub, which I encourage you to check out. It contains hundreds of links — organized by topic, source, research type, and industry — to the best performance-related content on the web.

Mobile

Mobile HTML5
For hardcore HTML5 and/or mobile geeks, this is an awesome table, created by mobile performance guru Maximiliano Firtman, which illustrates HTML5 compatibility across major mobile and tablet browsers.

Steve Souders: High Performance Mobile
A lot of people in our community (including myself) were kicking themselves for not being able to attend Steve’s talk at the San Francisco/Silicon Valley Web Performance Meetup. Next best thing: watching the video of his talk.

Mobile WPO
In June, I had the privilege of being a speaker at the Web Performance Summit. Fellow speaker Tim Kadlec gave a fantastic overview of the current mobile state of the union at the Web Performance Summit in June, which is a must-see.

Measuring Mobile Performance
Another great presentation, this one from front-end performance consultant Stephen Thair’s presentation to the London Web Performance Meetup Group. It’s packed with useful tips and how-tos.

What Mobile Users Want
Gomez revisited their two-year-old survey of mobile user expectations with this excellent report, which compares new data with those earlier benchmarks. Gomez found that mobile users are even more impatient than ever. 74% say they will abandon a site after waiting 5 seconds or less for it to load, up from 20% just two years ago. (If you want to see another take on this data, I created this set of graphs showing just how dramatic these changes are.)

Mobile website optimization now factors into mobile search ads quality
Google’s official announcement that mobile-optimized sites will factor into landing page quality and perform better in AdWords. This didn’t get a ton of media attention, but I think it should have. This algorithm change has implications beyond just AdWords, and I wrote about this here.

Tools

The Complete List of End User Experience Monitoring Tools
This is helpful list of tools for RUM and other user monitoring is a work in progress. Send your suggestions for additions to the folks at CorrelSense.

Yahoo! YSlow (Mobile)
YSlow for Mobile is now available as a bookmarklet. Users can run the equivalent of regular YSlow in Mobile browsers as well as any bookmarklet-enabled desktop browsers. [Note that this is a beta version.]

How-tos, case studies, and other research

Social button BFFs
Good post from Stoyan Stefanov on how to make your social buttons load asynchronously.

How-To: Optimize Social Plugin Performance
Facebook developers share some best practices, such as asynchronous loading, that can improve the performance of social plugins on your website.

Twitter’s mobile web app delivers performance
In-depth look at how Twitter developed its mobile app to maximize speed and performance.

“And that is why you need to speed up your site!”
I’m biased. I like this case study from performance consultant André Scholten because it validates my theory that, by using browser type and connection speed as proxies, you can use Google Analytics to simply demonstrate how faster sites make more money. Personal bias aside, it’s a pretty nifty speed-revenue analysis.

How We Improved Page Speed By Cleaning CSS, HTML and Images
Front-end developer Lara Swanson walks through a detailed case study showing how Dyn tackled performance optimization on its site.

How case-sensitivity for ID and ClassName can kill your page load time
Interesting findings from Andreas Grabner, showing how case-sensitivity causes a huge execution time difference in Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Firefox 6.

Creating a Performance SLA with your customers – Betfair’s Customer Charter
Stephen Thair analyzes Betfair’s performance commitment in its customer charter, and discusses what a performance SLA should contain. Some thought-provoking stuff here.

Google +1 Button Performance Review and Google Triples the Speed of the +1 button
After Aaron Peters did a thorough audit of the +1 button’s performance and found some issues that could slow down page load by up to 2 seconds, Google responded by making some fixes to make the button faster. What I like about this pair of links is that it illustrates the level of transparency and mutual respect in our industry.

New performance findings

HTTP Archive: nine months
Nine months after the launch of the archive, Steve Souders compares performance data from November 2010 and August 2015 and discovers increases in total transfer sizes, requests per page, redirects, and page errors.

Website performance drop threatens top retailers
Report from Site Confidence analyses average download speeds for the UK’s top e-tailer websites and found an increase from 12 seconds in the first quarter of the year to 12.5 seconds in quarter two. This is a pretty steep increase from the average 10 second load time from the 2010 holiday season. This slowdown comes at a time when ecommerce is hurting in the UK.

Browsers and connectivity

Introducing Amazon Silk
You already know about Amazon Silk, but I just wanted to mention that I really like the short explainer video on the official blog. As someone who’s been working on “how it works” videos for my own company’s products lately, let me tell you: it isn’t easy.

Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] is the new IE6
Google Chrome team member Paul Irish explains why developers may soon need to develop with 76 different browsers in mind.

Browser Speed Tests: Firefox 7, Chrome 14, Internet Explorer 9, and More
Lifehacker tested browsers across a variety of functions — from cold boot-up to memory use — and Opera emerged as the clear winner.

The way carriers manage networks can hurt phone performance
Among other things, CNN writer Amy Gahran says that ”One of the largest U.S. carriers (unnamed in the study, since the data was made anonymous for legal reasons) appears to be slowing its network speed by as much as 50%.”

Industry news

Israel Web Performance Meetup Group
It’s always exciting news when a performance meetup group springs up.  Say hi to the new group based in Herzeliyya, Israel.

Opinion pieces

Why I think automation is the future of #webperf
Stephen Thair costs out manual versus automated performance optimization. I’m posting this link here, so you can guess that I like his conclusions. :)

Did I miss any great new links? Do you have other suggestions for the Hub? Let me know!

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