There are a lot of ways to optimize a page at the front end, and while some of these techniques can give you great-looking RUM and WebPagetest results on paper, they can also mess with how your page actually looks and performs. These days, I’m seeing more and more sites that test well but perform poorly. Here are two tips to make sure this isn’t happening to you.
Category: web performance news
Four important web performance lessons for SMBs
“Sub-3-second page loads are a serious goal, even for SMBs.” Read more about this plus three other lessons learned from interviewing successful ecommerce site owners.
The 27 best web performance links of Q1 2012
This week, I had a chance to go through the latest links added to Strangeloop’s WPO Hub, and as always, I’m impressed by the breadth and depth of the topics covered. There are a lot of smart people in our industry.
Jason IT Industry Outlook 2012

So here is a fun and serious look at the industry with my performance eye. My commentary on what I see happening within the industry: Patents: A great idea gone wrong. Trolls are a great example of this. Some IT titans now use them to protect their position within the industry, not to protect IP. Companies […]
Latency 101: What is latency and why is it such a big deal?
A beginner’s guide to understanding web latency and why it’s one of the performance industry’s top priorities.
NYT redux: For Impatient Web Users, an Eye Blink Is Just Too Long to Wait
My take on the salient points from this highly forwardable NY Times story about the importance of delivering a fast online user experience.
4 awesome slides showing how page speed correlates to business metrics at Walmart.com
The team at Walmart shares a compelling set of slides showing how page speed clearly correlates to metrics like conversion rate and bounce rate across a massive data set. It’s good stuff, as well as being a showcase for how to use RUM tools to great effect.
Good question: We own a load balancer/ADC. Why not just use it to accelerate our site?
Application delivery controllers do not focus on front-end problems, yet the language they use is very similar to the language used by the front-end performance community. This post demystifies web acceleration from an ADC perspective — looking at ADC features from the perspective of real end-user performance and asking ourselves how much benefit they bring to real end users.
A non-geeky guide to understanding performance measurement terms
In our industry, there’s a lot of language around how we time website speed. We tend to assume that outsiders understand our language, but something I read recently indicates that the average person doesn’t. We need to fix that.
Web performance and the 2012 US election: Is site speed an early indicator of future success?
Barack Obama and each of the Republican candidates’ all claim to be pretty pro-technology, with strong anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA stances. I wanted to see if this pro-tech stance extends to web performance, so I decided to take a shallow dive into their websites and mobile strategies. I was actually kind of surprised to see some interesting patterns emerge.