How we did it: Speeding up SharePoint.Microsoft.com

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.