18Aug 10
Productspec delivers over 1,000,000 pages each month and wanted to increase visitor satisfaction by decreasing the load time of their web pages. It was this simple requirement for greater page load speed that led them to investigate the Aptimize Website Accelerator (WAX).
During testing Productspec discovered it was significantly more cost-effective to invest in WAX rather than continuously spend time tweaking web pages in-house to increase their speed. The decision to use WAX ensured their Systems Architect could focus on major projects with very little time dedicated to the seamless and maintenance-free WAX integration.
“It is significantly more cost-effective to use WAX than manually hand-tune each page for speed”
Jon Thompson, CEO, Productspec.
Results
1.8x faster page load speed, decreased bounce rate plus more page views per visit.
About Productspec
Productspec.net is a New Zealand website used by 50,000+ Architects, designers, engineers, building industry professionals, contractors, specifiers and homeowners each month to source and specify architecture, design and landscape products, access technical specifications, environmental data, and download CAD & BIM content.
Productspec also offers a popular free project management tool - MyProjects - used by design teams to manage product selections, request quotes, and share project folders with other project participants, consultants, the client etc.
>> Download Case Study
8Jun 10
Just as the performance of e-commerce web sites is critical to private sector businesses, web site performance is crucial to the proper functioning of school educational web sites.
With this in mind, Research Machines (RM), one of the largest education ICT providers, has deployed Aptimize's Website Accelerator (WAX) to provide faster content to users regardless of their network speed or desktop hardware.
Teachers use RM's platform to deliver online content to pupils during lessons, and pupils use the platform to submit homework or collaborate with other pupils. In addition, parents access the portal to look at the attainment levels, attendance and behaviour of their children at school. The platform is based on Microsoft's SharePoint 2007 collaboration and content management platform. Brian Gibson, technical architect for the RM platform, said: "RM's Learning Platform serves a demanding audience, and optimising response times is important for avoiding frustration or even disturbance in the classroom. "RM has an account for every parent, teacher and school in Scotland. It also has platforms serving the rest of the UK, which hosts 2.2 million user accounts. Gibson explained that the company also has platforms in Australia and is building one in the US.
Why roll out Aptimize?
The scenario confronting RM was different from that of normal service providers. "With a school there will be two or three classrooms with, say, 30 PCs connecting to the portal all at the same time, each of them looking at the same web site and pulling down some very rich media content," said Gibson. Where it is running off a single portal, that can lead to the system reaching a saturation point. "We're trying to improve the experience for schools. We can't use the excuse that the learning platform doesn't perform well enough because a school's internet connection is slow, "explained Gibson. Aptimize was used by RM to dramatically reduce the number of connections a browser has to make to get its content. "For example, if one web page has to make, say, 50 connections [to its source] to deliver the content, this is reduced to 23 with Aptimize, so there's less time spent on that 'ropey' internet connection," said Gibson. "Aptimize reduced even our slowest pages from load times of seven seconds to just over two."
Deploying Aptimize
Gibson said that Aptimize caught his eye with the work it had done with Microsoft's SharePoint.Microsoft.com site. The company said that Aptimize's WAX system was relatively straightforward and that the system was implemented by just two people from the company using out-of-the-box instructions. It did not require developer skills.
Management and monitoring
RM releases fairly large updates to its platform once a quarter, meaning that every time the company releases an update it has to ensure that Aptimize deploys properly and does not break the portal. The company uses a system called Keynote to monitor the performance of its platforms by checking web pages from different DSL locations. "This gives a nice graph showing how fast the pages are running. We wanted to improve on our slowest pages [which took about seven seconds]. Aptimize knocked that down to 2.5 seconds and we were able to monitor this," said Gibson. RM's future plans include using Aptimize to expand into new territories such as Australia and the US, as well on other parts of RM's online infrastructure including its management information systems.
>> Source ApplicationPerformance.com
30Mar 10
By reducing page load times more than 40%, Microsoft’s website http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com feels more “snappy”, has faster load times, and consumes half the bandwidth.
What we did
- Added Aptimize Website Accelerator (WAX) to the site
- Hand-optimized the Silverlight controls
This is a standard Aptimize offering, and the same benefits are available to every Aptimize customer.
The results
Before optimization, the website load times were:
- 10.5 seconds for domestic visitors
- 13.3 seconds for international visitors
- 1.7 MB in page size
After optimization, the website load times were:
- Reduced 43% to 5.9 seconds for domestic visitors
- Reduced 54% to 6.1 seconds for international visitors
- Reduced page size 49% to 0.9 MB
- The “start render” (time people see a blank page before it draws) was reduced by half
WebPageTest results:
Original:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100329_7690d16f562a8416aa7532262c6f2fe7/
Aptimized:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100329_ef769ed36dddf0e7801627e4ac44dd6c/
This is a great result for Microsoft, giving powerful business benefits very quickly. Thanks to Tim McDaniel and Tony Tai from Microsoft for their help.
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11Feb 10
www.wssdemo.com is a popular SharePoint 2010 community site. It is hosted in New Zealand, and the distance impacts load times from around the world.
WSSDemo installed WAX yesterday, and the results are very impressive. This is our first deployment to a SharePoint 2010 website, so we’re very happy with the acceleration.
Improvements From the East Coast USA:
- First view load time reduced 37% from 21.8 seconds to 13.8 seconds
- Repeat view load time reduced 54% from 9.0 seconds to 4.1 seconds
SharePoint 2010 has some performance improvements over SharePoint 2007, and we’ve enhanced WAX to take advantage of these, and the acceleration results are great!
Here are the raw page test results:
Original: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100208_4ZZR/
Aptimized: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100211_52HK/
29Sep 09
Recently we teamed up with Microsoft to speed up SharePoint.Microsoft.com using the Aptimize Website Accelerator (WAX).
SharePoint.Microsoft.com is a critical communications channel for SharePoint, it’s aim is to provide visitors with a rich and helpful experience and at the same time educate them on what SharePoint can do for their businesses; the site leverages the SharePoint web content management platform.
Microsoft recognized that there were fundamental Internet challenges that needed to be overcome in order to improve page loading time, especially for its global visitors.
While SharePoint developers can take advantage of SharePoint’s scalable server processing, utilization of web browsers built-in object caching, and integration with caching offered by content delivery networks these optimizations don’t work to reduce the number of round trips made between the browser and the web server and they don’t take steps to dynamically optimize the HTML, JavaScript, CSS or image output from the server - typically, these factors contribute 80 percent to 90 percent of the page load time. This is where WAX was able to help.
To find out how WAX reduced SharePoint.Microsoft.com first view page load times by 46% to 64% and repeat view load times by 15% - 53% check out the 'How we did it' post on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog.