I recently saw the results of an independent study conducted by
Equation Research for Gomez, the Web performance division of
Compuware Corporation, showing the importance of website
performance for consumers. The study found:
- 67% find a slow website a few times a week or more
- 84% are only willing to try a slow website a few times before
giving up
- Over a third say they are less likely to return to a slow
site
These are consumers that are used to sites like MSN, Google and
Yahoo! Of course not all of us have the resources available
to those guys. What makes it even more difficult these days
is the variability of browsers on the market. The latest IE
browser used to dominate, but I read on Website Magazine
that IE 8 has almost a quarter of the market now, and earlier
versions of IE plus the other browsers like Firefox, Safari, and
Chrome account for over three quarters of the people.
So what can you can you do? Problems can occur anywhere in
the web delivery chain: from the hosting datacenter to the
third-party services used by the website to the ISPs to the
browsers themselves. If you can afford it, testing networks
offer a fast and easy way to test and monitor your website
performance for your visitors, and determine where all the problems
are and if you need to optimize for the browser.
Browsers have evolved from just rendering web pages to now being
responsible for well over half of the overall processing time of
websites. There is probably room for improvement at the
browser. For those of us with limited means, this means that we
need to look at what front-end improvements to make for the most
popular browser(s) that will yield the biggest return for your web
visitors. Only concentrate on those that the majority of your
visitors use and focus on the areas of your website that are
important to you and your users.
Web Analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, tell you what
browsers visitors are using and what type of internet connection
they use. They also tell you what pages are viewed the
most. You know what pages you want viewers to view the
most. For tips on design and performance optimization of your
website, I suggest looking at 2 tools that integrate with the
Firefox browser:
- Page Speed - Page Speed performs several tests on a site's
server configuration and front-end code. You get a set of scores
for each page and suggestions on how to improve performance.
- YSlow - YSlow analyzes web page performance by examining all
the components on the page, including components dynamically
created by using JavaScript. It measures the page's performance and
offers suggestions for improvement.
One suggestion, don't get wrapped up and spend a lot of time and
resources trying to get good scores on these tools without yielding
significant improvements for your users. There is a lot of
information online to research and plan your improvements. A
good place to get best practices for speeding up your website is:
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html.