This document discusses techniques for improving website speed, including front-end optimizations like image compression and sprite sheets, backend optimizations like updating modules and ensuring sufficient server capacity. It notes that slow site speed can negatively impact conversion rates, bounce rates, and SEO. Tools are recommended for analyzing site speed like Pagespeed and Pingdom. The goal is to load pages within 2 seconds to avoid high abandonment rates.

1. Site Speed Tune Up – Putting Your Code on a Diet
Brennan Heyde
Technical Director – Professional Services
3/8/2012

2. Overview
• Site Speed – Why Should You Care?
• How to analyze your site speed
• Techniques used to increase troubleshoot
problems and increase your site speed
• Testing Tools
• Beyond Coding – Tools to take your site
speed to the next level

3. Why you should care – Visitor Abandonment
• Reduced Bounce Rate -
According to surveys
done by Akamai and
Gomez.com, nearly half
of web users expect a
site to load in 2 seconds
or less, and they tend to
Source: Kiss Metrics
abandon a site that isn’t
loaded within 3 seconds.

4. Conversion Rate
• A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7%
reduction in conversions – Kiss Metrics
• From Shopzilla.com: Improving the site speed of this popular
ecommerce portal by 20% resulted in an improvement in
conversion rates of 7% to 12%. Page views went up by 25%.
• Tests at Amazon, also in 2007 revealed similar results: every
100 ms (that’s 1 tenth of a second) increase in page load time
of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1%.

5. SEO – Used in Google’s Ranking
• April 2010 – Site Speed is one of the 200
metrics used to rank a web page.
• “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't
carry as much weight as the relevance of a
page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search
queries are affected by the site speed signal
in our implementation”

6. Where Do I start?
Image Sprite
1. Front End Optimization
- Reduce number of server requests
- Combine CSS/JS Files
- Use Sprites for icons
- Optimize Images
- Utilize Compression / Caching
- Minify CSS / JavaScript
- Fix all broken Images (404 errors)
- Calls to External Websites (facebook)

7. Compression – How It Works
gidnetwork.com/tools/gzio-test.php
Compression can be turned on
in your .htaccess file on your
server

8. Tools - https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/

9. Results:

10. How Fast is My Site?
Test with FireBug /FireFox / Chrome Developer Tools

11. Other Tools:
• www.pagespeedtest.org
• http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
• http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

12. Google Webmaster Tools
Let Google tell you the speed of your website:
* Data comes from users with Google Toolbar

13. 2. Backend Optimization
• Bad Coding / Logic Errors (Typically Using a
3rd party module)
• Poor Performing Modules / Non Updated
Modules / Module Maintenance
• Server Capacity – Can your server handle
your traffic? Do you know your servers
limits?

14. Bad Coding
• Calls to external files / Scripts
• Loops / Logic Errors
• Iframes

15. Tools Used for Troubleshooting
• Miva Empresa Engine Logging
• Any 5.10 and higher Miva Merchant Engine can
log every action to find module performance
issues. (see release notes for implementation)
• Example: isokineticsinc.com

16. Modules
• Poor Performing Modules
• Not Keeping Modules up to date
• Module Maintenance
• Large Database Files

17. Server Capacity
• Who knows the specs of their server?
• Who knows their traffic?
- Unique Visitors/day
- Average Pageviews/ visitor
• Make sure your server is not the cause of your
site’s slow performance
• Quality Miva Merchant Host

18. Visits per Day / Page Views
Hits Per Day
2,000,000
1,800,000
1,600,000
1,400,000
Page Views
1,200,000
1,000,000 Page Hits/Day
800,000
600,000
400,000
200,000
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19. Hits/Second Needed to Handle Visitors
Server Capacity Needed in Hits/Second
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20. Server Testing Tools
• ab – Part of Apache, will show how many
requests per second your Apache installation is
capable of serving
• Httperf - It provides a flexible facility for
generating various HTTP workloads and for
measuring server performance
* Always test in a DEV environment.

21. Recap
Three Areas to Look At To Improve Site Speed
1. Front End Optimization
2. Backend Optimization
3. Server Performance
What Else Can You Do?

22. What Next?
Merchant Optimizer – Converts all your dynamic
pages into static HTML pages.
- Will lose some dynamic content such as mini
basket.
- 38 times server performance increase in our
testing

23. 1000
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365.71
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24. 3rd Party Services
• Altruik – Domain Sharding
• Loading images from different sub domains at the
same time
• Front End Content Delivery Network
• Blaze.io
• Yotta.com
• CloudFlare.com

26. Q/A
Any Questions?
Thank You!