FollowWebsite speed is important. One study found that 57% of online shoppers will wait less than three seconds before abandoning a site. When Google and Microsoft engineers experimented with load times on their respective search engines, they both found web delays had negative effects on traffic.
Popular methods for improving website speed are adding servers and using content delivery networks (CDNs), networks of servers that deliver a web page to a user based on the location of the user.
“That’s only solving the distance problem,” Yottaa VP of marketing William Toll says. “That’s not solving the real problem today. Over 90% of performance time is the time it takes to load a website is the front end, the web site code.”
If you’re Google, you have a team of engineers working on making the multiple images, Flash files, JavaScript files, HTML files and CSS files on the modern day website load instantly. They apply hundreds of techniques to the website’s code to make it load faster. If there are several images on the page, for instance, the right change can make the browser call for all of them at once instead of one at a time.
If you’re a small site, hiring a team to work out these sort of fixes is likely out of your price range. Yottaa’s Site Speed Optimizer, launched Tuesday, aims to automate the techniques in the cloud instead. It also has servers scattered across the world that provide a speed boost, similar to a CDN.
Without adding any code or installing software, a small site can set up the service for as low as $29, depending on bandwidth use and number of pageviews. The product can cut load times in half, Toll says.
Yottaa isn’t the first startup to think of automated front-end optimization. A company called Blaze, for instance, makes a similar cloud-based product that focuses on mobile. While Yottaa does make improvements to mobile site load times, it’s more focused on desktop browsing.
When it launched 18 months ago, it did so with a free dashboard that breaks down load times by task and location (Blaze also has a monitoring product bundled with its optimizer). About 50,000 sites already use it to monitor their speed. Yottaa is hoping they’ll now use it to remedy the problems it shows them as well.
Source: mashable
