May 26, 2010

Healthy speed for website about health, WEBO Software says no smoking

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After acceleration we noticed remarkable drop in server load and user session time enlargement.

Health portal "How to stop smoking" (kurenie-yad.org/) appeared in the year 2007. Portal evangelizes healthy lifestyle and smoking cessation, proving for its readers large number of collateral materials. Portal attracts about 60,000 visitors every month, and its load speed significantly influences website quality and its popularity so far.

There are visitors from all over the world on this website. Moreover «How to stop smoking» uses a lot of social widgets (Google Connect, Facebook Connect, etc) to hold audience. This all sets strict requirements to the overall website performance, especially ti its client side. In this case project's VPS hosting plays well and allows us not to implement additional caching layers to speed the website up.
After the first stage of website acceleration (regarding Google Webmasters data) its load speed increased by 30%. Common actions to accelerate the website helped a little, so there was decided to integrate additional WEBO Site SpeedUp modules with delayed social widgets load (Unobtrusive JavaScript). After their implementation website load speed increased almost 3 times (up to 3.1 seconds against 9.1 seconds initially). Vlad Kulikov, project administrator, said that "after acceleration we noticed remarkable drop in server load and user session time enlargement."
High website load speed is required to form a stable users core. In this case the use of embedded communication tools of known social networks only make the client side speed slower, forcing to implement more aggressive methods to change the website load flow, based on the latest research and development in the area.
Website load speed primarily influences the website quality and its ability to target the owner's business goals. Therefore, in conditions of acute competition and the high quality standards it's necessary to implement the most stable, productive and time-tested solution - such as WEBO Site SpeedUp. Practice shows that the acceleration site is worthwhile for a few days, in rare cases a week, but it brings increased profits to the website owner even after a full ROI.

May 16, 2010

v1.1.2 released

Every day there are more and more fast websites around us. And we are happy to support this trend. So features of the new version of WEBO Site SpeedUp.

    Added pre-defined CDNs. Now you can simply choose between few patterns to distribute your static assets through CDN. Supported now manual configuration, some pre-efault configuration (cdn subdomain) and Coral CDN. Coming: WEBO CDN specification.
  • Added 'FTP upload access' option for paid CDN. Few CDN require files to be uploaded manually via FTP (i.e. EdgeCast). Now you can setup FTP access string to upload all assets created by WEBO Site SpeedUp to CDN automatically.
  • Added 'remove duplicates' option. This option can reduce amount of JavaScript code in case of complicated frameworks usage. I.e. if there are two jQuery libraries, the second one will be automatically excluded from merging. This reduces download time and JavaScript initialization time as well.
  • Removed check for .htaccess possibility. After various minor troubles with dozens of environments this check is disabled. We are going to re-test this functionality (not to enalbe .htaccess options on unsupported environments and enable them on supported ones) later.
  • Added cache integrity check. Now all system libs stored in cache directories are re-checked for new versions (to update them as soon as new version is released).
  • Added exclusion from CSS Sprites images used with AlphaImageLoader. Very helpful feature because you can't apply CSS Sprites for IE if this image is used in filter.
  • OptimizerAdded webonautes to achievements. Now you can use 5 webonautes to indicate your website acceleration, also achievements page was expanded with total webonautes number.
  • Magento added to supported systems.
  • Improved server environment detection.
  • Minor fixes.

You can update to the latest WEBO Site SpeedUp or download it from the official website.

May 4, 2010

SWIFT tool for slow websites


Several days ago we released a new tool for websites which are revenue-focused and are trying to maximize their income. It's SWIFT - Slow Websites Investigation for Financial Target, www.webogroup.com/corporate/test-speed/.

Now you can just enter your website address, get its load speed, get projected acceleration, and calculate how much do you loose every month with your current website speed.

We included a number of pre-defined patterns for e-commerce activity: e-stores, blogs, corporate websites, news, and portals. Also there is an industry selector to specify your model more accurately.

You earn money with every visitor to your website, also you miss some opportunities with a slow website. Now you can just calculate how much do you miss every month.

Try it now: SWIFT - an easy tool to calculate missed revenue.

May 1, 2010

v1.1.1 released

After a lot of R&D andtesting we are ready with few core improvement in WEBO Site SpeedUp.

  • Fist of all, there added normal CDN distribution for CSS/JavaScript files. We are going to include a number of pre-defined rules for CDN hosts naming (i.e. for Coral CDN), but now you can just enable CDN distribution for all files (w/o actual merging). 'Multiple hosts' group of options renamed to 'CDN'.
  • Changed Unobtrusive JavaScript logic (widgets are moved to window.onload). The second major improvement. Now a number of critical widgets (Google Search, Google Connect, Facebook Connect) can be loaded after the whole page is ready (window.onload).This significantly improves website load speed (by Google Webmasters).
  • Added support for Google Search widget.
  • Added support for Google Connect widget.
  • Added support for Facebook Connect widget.
  • Added support for Novoteka widget.
  • Improved data:URI (failures handling).
  • X-Cart added to supported systems.
  • Improved UI.
    Minor fixes for achievements logic.
  • Minor compatibility fixes.