We know the various rules for improving Web site performance. But are sites employing them? Which rules are used most? What impact are they having?
The webpagetest.org site (powered by AOL PageTest) has been active for nearly a year now, and has collected performance metrics for more then 20,000 Web pages.
Pat Meenan recently reviewed those results, looking at the cummulative distributions of various metrics and optimization scores. The results are pretty eye-opening.
Ran across a blog post from Jesse Robbins, and this quote really struck me:
Web Performance & Operations is an emerging discipline which requires incredible breadth, focusing less on specific technologies and more on how the entire system works together. While people often specialize on particular components, great engineers always think of that component in relation to the whole. The best engineers are able to fly to the 50,000 foot view and see the entire system in motion and then zoom in to microscopic levels and examine the tiny movements of an individual part.
Spot on.
More goodness in the rest of his post.