Previously we reviewed the healthcare.gov website for speed, and found it lacking. The old site was notoriously slow and spawned many “wait” error messages for users looking for health care. Just in time, President Obama made a pledge that the site would be fixed (with a new performance czar) by the end of November. To test his promise, we reviewed the site shortly after that deadline, in early December (see Figure 1). This report shows the results of this study. To see how much the site could be improved further, we had our friends over at Radware test the site with their automatic optimization software called Fastview, which we reviewed in a previous article.
Year: 2013
Speedy Mobile Sites Impact Google Search Rankings
Google is now factoring in mobile friendly web designs and mobile site speed into their search engine rankings. With the growth of mobile devices surfing the Web (some sites we’ve tested have more than 40% of their traffic from mobile devices) Google wants its search engine users to experience the full richness of the Web by rewarding sites with fast mobile-friendly designs.
Use a Website Accelerator – testing automated web performance optimizer radware fastview
There are a number of automated ways to speed up your website. Web developers can deploy both software and hardware solutions to speed up their website automatically. By embedding best practices into code, vendors can speed up websites without the need to involve developer resources. This article evaluates Radware’s Fastview web acceleration hardware. Some other solutions are listed below.
Velocity 2013 New York City Highlights – web site performance and operations conference
The first Velocity Web Performance and Operations conference held in New York City ran from October 14-16, 2013. In its sixth year, Velocity is a conference devoted to testing and speeding up websites. Co-founded by Steve Souders, of YSlow and Page Speed fame and now with Google, attending Velocity is a great way to stay up to date on the latest performance trends, include mobile performance. This article gives some highlights from the conference.
Healthcare.gov Performance Review – website speed audit of healthcare.gov affordable care act obamacare
The Affordable Care Act began enrollment on October 1, 2013 for health care coverage beginning on January 1, 2014. Health care consumers are directed to log-on to the healthcare.gov website (see Figure 1), call, or show up in person. Over 2 million people have accessed the site in the first two days, many experiencing errors or delays (which the media is characterizing as “glitches” and “growing pains”). Let’s take a closer look at the healthcare.gov website to see how its performance can be improved.
Optimize Start Render Time – web page optimization of start rendering times
Start render optimization takes place before the first content appears to the user, and is critical for good HCI feedback. A fast start render time gives the user visual feedback
that the web server is responsive. Ideally you want a start render time (and useful content
display) of under 1-2 seconds (see Website Optimization Secrets for details). The start render (the time it takes for the first visible changes to appear) is composed of Time to First Byte (TTFB) connect time, server response time, processing objects in the HEAD of your document, and initial page parsing and rendering. Optimizng your start render time is a matter of optimizng each of these delay components.
Flush HTML Early and Often – flushing html to speed up start render times and page rendering
When a user requests a page, it can take from 200 to 500ms for the backend server to create the HTML. During that time the browser is idle, waiting for data to arrive. Developers can speed up start render times and the display of useful content by flushing the buffer. Flushing HTML sends a partial HTML response to the browser, which modern browsers can display. Flushing allows the browser to start fetching components and rendering the response while the backend can continue creating the rest of the HTML page.
Speed Up Your Netbook: Toshiba NB205 & Toshiba NB525 – upgrade laptop boot time speed optimization with RAM, SSD & software
Figure 1: Toshiba NB205-N210BN-G
Netbooks are small, low-cost laptop computers first launched in 2007. Typically powered by low voltage CPUs (like Intel’s Atom or AMD’s Fusion series) netbooks omit certain features of full-featured laptops like optical drives to keep cost and weight down. Netbook screen sizes typically range from 10.1″ to 12″ diagonal in later models. Netbooks are being replaced by thinner ultrabooks and tablets now, but are still quite handy as a second laptop for traveling. One problem with netbooks is that they can be slow to run applications and boot. This article shows how to upgrade your netbook to boot and perform faster.
Average Web Video Duration 5.4 Minutes – internet video statistics and study trends
The length of the average web video has grown by 20% since 2010. Since our last video survey the average web video has grown from 270 seconds (4.5 minutes) to 5.4 minutes (324 seconds) in December 2012 (Comscore 2013). Figure 1 shows the growth of the average web video since 1997.