Performance- resolving some of the issues
Throwing resources at Performance issues, as many organisations often do, doesn't always work and it is RARELY cost effective.
Sitemorse provides a information on a number of aspects that can affect your site's performance.
Raw performance measurements
As Sitemorse spiders through the website checking each page it issues "Get" requests for each element of a page in order to verify that links to those elements are working and to pull down the HTML in order to validate it against the various standards. For each and every one of these "Get" requests Sitemorse takes two performance measurements. The Time to First Byte (also referred to as Response Time) and the Download Speed.
If your response times are slow take a look at the hardware driving your site. Look at CPU utilisation of the servers, monitor the performance of any databases to ensure there are no glitches in performance.
If the Download Speed figure is low then investigate your Bandwidth utilisation you may need more bandwidth or look at the next section as a possible cause.
Other things that affect a site's performance
There are a number of other things that Sitemorse evaluates as it spiders through a website that can have a detrimental impact on the performance of a Website.
File sizes (detailed on the Inventory page)
Anything that a browser has to download from a Webserver in order to display a webpage can impact on the page's performance, so keeping the size of each item optimised is important. This is especially true of images. Images greatly improve the appeal of a page but they need to be optimised so that they aren't too large but the quality isn't compromised. It's important to remember that people are viewing your Webpages on screens with a relatively low resolution. So LARGE, high quality images don't look any different to much smaller optimised images, but the larger images could have a devastating impact on the time it takes to display the page.
You need to think wider than a single page's performance because LARGE files chew up your available bandwidth that connects your Website to the Web. So if, say, you have oversized images that are 200KB larger than they need be on your main landing pages where everyone is directed to, and you have 10,000 visitors per hour during your peak times that's 2MB of wasted bandwidth you need to pay for.
And each and every download of those pages will contribute to slowing down every other visitor to your site potentially make the other Webpages "feel" slow
Also, Webservers have a limited number of "sessions" that they can handle simultaneously. The more time taken to serve up those pages the longer the sessions are held "open", which during busy periods might mean that "queues" form waiting for available sessions, again adding to the impression that your Website is running slowly. You might buy more Webservers to resolve this problem of queues when all you needed to do was optimise those images
Code quality (detailed under the Code Quality section)
Whether it's non-compliant HTML or links to pages with redirects setup these can all contribute to a Website's performance. Keeping a site's code compliant and ensuring redirects are kept to a minimum will contribute to keeping a site performing at it's best as well as helping ensure that it displays correctly in the many different browsers in use today.
Broken links (detailed under the Function section)
Having links to content on a page not only detrimentally affects the look and feel of a page there is also a performance overhead as the Webserver attempts to do it's best to locate the missing items.
Why you need to be concerned about performance
Performance is one of the main points that Websites are judged on by the people using them. A fast site is well regarded and a slow site is quickly abandoned. Forester's latest survey shows people tolerance of slow Websites has lessened with 40% of people saying they'll abandon a site after just a 3 second delay.
Take a look at this blog post for the background to the Forester survey http://blog.sitemorse.com/2009/10/47-percent-of-consumers-expect.html
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