We believe in agility and flexibility. Is your website flexible enough? [EN]

We believe velocity, agility and flexibility are key elements to world sustainability. The ability to adapt to every day changes, to change course or simply getting there faster better prepares people and organizations to succeed.

Information is everywhere; we are bombarded by information, news, articles, sites and videos.We also don’t have a lot of time. We shouldn’t have to wait for information. The sites, pagesand news should open instantly. It helps us being more flexible by reading more news in lesstime, to stay connected with less effort and stress.

Studies show that one key element for retaining web users and increasing traffic is site speed.Amazon’s team found out that for every 100ms of delay in loading the site they would loseabout 1% in sales.

How to speed up your website

The loading time of your website pages depend of a lot of factors: client’s bandwidth, browser speed, server’s hardware, and portal’s programming. Only the last two factors are under your control. The first two factors are external factors that you cannot tweek.

The task at end is to optimize the hardware and portal’s programming. And if you are not
an exception, it is cheaper and fast to optimize the portal’s software with some simple, yet
important, tweaks and guidelines.

Our checklist is:

• Connection Speed items. Solve and optimize key points that depend of user’s
  connection speeds and latency, like browser cache.
• Browser speed. Optimize the web page code and design to help browsers render andshow the pages faster.
• Server speed. Configure, upgrade or tweak the server’s OS and / or hardware. With some very controlled investments improvements of 50% to 300% are possible.
• Speed Oriented Programming. A set of programming guidelines that can improve your site performance 10x fold.

Allow agility and flexibility, in a mobile environment.

More and more users are using mobile devices. However, portals are often optimized for
high bandwidth leased lines. A great user experience means you have also to consider low
bandwidth or high latency access from 3G or even 4G. On a leased line you can often get a
100Mbps sustained but in a mobile world 3 or 4 mbps is already a good mark.

Overcoming connection speed bottlenecks

The bandwidth is one of the crucial factors in the load time of a webpage. Its importance relies on the obvious impact on a page load time, but also because you don’t control it. Thus, in order for you to be flexible about the time of connection (either leased or wireless) the best way is to eliminate altogether the need of transferring data.

• Cache-Control headers. Make the most of the user’s browser cache.
• Cache-Control Public. Make the most of ISP’s servers cache.
• External JS and CSS. To enable cache of those files.
• GZIP. Compress and minimize js, css and static html files.
• Cookieless domains. Reduce or eliminate useless communication with servers forstatic files.
• Images. Optmize the format and compress images.
• Use CDN. Scale enable your site by using content delivery networks.
• Multiple domains. Use multiple domains to parallelize files downloads.

Web Browser Speed

There are a lot of web browsers out there (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE) but even more devices. Some have fast processors; others have slow processors as well as slow graphic chips. Helping browsers is as important as connection speed.

• Image size. Telling the browser the image dimension allows the browser to starting displaying the page sooner.
• Do not resize images. Show the images in the original dimension; re-dimensioning is a heavy task.
• Eliminate CSS expressions. CSS expressions calculations are also heavy and costly.
• Reduce JS to a minimum. It will take 1ms to parse and compile each 1KB of JS.

Server Speed

What was true a few years ago it is not true no more. Did you know that RAM prices fallen 70% in 2011? Now 48GB costs less than 1,500 USD, or about a week programmer’s salary?

• Use RAM. RAM is very cheap. Load as much possible data into RAM. RAM is 10.000 faster than hard drives.
• Switch to SSD. If your site has an I/O performance issues, SSD are a lot cheaper than investing in a whole new storage platform.
• Tweak VMs. Virtual machines are great, but still you need to know what you are doing.Do you need a lot of virtual memory? If not, turn it off. Have you TCP offload enabled? Is some cases it can hurt you more than save you.

Speed Oriented Programming

Every software application now deals with a database. And every portal screen shows data
that resides in some sense in a database. But should we burden the database every single time we need that data?

Pages are more and more interactive. They have AJAX and variants like JQuery, partial renders and so on. Each of those components increases the number for data requests.

• Lookups cache. Load static or semi-static tables into application memory directly. Do you need to go to the database every time you need a list of countries? Of course not.
• Data Cache. Expand the lookups cache for data also. There are data tables that have 10K, 100K or even 1MB. What’s that when compared to a trivial 2GB server memory nowadays?
• Parallelize and unblock. Server the page core first and de-serialize the loading
  of detailed information. Use asynchronous parallel methods to load each page’s
  information group.

Let us make your website faster!

Preliminary Audit (duration: 1 day)

A fast audit identifies key issues in your website. It provides a broad framework of action. Each case is a different one. After an initial audit for key issues we analyze your specific case. Is your site in WordPress, Joomla, .Net, Java, WebSphere ? Each platform has its own restrictions. A line of action means identifying the most rewarding and cost effective execution plan.

Get Faster, Fast (duration: 1 week)

A lot of recommendations and suggestions listed above in the bullet list can be made in one week. Each tweak can even solve multiple issues. Our method is to tweak and retest, tweak and retest. We stop when the performance achieves the desired benchmark. No need to optimize what already works well.

Get Faster, by Design (duration: project dependent)

Sometimes the website is not well designed or optimizations can only be done changing the code. We provide a more in-depth analysis of what need to be changed. We then forward that information to your developer’s team, or we can make the changes ourselves.

A complete benchmark is done, from hardware to browser speed, your competitor’s web site benchmarks and so on.

Get Faster, from Now On (duration: 2 days training)

A two days training. The first day focus in concepts. The second day is a workshop exemplifying with your own real website portal.

The objective is to train your developer’s team so that you have a fast website by design from day 1.