I’ve posted before about Aptimize, the startup trying to singlehandedly speed up the web. Their Website Accelerator product has just been given a strong endorsement by Microsoft who are using it to speed up their SharePoint public site.
Aptimize have published some statistics of the benefits Microsoft is seeing with the solution;
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Reduction in load time |
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First View |
10.6 seconds |
5.7 seconds |
46% |
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Repeat view |
7.1 seconds |
3.3 seconds |
53% |
Aptimize are banking on their contention that faster load times translate into a more sticky browsing experience. This is borne out by another test site they’ve had live for a few months now. Geekzone a technology site with a 700k monthly unique viewer figure. Using the Aptimize tool, Geekzone has reported a;
- 35.10% increase in average time on site
- 13.63% increase in number of pages per visit
- 3.7 percent reduction in bounce rate
It’s interesting to see Microsoft using a tool that’s specifically aimed to increase the speed of some of its own software – one wonders why Redmond hasn’t developed a tool like this themselves already.
I’d be remiss if, along with my post, I omitted posting the video of Aptimize founder and CEO Ed Robinson doing his best media superstar impersonation. Enjoy…
While this software can be a nice quick-fix for an old slow website, any web developer should understand the techniques used in this tool:
* Compress JS/CSS
* Combine small images in one and use CSS sprites
* Combine all JS in one file, same with CSS.
* Cache these static files on the client
Following the recommendations in YSlow is usually a good start: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/