Steve Souders

Your 10 favorite posts of 2011

22 Dec 2011

A couple of days ago, I said that it wouldn’t be December without a set of predictions. But it really wouldn’t be December without a roundup of the most-read posts on this site.

1. Early findings: 97% of mobile end-user response time happens at the front end

I revisited Steve Souders’s four-year-old stat that says that 80% of end-user response time occurs at the front end, and made a surprising discovery: After analyzing beacon data from 5 million Strangeloop customer transactions, I found that the front end is where a whopping 97% of mobile response time happens.

2. How to perform a 5-minute page speed/revenue analysis of your e-commerce site

I converted a performance non-believer, first by showing him that his site was 30% faster in IE8 than in IE7, and then by pointing out that the value per visitor on his site was 29% higher for IE8 than it was for IE7. Using two simple tools you probably already have at hand, you can quickly calculate how a faster user experience correlates to greater order value on your own website. (We later used this post as the basis for a short webinar, which you can watch here.)

3. The 12 most-asked questions about how Google factors page speed into its search rankings

It’s a well-known fact that site speed is a critical ranking factor for organic search. One of the most-asked questions I receive is: How exactly does Google do this? Over the last year and a bit, I’ve done quite a bit of digging to get the answers. I thought it would be useful to start an FAQ-style repository for the answers.

4. Automating complexity: The future of website performance optimization

Applying performance best practices in a general sense will take care of 80% of front-end web performance problems, but the last crucial 20% can only be achieved through painful real world testing and iterative problem solving. We need to find a way to do this quickly and cost-effectively. Back in January, this was my vision.

5. Google’s new Page Speed service: A handy resource for smaller site owners

When Google announced their Page Speed service in July, the most frequent question fielded was, “Is the Page Speed service a threat?” In short, no. If anything, it offers yet more validation that site speed is a crucial business issue.

6. Fourth-party calls: What you don’t know can hurt your site… and your visitors

There’s a growing awareness of the fact that third-party content can cause a major hit to your website’s performance. Good. Great. Now we need to tackle what I’ve dubbed “fourth-party calls”. Not only can these insidious server calls leach performance, they also have massive security implications.

7. Slow websites make people angry

Aberdeen Group has reported that “A one-second delay in page load time equals a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.” But what does that customer dissatisfaction look like in the real world? I searched Twitter to find out. It wasn’t pretty.

8. Front-end optimization: It isn’t over till it’s over. And it’s never over.

A concise example illustrating three important things about front-end optimization (FEO): the current performance rules are not complete; these performance rules will never be static; and the front-end optimization market is evolving faster than the current performance tools can measure.

9. This is your brain on a slow website: Lab experiments quantify “web stress”

Fascinating study: Brain wave analysis reveals that people have to concentrate up to 50% more when using badly performing websites. EOG technology and behavioral analysis also reveal greater agitation and stress in these periods.

10. Why the performance measurement island you trust is sinking

I routinely encounter customers that have been led, by the very experts they trust, into believing that their site performance can be measured by the wrong tools. This post was written to explain exactly why you can’t always believe the experts.

This is my last post of 2011. Before I sign off for the year, I want to take a moment to thank you for coming to this site, for reading, and for your thoughtful comments. It’s a privilege to write for such an engaged community at such an exciting time in our industry. I’m looking forward to even more exciting times ahead.

By: Tammy Everts Category: Tags: Google, Page Speed, performance measurement, performance monitoring, psychology, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, SEO, Steve Souders, Third-party content

The 20 best web performance links of Q4

15 Dec 2011

1 Comment

Every time I write one of these posts, I’m impressed by the volume and quality of writing that happens in our industry on an ongoing basis. It’s truly an exciting time for web performance. I feel endlessly engaged by the dialogue that happens every day, and honoured to be part of it it.

This roundup (which includes links pulled from the Strangeloop WPO Hub), includes some increasingly refined thinking about mobile optimization, a handful of excellent tutorials and case studies (including some great new presentations from Velocity EU), and some revolutionary browser developments.

But my favourite link is this first one…

The best link of Q4

Retailers need for tech speed
Does it tell us anything new? No. But I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve forwarded this two-minute segment on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” — which discusses the importance of speed for e-commerce sites, particularly for mobile users, during the holiday shopping season. For me, this shows that site speed has finally jumped into the mainstream. I’m excited to see how this attention snowballs in 2012.

Mobile

Mobile UI Performance
This slide deck from Estelle Weyl’s excellent presentation at Velocity EU gives an overview of mobile performance challenges, why we need to address them differently than we deal with desktop sites, and detailed tips on how to do just that.

Performance Automation 101
This slide deck from Jeroen Tjepkema’s Velocity EU presentation explains what performance automation is, how it works, and why it’s the only viable solution for dealing with the challenges of mobile device/browser fragmentation.

HTML5 Techniques for Optimizing Mobile Performance
Great post on HTML5 Rocks: ”In this article, we will discuss the bare minimum of what it takes to create a mobile HTML5 web app. The main point is to unmask the hidden complexities which today’s mobile frameworks try to hide. You will see a minimalistic approach (using core HTML5 APIs) and basic fundamentals that will empower you to write your own framework or contribute to the one you currently use.”

Mobile Performance Manifesto
Love this post from David Calhoun itemizing and describing mobile performance best practices.

Tools

How WebPagetest works
If you’ve ever wondered how exactly WebPagetest gathers performance data from the various browsers it simulates, this is great post from Pat Meenan in which he cracks the hood of WebPagetest and explains all that.

Mobile Perf Bookmarklet
Steve Souders offers one mobile bookmarklet to rule them all: a new “master bookmarklet” that lets you install a handful of common debugger and profiler bookmarklets in your mobile broswer in one step.

Is Synthetic Monitoring Really Going to Die?
Alois Reitbauer asks: “Will User Experience Management using JavaScript agents eventually replace synthetic monitoring or will there be a coexistence of both approaches in the end?” As you might guess, the answer is not cut and dried.

Case studies, how-tos, and other research

Diagnosing Slow Web Servers with Time to First Byte
Much as it pains me to admit it, from time to time performance pains aren’t caused at the front end. Performance expert Andy King gives some good tips on how to use the time to first byte metric, as displayed on a waterfall chart, to help diagnose a slow server.

The art and craft of the async snippet
Stoyan Stefanov examines the topic of asynchronous code “from the perspective of a third party – when you’re the third party, providing a snippet for other developers to include on their pages, be it an ad, a plugin, widget, visits counter, analytics, or anything else.”

Why loading third party scripts async is not good enough
We talk about asynchronously loading third-party snippets as if that’s the sole cure for performance pains, but in this case study, Aaron Peters reminds us that sometimes it’s okay to defer their loading until after onload.

Fast Loading JavaScript
Slide deck from performance consultant Aaron Peters’ great Velocity EU presentation: “A walk-through of several JavaScript loading techniques with a characteristics table for each and at the end a decision tree to help you decide which technique to use.”

How Downtime Financially Impacts Top Ecommerce Websites
Compelling infographic showing how downtime affected the Internet Retailer 500 in 2010. Includes the estimate that downtime resulted in more than $300 million in lost revenue for the IR 500.

Testing for Frontend SPOF
Excellent post from Pat Meenan in which he simulates third-party outage with a blackhole server in order to demonstrate — via WebPagetest-generated video — how that outage slows down or disrupts page load.

Browsers and connectivity

SPDY of the Future Might Blow Your Mind Today
Great post (“definitely for protocol geeks”) by Google software engineer Mike Belshe on SPDY’s evolution and how Kindle Silk is taking it beyond other browsers.

Chrome Fast
Slides from Google software engineer Tony Gentilcore’s excellent presentation at Velocity EU, in which he gives an overview of the Chrome platform and explains what makes Chrome fast.

Report reveals drop between peak and off-peak surfing
No big surprise, but a good reminder (especially if you rely on synthetic testing) that real-world performance is a nebulous thing: UK study finds that web speed is up to 69% slower during evening peak time.

The end of an era: Internet Explorer drops below 50% of Web usage
Mark the month and year. November 2011 was the first time in more than a decade that Internet Explorer’s share of global browser usage dropped below 50%.

Opinion pieces

Your CDN is not a silver bullet for web performance
In the e-commerce and SaaS world, the two most common causes of poor web performance are third-party content and server-side processing. Neither of these bottlenecks are addressed by loading static content from a closer location via a content delivery network.

Why you have less than a second to deliver exceptional performance
dynaTrace’s Alois Reitbauer writes: “Being exceptionally fast is becoming the dogma for developing web applications. But what is exceptionally fast and how hard is it to build a top performing web site?” I like posts like this because they remind us what the fundamental questions are that our industry is trying to address.

If you have any other great links to share, let me know in the comments. And if you’re looking for more great links, we have hundreds — sorted by topic, industry, and type — over in the Strangeloop WPO Hub.

By: Tammy Everts Category: Tags: best practices, Chrome, content delivery networks, content distribution networks, Ecommerce, metrics, mobile, mobile web performance, performance, Steve Souders, Strangeloop, Third-party content, Velocity, Webpagetest

Speed tests: How fast are China’s top websites?

28 Oct 2011

2 Comments

A couple of months back, Strangeloop released a report about the load times of North American and European sites in China — arguably the fastest growing e-commerce sector in the world. We found that the average load time for these sites was just over 16 seconds.

In my post about the report, Steve Souders asked a great question: To make the case that luxury sites need to be faster, it would be great if you could compare their load time (16.2 seconds) with the load time of popular Chinese sites.

Steve’s question has been percolating on a back burner (I have a lot of back burners), and I was reminded of it when looking at Mary Meeker’s slides from her presentation on internet trends at the recent Web 2.0 Summit.

This slide in particular jumped out:

Of the top 25 websites, six are based in China. While none of these sites come even close to the top four U.S. sites in terms of profitability and valuation, it’s important to remember that this is an online marketplace that is still in its babyhood. By 2015, China’s e-commerce base is expected to increase by almost 400%. It’ll be interesting to see what this table looks like then.

But getting back to Steve’s question, I thought this would be a good time to run some tests and see how China’s top sites compare to the sites we tested in our study. (I used the same parameters: Testing via WebPagetest‘s location in Jiangsu, China, using Internet Explorer 7.)

Page load times of leading Chinese websites

Website	Load time (seconds)	CDN detected?
Sina.com	20.818	No
Ctrip.com	2.554	Yes
Alibaba.com	4.877	No
163.com	21.139	No
Tencent.com	27.468	No
Baidu.com	1.706	No
Average Chinese site	13.102	17%
Average NA/EU site	16.2	29%

A few thoughts

This is a tiny sample size, of course, but it’s still an interesting snapshot of how China’s top websites fare when it comes to performance.
There’s a clear performance divide between verticals, and these correlate closely to the same performance divide I’ve observed in western-based sites. The news sites — Sina and 163.com — experienced 20+ second load times. The e-commerce sites — Ctrip (travel) and Alibaba (retail) — were much faster, with sub-5-second load times. The search site Baidu was the fastest of the bunch, while, ironically, the internet service provider Tencent was the worst. (I suspect that competition isn’t a concern for them.)
Only one site, Ctrip, uses a content delivery network.
And returning again to Steve’s question, while the overall average load time of just over 13 seconds wasn’t much lower than the 16 seconds we recorded for western sites, it should be noted again that the top e-commerce sites did load in under 5 seconds. From this, we can deduce that leading e-tailers in China are taking performance seriously — which means that western e-tailers need to do the same in order not to get left behind in the global marketplace.

By: Tammy Everts Category: Tags: CDN, content delivery networks, site speed, Steve Souders, Webpagetest

How vulnerable is your site to third-party failure?

13 Oct 2011

7 Comments

Third-party scripts are the single most common point of failure for sites: just a single line of JavaScript can take down your entire site. Despite this, measuring the impact of third-party content on a site’s usability is often an afterthought — if it even gets thought about at all.

After reading Pat Meenan’s excellent post on third-party SPOF (single points of failure), in which he used WebPagetest to simulate how your site will perform if one of its third-party providers goes down, I was inspired to try it out for myself. (I wasn’t the only one. Steve Souders wrote this great post today, as well.)

After running my tests, I revisited some research we did here at Strangeloop into third-party scripts and how they’re used by 200 top ecommerce sites. Some very interesting stuff came up, which I’ll get into later in this post.

Methodology

I wanted to see how vulnerable the top five ecommerce sites (according to Internet Retailer) are to third-party SPOF. I did the exact test that Patrick did, but decided to blackhole all third-party domains except the CDN domain (i.e. if a site was using Akamai or Level 3 for small objects, I did not blackhole that domain).

I generated a series of side-by-side videos for each site, so you can get a vivid sense of the impact of third-party failure on page load. I’ve also included the waterfalls so you can see what the major culprits are. (You can see the scripts I used by clicking on the waterfall for each test and clicking “strip”.)

Amazon

Waterfalls: normal vs. broken

Observations:

Site still performs
Site looks fine, except for the fact that the ads don’t come in.

Staples

Waterfalls: normal vs. broken

Observations:

When Omniture dies (see line 18 of the waterfall), the entire site stalls for almost 30 seconds.
This site is entirely reliant on Omniture.

Apple

Waterfalls: normal vs. broken

Observations:

Caveat: Right now, Apple is still running its Steve Jobs memorial home page. Practically zero content, meaning the page is incredibly small.
Very few third-party calls.
Nothing blocks. The entire internet could go down and this site would still work.

Dell

Waterfalls: normal vs. broken

Observations:

As with Staples, Omniture blocks the page request (see line 11 of the waterfall), this time for almost 20 seconds.

Office Depot

Waterfalls: normal vs. broken

Observations:

This waterfall is the worst of the bunch.
The issue here seems to be one that Steve described in this 2010 blog post about SPOF. In this case the file is an external JavaScript file very near the top of the page, which is why the effect is so bad. The page is white until it times out trying to connect to the broken domain.
The same behaviour happens when testing this page with HTTPWatch in IE9, Firefox 7, and Chrome 16.

How are top ecommerce sites using third-party scripts?

A few months ago, I wanted a to get a sense of how ecommerce sites were implementing third-party scripts. We did an audit of the top 200 Internet Retailer sites to see who is using what. Here’s some of what we found.

Average number of third-party scripts

	Average # of 3rd-party scripts
Top 200 sites	6.7
Top 20 sites	3.5

6.7 actually isn’t that bad, but some sites use many more than that…

Top sites, in terms of the number of third-party scripts used

Site	# of 3rd-party scripts
Coastal Contacts	25
Express LLC	23
American Greetings	22
Urban Outfitters	21
The Sports Authority	20
Coldwater Creek	19
American Girl	19
RealNetworks/GameHouse	18
Chico’s FAS	18
Signature Styles/Spiegel	17
Boden USA	17

When you look at the sheer volume of widgets and third-party tools out there, the numbers above are not too surprising. This next table represents just the tip of the iceberg…

Most-used third-party scripts

3rd-party script provider	Appearance in top 200 sites
Omniture	98
Google Analytics	97
DoubleClick Floodlight	49
DoubleClick	45
Google AdWords Conversion	45
Coremetrics	44
Right Media	40
Foresee	36
Microsoft Atlas	33
LeadBack	32
DoubleClick Spotlight	29
Turn	29
Facebook	27
Acerno	26
Rubicon	25
Channel Intelligence	24
Dotomi	22
Interclick	22
Traffic Marketplace	22
Adconion	19
Channel Advisor	19
Resonance	19

Many people would guess Facebook because of its visibility, but this is a good reminder that “invisible” scripts are actually much more widely used than obvious content like social buttons.

Conclusions

Omniture doesn’t come off well, obviously. In 2 out of 5 of the sites I tested up top, it was clear that if Omniture goes down, the site goes down. And as our survey shows, almost half of the top 200 sites use Omniture.

But I don’t want to over-focus on Omniture. The key issue here is that site owners are implementing more and more third-party scripts, possibly improperly, and with little to no analysis of how these scripts affect their sites. It doesn’t matter how well you optimize the rest of your site if a single line of external JavaScript can take out the whole thing.

Takeaways

The odds that all your third-party scripts are going to fail simultaneously? Pretty close to nil. The odds that some of them going to fail sometimes? Pretty much guaranteed. You need to ask yourself these questions:

What do you know about the third-party scripts on your site? Do you know how many scripts your site contains. Do you know who all of your providers are?
Is your third-party content optimized? You can’t optimize the script itself, obviously, but you can make sure that it’s implemented well in your pages. (Here are some good tips and how-tos.)
Are all those scripts adding value? And is that value significant enough to outweigh any performance losses? (See my blog post and accompanying webinar to figure out how to calculate this.)
What are your SLAs with your third-party providers? Do you even have SLAs with your third-party providers? (Not to turn this into a product shill, but third-party SLAs are a feature in our new Mobile Site Optimizer. If you want to learn how this feature works, read more here.)

By: Tammy Everts Category: Tags: Amazon, Ecommerce, Google Analytics, Omniture, Steve Souders, Third-party content, waterfall chart, Webpagetest

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.