Time Is Money

Chapter 4. Let’s Talk Solutions

Concerns about web performance aren’t new. Let’s jump into the Wayback Machine and make a quick visit to 1999, when Zona released a report¹ warning online retailers that they risked losing $4.35 billion per year if they didn’t optimize their websites’ loading times. (Interesting aside: Zona recommended that the optimal loading time for ecommerce sites was 8 seconds. Times sure have changed. Today, we know that for most ecommerce sites, the performance sweet spot is around 2.5 seconds. After 4 seconds, conversion rates dip sharply.)

Over the years, solutions have become increasingly refined, from building out the bulk of the infrastructure of the Internet to homing in on performance issues within the browser. This chapter offers a quick fly-over tour—designed expressly for nongeeks—of the acceleration and optimization landscape over the past 20 or so years.

The goal here is to show you how solutions have evolved from relatively simple (i.e., throw more servers at the problem) to increasingly complex and nuanced as we’ve learned more about the root causes of performance issues and how to address them.

Before getting started with talking about solutions, let’s first talk about two of the biggest problems faced by anyone who cares about making the Internet faster:

• Network latency (AKA the amount of time it takes for a packet of data to get from one point to another) 
• The myth that modern networks are so fast, we no longer need to worry about latency ...