Studies have identified speed as the single most critical factor for e-commerce conversion. There are lots of changes you could make to your website, but none of them are as risk-free as increasing speed. Some people like yellow, some like blue, but nobody likes slow. This talk will explain how to measure speed, and how to make your site much faster with minimal effort.

1. Respond Promptly

2. Motivation
Good service includes responding promptly—whether
that’s you or your web server.
-Jehochman
Faster responses generate more revenue.
“Most e-commerce sites rank among the slowest sites
on the Internet. Amazon did a study where they
identified that there is a direct relationship between
page load speed and conversion rates. They found a 1
percent decrease in sales for every 0.1 second
decrease in response times. Other studies have
identified speed as the single most critical factor for e-
commerce conversion.” (emphasis added)
-Steve Francia, Internet Evolution

3. http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
3

4. Speed Benchmarks
• 1.5 seconds (1500 milliseconds) is acceptable
• Google.com loads in 300 - 500 ms.
• I prefer 1 second or faster.
• Test a few times and discard any outliers.

5. The speed of light: c = 186 282 mi/sec
Information never moves faster.
Albert Michelson Edward Morley Albert Einstein
Distance from Earth to Moon is 238 855 miles

7. SearchEngineLand.com

8. Distance to User Impacts Response Time
Dallas
Holland
10 000 mi / c x 272 = 14.78 sec
10 000 mi / c x 275 req / 3.5 parallel req = 4.21 sec

9. Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
• First load might be slow (with free service)
• Caching speeds up subsequent loads
Naked
Server
CDN
Deployed

11. Hosting Matters
Linux hosting at
BostonComputing.net:
1 second
Unnamed Windows
hosting – same site:
12 seconds

12. Complain to the Hosting Provider
Before
After

13. Does HTML Efficiency Matter?
• A lot of people obsess about code size.
• Is it worth the effort to recode for speed?
- probably not!

15. Ctrl-U: View Source—3052 lines!

17. 6X Less Code—But Same Load Time.
HTML Size Matters, but Not So Much.

18. Content Management Systems (CMS)
and Caching
• It takes time to run PHP/Ruby/Java scripts
server side. A CMS is slower than static code.
• A cache stores the script output and reuses it
each time the page is requested.
• Caching cuts response times, but some types
of updates might not appear instantly.
• W3 Total Cache for Wordpress
http://yoast.com/w3-total-cache/

19. Cache Off / On Test
W3 Total Cache also does minification: CSS and JS files are merged, and
extraneous characters are stripped from files.

20. Web Video and Speed
• Asynchronous video (and AJAX) impacts page
load speed very little.
• Streaming large video files from the same
server probably isn’t smart.
• Wistia is a good option.

21. Speed Tactics are
Cumulative

22. The Easiest Speed Wins
• Good Hosting
Not overloaded, properly configured server
• Content Delivery Network
Place static files close to the visitors
• Simplify Design to Improve Usability and Speed
26 requests are ~10X faster than 275 requests
• Cache Plugin for CMS
Alleviates time spent running server-side scripts.
• Appropriate Use of Asynchronous Content
Leverage AJAX and Video for complex content

23. Google PageSpeed™
developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
• PageSpeed extension for Chrome and Firefox
• mod_pagespeed – an open source Apache module
that speeds up serving.
• Lots of details for those with time and expertise. For
people who run their own servers.
• Recommendations are automated and NOT based on
actual speed. They are a start, not an end.
developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

24. Further Reading
https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-
practices/rules_intro
• Optimizing caching — keeping your application's data and
logic off the network altogether
• Minimizing round-trip times — reducing the number of serial
request-response cycles
• Minimizing request overhead — reducing upload size
• Minimizing payload size — reducing the size of responses,
downloads, and cached pages
• Optimizing browser rendering — improving the browser's
layout of a page
• Optimizing for mobile — tuning a site for the characteristics of
mobile networks and mobile devices

25. Jonathan Hochman
slideshare.net/jehochman
linkedin.com/in/jehochman
hochmanconsultants.com
@Jehochman