Roswell startup hopes to speed to success by cutting web load time
By Allan Maurer
Internet users hate slow-loading Web sites. We all remember those slowly turning icons as all but the simplest pages crawled into view.
While it’s not the problem it once was when most people accessed the Internet via slow dial-up connections, Zoompf founder Billy Hoffman says the performance of most sites is still suboptimal.
Zoompf founder Billy Hoffman
Hoffman, a well recognized expert in the field of the web application development technologies and web security, was research director of web application security software firm SPI Dynamics (which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in August 2007). Following the acquisition, Billy served as Director for Hewlett-Packard’s Web Security Research Group.
Hoffman’s research has focused on Web 2.0 technology and security threats, automated discovery of web application vulnerabilities, and web crawling technologies. His work has been featured in Wired, Make magazine, Slashdot, G4TechTV, and in various other journals and Web sites.
But as Hoffman researched Web app development and design, he found many sites perform poorly.
“As fixed and mobile networks have seen dramatic performance improvements, in many cases applications have not kept up and are now the bottleneck in improving the user experience,” Hoffman says. “In an always-on, instant-gratification world, web application speed is becoming the next competitive advantage.”
While bandwidth today is an order of magnitude faster than in the past – 100 times faster – many Web sites still take the same amount of time to load as they did in the past, says.
Zoompf did a study of the top 1,000 Web sites, analyzing more than 88,000 separate URLs, which showed that on average, 20 percent are bloated and slower than necessary.
Is that important when it’s a matter of fractions of a second or a few seconds? Hoffman points to Google‘s statement that a half second delay in load time results in a 20 percent drop in ad revenue. Amazon found that a tenth of a second delay caused a 1 percent drop in revenue.
A recent Forrester study found that “two seconds is the new threshold in terms of an average online shopper’s expectation for a web page to load, and 40 percent of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail or travel site.”
Hoffman, 29, who founded five-employee Zoompf in 2009 and serves as its CEO, tells us the good news is that companies can often make simple changes that will significantly improve site performance and user experience.
When they’re downtown you can often find the Zoompf folks at the 5th Street RibsnBlues across from Tech Square.
In its study of Web site bloat, Zoompf found that nearly 20 percent of web content served by the Alexa Top 1000, can be eliminated through lossless optimizations that have no impact on content quality or substance.
It also found that 27 percent of static resources that should be cached are not, because they are missing the information required for browsers to do so. This has an enormously negative impact, especially when operating within a shared caching environment.
Cached data such as logos and other static elements stored on a user’s machine can dramatically improve a site’s loading time. “It can knock 100ths of seconds off Web loading of images, mouse-over menus, WordPress plugins. You download them once and don’t have to do it again until the next week or month,” Hoffman says. “It can make a Web site amazingly faster.”
Not surprisingly, Zoompf launched its new On Demand Web Performance Optimizer (WPO), which helps organizations to dramatically speed up their web applications at the same time it released its study findings.
The WPO flags a number of problems, but the two most common are sites not using compression, a simple configuration change that can cut bandwidth needs by 70 percent and the cache problem.
Does it work?
“Leveraging some simple, easy-to-implement recommendations from Zoompf, we were able to cut our page load times almost in half, and reduce our homepage to a third of the original size,” said Nick Levay, head of Information Security and Operations at The Center for American Progress.
Hoffman says the full service, a Software as a Service product that starts $99 a month, can, on average, double the speed of most client sites and gaining up to a 100 percent improvement for some.
Roswell is about 20 miles from the center of Atlanta, but Hoffman says when he heads into town, he can be found sampling the BBQ at The 5th Street RibsnBlues restaurant right across from the Tech Center near the Georgia Tech campus and the Tech Research Building that’s home to the Atlanta Technology Development Center and the Technology Association of Georgia, as well as many tech firms.
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