After reading a blog entry of Web Republic (our partners on SEM Marketing) we had an internal discussion which lead us to the conclusion that page speed is really the king. 

Steve Souders, writer of the famous book "Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers", a must buy for each web design agency, sustains the theory that performance is critical to success of any web site. 

The increase on content and multimedia content, the use of heavier AJAX techniques and the increase of social media linking with calls from other sites make most sites slow and underperforming.  The performance is decreasing year by year instead of increasing. 

Speed is essential for today's rich media web sites and Web 2.0 applications. We need to learn how to shave precious seconds on all produced sites, decrease load times and make responsiveness feel even faster.

You can profit:

• Decrease frustration by customers and visitors
• Increase efficiency when executing B2B business applications or even more important e-commerce projects
• Increase search ranking, since is is one of the criteria used by google on ranking
• Make the experience equal to desktop applications

How to do it:

Read ton's of available online information or simply call the experts.  There are basic elements you need to think of:

• Optimizing / Splitting the initial payload (DOM)
• Writing efficient JavaScripts
• Efficiently loading scripts without blocking
• Coupling asynchonous scripts
• Positioning inline scripts
• Compression (headers, scripts, etc)
• Optimizing Images (a must for every effective CMS Application, in case of eZ Publish, the handling is done together with Image Magic and the right settings. 
• Caching / Buffering
• Using less frames
• Simplifying CSS selectors
• Wisely test your page with goggle webmaster tools

The Network & the analysis

Web applications are not desktop applications, the network stability and performance is of high relevance.  The adoption of ajax resulted on a new style of data communication between servers and clients, the challenge is to have a stable network performance.

We track most of the sites we produce with PINGDOM, they have a pretty clean and impressive infrastructure. They make domains easy to manage.  They offer a service to track the uptime and also offer performance monitoring from different locations in the world. This is for as an important measure instrument which needs to be monitored daily.  Keep track of your performance mostly after you have finished development.   This will help you:

• Optimize websites even further
• Have a constant feedback of what happens on the page 
• Extend analysis of traffic further than other analytic tools (important when marketing activities have an impact on your site)

Tools you can use for analysis:

There are tons of tools available on the market but mainly two are required a visit:

• Google Page Speed  (Google)
• YSlow  (from Yahoo)

You need to invest time and effort on optimizing your site of web application.  Every optimization, every millisecond for shorter load time will increase performance that you can measure and track together with your KPI's

There are tons of examples where optimization has lead to higher profit and better customer experiences. Make it a MUST on every project.   We are pleased to help you on any question you may have. 

Here an example of local page speed measurement of amazon.com using the speed tester on google chrome (plug-In extension).

Amazon.com Page Speed 96/100