Advisory - Address Emerging Threats to Website Performance

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Observer newspaper columnist John Naughton recently wrote a controversial article, "Graphic designers are ruining the web," which brought an old topic back to the fore: web page weight. He cited a statistic that "[between] 2003 to 2011, the average web page grew from 93.7kB to over 679kB." Why should this be of concern?

The real issue is not strictly page weight, but rather one of end-user performance. From the perspective of your website visitors, performance is a function of two things:

  • Data Transfer Time - The time it takes for information that makes up your page to transfer from your server to visitors' local machines
  • Page Render Time - The time it takes for downloaded information to be processed by visitors’ browsers and be fully-functional

Today it's not just site visitors making judgments about the performance of your websites; Google does too, using "page speed" to help determine page rankings within its algorithm.

Enterprise web managers should not lull themselves into thinking that performance is no longer a challenge in an era of higher bandwidth and faster servers and networks. This advisory briefing outlines steps to take to review and optimize website performance.