Let's “Ace” the performance with simple basic rules!

“If it is fast and ugly, they will use it and curse you; if it is slow, they will not use it.”- David Cheriton.

Web sites and web pages are evolving, expanding and getting more complex with time. But if it does not load with a good speed,  it might affect a site visitor's behavior. The adverse effects will be seen on the sales conversions and hence, the revenue.

We can see some cases like:

• Amazon increases 1% of revenue with an increase of every 100 milliseconds. ( Ref: wpostats.com)

• Google takes site speed into account for appropriate search rankings. Statistics show that an extra 0.5 seconds in search page generation time dropped site traffic by 20 percent.

Slow performance affects everything from individual transactions, uploading or downloading to customer retention and ultimately sales turnover and revenue. Website loading times can have an enormous effect on the conversions. Only 1 second of delay could potentially cost a company 10 percent of revenue. On the other hand, an improvement of the only second could potentially increase your conversions with 2 percent. (Reference: www.blog.uptrends.com). Some of the consequences of low speed are:

• Losing a loyal customer.

• Unsuccessful Marketing Campaigns.

• Rising bounce rates  ( the percentage of single-page sessions).

• Lower conversion rates.

• Bad user experience and high operating costs.          

A website can slow down for many reasons, including low server memory,  many unnecessary requests or data influx. If a server is slow, it will hinder the website’s performance. Likewise, a site receiving a great deal of traffic can also slow down the load time or disrupt the user experience.

CONCLUSION

Your website’s performance can make the difference. Website performance optimization should be aligned with the service/website/target audience you work with.

In this session, we look into these important aspects:

1. Performance Improvement Plan- The first step towards improving a web performance or any other activity is to set a plan for it. Identifying the areas and inculcating it into the sprint-wise structure. We shall discuss about different stages and areas that are required to be addressed at each stage.

2. Caching - Most us of are aware of the fact that enabling cache helps in increasing site performance. There are cache mechanisms available like- Drupal In-built cache mechanism, Varnish, memcached etc. But we need to understand how to use them and when to use them to maximise the effectiveness. We shall discuss few of the cases where the respective mechanisms could be used. Also, a practical example showcasing what difference enabling a cache could make.                                    

3. How to improve your website performance with a Content Delivery Network (CDN)- A good amount of page load time is spent while retrieving content. hence it makes sense to provide these building blocks [CSS/JS, Images and other structural components] of a site in as many servers as possible that are distributed throughout the world. We will discuss a couple of scenarios and give a walkthrough about the same.

4. Compression- The lesser the size of the document or images the faster is the page load. We shall talk about using encoding Base-64 images, CSS image sprites and GZIP Compression.

5. Maintaining Code quality and preventing memory that has a direct impact towards page performance- Here, we shall talk about debugging extraneous HTTP Requests, micromanaging custom modules, usage of git pre-commit hooks and PHP Code sniffer etc.

6. Monitoring Performance- We shall look after the tools that are easily available as 3rd party services and see how could we make use of it in day to day web development cycle.These commonly available tools are  New Relic (server monitoring tool), Firebug, Chrome Plugins.