Speed in digital marketing en

The Business Case For Speed In Digital Marketing

The Business Case for Speed in Digital Marketing In this report you will learn:

• Best practice for digital content acceleration • Where to find tools to identify your own website’s performance • The available solutions for web acceleration • How front-end acceleration can speed up website downloads on any device

May 2012

Thom Poole International Marketing Director

Limelight Networks Inc.

London Office: +44 (0)207 437 1617 Paris Office: +33 (0) 149 973 318 Munich Office: +49 89 89058480

www.limelight.com

The Business Case for Speed in Digital Marketing | Page 2

Contents

Contents ........................................................................................ 2

A Brief History of Speed ................................................................ 3

Why Invest In Web Acceleration? .............................................. 4

Determinants Of Website Page Speed ..................................... 5

The Business Case For Speed ...................................................... 7

Impact of Infrastructure ............................................................. 22

The Unique Limelight Web Acceleration Solution .................. 26

Glossary ....................................................................................... 29

Sources ........................................................................................ 35

About Limelight Networks:

Limelight Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq:LLNW) is a trusted provider of integrated cloud-based applications that leverage Limelight’s scalable, high-performance, global computing platform. We give organisations whose Internet, mobile, and social initiatives are absolutely critical to their success a complete solution to upload, manage, publish, monetise, accelerate, and analyse their online and mobile content. The Limelight team of experts and end-to-end offering allow customers to streamline all of the processes throughout the content lifecycle and optimise the performance of content across all channels — empowering them to quickly and cost-effectively orchestrate a successful digital presence that improves brand awareness, drives revenue, and enhances customer relationships.

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A Brief History of Speed When the commercial Internet started in the early 1990’s, no one was sure what to make of it. In the early days we endured dial-up modems that dropped off every so often. Websites were basic and relatively small in their footprint. Pages were basic black on white, Courier typeface and no images.

Today we are demanding websites to deliver rich media content – immediately, conveniently and consistently. If a website fails to do this, visitors soon give up!

Web pages are getting ‘fatter’, but are also getting faster thanks to faster networks, connections and browsers. Typical retail websites download in between 3 to 6 seconds. The ideal is 2 seconds.I

Where do you stand?

Key Findings 1. Customers expect your content –

NOW

2. Every delay loses conversions, revenue, and customer satisfaction

3. Mobile commerce is even more sensitive to network latency

4. Content Delivery Network (CDN), network acceleration and presentation layer optimisation services are vital

5. Reducing download waiting times is critical to digital satisfaction

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Why Invest In Web Acceleration? Web acceleration services are designed to accelerate non-cacheable content and offload objects through cached storage if at all possible – and this is still a major technique today. But in this mobile economy – where is close to the user?

As the complexity of websites has grown, the potential for delay has increased. Excessive noise in the media landscape also means many sites are trying to drive more engagement through personalisation, thus creating more opportunities to interact – if the user can wait!

With so many different browsers, caches, networks, devices and connection speeds involved in the modern Internet, a single set of HTML optimisations does not fit all eventualities.

Your page views, bounce rates, customer conversions, customer satisfaction and, most importantly, profitability, are at stake. This ‘Business Case for Speed in Digital Marketing’ will demonstrate this.

Websiteoptimization.com has found top online brands saying the same thing.II

Google found that moving from a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and advertising revenues by 20%.III

When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70-80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks.IV

Amazon tests revealed that for every 100milliseconds increase in load time sales decreased by 1%.V

In a study by the Aberdeen Group, a 1 second delay results in11% fewer page views; 16% reduction in customer satis-faction and most importantly, 7% loss in conversions. They calculated that for a site earning $100,000 per day, the site could lose $2.5 million per year in sales.VI

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Determinants Of Website Page Speed Popular browser plugins can highlight key areas of performance. Unfortunately, they only highlight them! Industry recommend-ations to the issues include:

1. Minimise the number of HTTP requests This means limiting the number of files required to display on your web page. This can also mean reducing the size of the pages and limiting the choices on each page.

Files include CSS files, JavaScript references, images, video, etc.

Recommendation: eliminate everything that is unnecessary – the extra load-time for a ‘nice-to-have’ may not be worth it.

2. Optimise and correctly display images This means making images and video files as small as possible without losing quality. Size them correctly for the device so the browser doesn’t have to load and resize content.

Many images can contain extraneous metadata downloaded by devices. Compression can also help.

3. Minimise HTML, CSS and JavaScript Remove the white space from your code. It is useful when programming, but servers and browsers don’t care about this, and it just adds time!

4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) A CDN will help reduce the load on your servers and turbo-charge the performance by delivering cached objects from a nearby server.

A CDN is a network of high-performance servers around the world that cache website assets (code, images, etc.) locally in a Point of Presence (POP).

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5. Compress components Compress your files at the server level before sending them to the user. The greater the compression, the smaller the file size, and the faster the download.

6. Put style sheets at the top of pages All ‘interface-related’ style sheet (CSS) references should be included in the <head> of your document. If you have separate style sheets, use a <link> command as opposed @import.

When the style sheet instructions are in the <head>, customers will see a styled page from the start – the appearance of your site will load first.

7. Put scripts at the bottom of pages All functionality-related files should be loaded after the content. Let visitors see the content as quickly as possible – if they like that, they’ll be reading/watching this whilst the functional files load.

Because of the way browsers function, scripts hold up render time, whilst the browsers process these scripts. Putting the scripts at the bottom of the page allows the browser to build the page first.

8. Utilise browser caching Use the browser’s ability to store static files so that the second and subsequent pages load quicker. This involves instructing the browser to hang on to particular files, images, etc.

This is part of site coding, not the infrastructure.

9. Use CSS sprites A CSS sprite is an image comprising other images used in the page design. It maps co-ordinates of images on the page to speed loading.

Source: Willie Jackson – willejackson.com

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The Business Case For Speed Technical Case How much do you spend (time, effort and money) on optimising your websites for search engines? Google announced that they consider speed when determining search engine rankings, so a slow load-time will impact whether you appear on page 1 or 10!VII

Speed is vital, as Web accessibility guru, Jakob Nielsen identified. He shows two reasons why responsiveness matters:

• Human limitations – especially in the areas of memory and attention. We don’t perform as well if we have to wait and ‘suffer’ the inevitable decay of information stored in short-term memory

• Human aspirations – we like to feel as though we control our own destiny rather than be subjugated to a computer’s whims. Also, when companies make us wait instead of providing responsive services, they can appear arrogant or incompetent VIII

There are three response-time limits identified by Nielsen, originating in 1968 but which still hold true:

0.1 seconds

This gives a feeling of instantaneous response, as if the user, not the computer, caused it. This level of responsiveness is essential to support the feeling of direct manipulation (one of the key GUI techniques to increase user engagement and control).

1 second

This keeps the user’s flow of thought seamless. Users can sense a delay, and thus know the computer is generating the outcome, but still feel as though they control the overall experience. This degree of responsiveness is needed for good navigation.

10 seconds

This keeps the user’s attention. From 1-10 seconds, users definitely feel at the mercy of the computer and wish it was faster, but this is still manageable.

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Anything over a ten-second delay, and users start thinking of other things, making it harder to get back on track when the computer does finally respond. A ten-second plus delay will often make users leave the site immediately.

In a survey carried out in 2011 by the global tag management company – TagMan – over 80% of respondents are concerned or very concerned about their company page load speeds, and 60% claim to have undertaken some steps to improve their site speed, but feel they could still do more.IX

Respondents ranked the impact of slow loading sites as:

1. Reduced conversions – 51%

2. Visitor abandonment – 46%

3. Perceived negative brand experience – 47%

4. Reduced repeat visits – 49%

5. Switching to competitive sites – 40%

6. Other mentions: negative impact on search engine optimisation (SEO)

The measures that the survey found respondents had taken to improve site speed included:

• Optimising page code – 63%

• Performance monitoring – 56%

• Reducing the page ‘weight’ – 55%

• Reducing or removing third-party tags – 35%

• Increase the number of web servers/locations – 22%

• Site acceleration – 22%

• Unsure – 9%

• Other – 3%

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Performance of web and mobile web pages is also measured in terms of the bounce rate – i.e. the number of users who leave the first page without exploring the page or site in any greater detail.

This data came from a web acceleration provider – Strange-loop.X Other surveys and studies confirm this – more of that later.

There is a dramatic relationship between landing page speed, bounce rate and pages viewed per visit.

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The Business Case for Speed in Digital Marketing Share this report: | Page 9




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The most important result from these statistics is that the conversion rate falls-off at a greater rate.

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The most important result from these statistics is that the conversion rate falls-off at a greater rate.

Browsers Your customers need to use the best browsers to ensure that your digital content loads fast. Pages load 29% faster in Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 than in IE7. Internet Explorer 9 also outperforms Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.XI

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Browsers Your customers need to use the best browsers to ensure that your digital content loads fast. Pages load 29% faster in Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 than in IE7. Internet Explorer 9 also outperforms Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.XI

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Financial Case Any delay is likely to cause a drop in revenue – it’s just like queuing at a checkout, but without being able to see any other free or shorter checkouts?

The Aberdeen Group identified that a drop in business perform-ance begins after a mere 5.1 seconds delay.

For every one-second delay over the perceived average, a company can expect the following loss of performance:

1-second delay in page load time

7% loss in customer conversions

11% fewer page impressions (probably with an associated increase in bounce rate)

16% drop in customer satisfaction

Source: Aberdeen GroupXII

The Aberdeen Group also identified that an increase in dynamic web content and the emergence of ‘Web 2.0’ applications have an impact on the web performance in a number of different ways.

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Tests undertaken at Amazon revealed that for every 100ms delay in load time, sales revenue decreased by 1%. Using the 7% figure from the Aberdeen report amounts to an annual loss of US$2.5 million for sites that earn $100,000 per day.XIII

The loss in conversion rate is probably the most worrying for online marketers. Conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert from a casual content view or visit into the desired action.

When the page-load time increases, likely conversion rates drop by 6.7%, peaking at approx. 2 seconds. If we look at this from the other point of view – every second longer that a web page takes to download, the higher the chance of page abandonment.XIV

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Tests undertaken at Amazon revealed that for every 100ms delay in load time, sales revenue decreased by 1%. Using the 7% figure from the Aberdeen report amounts to an annual loss of US$2.5 million for sites that earn $100,000 per day.XIII

The loss in conversion rate is probably the most worrying for online marketers. Conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert from a casual content view or visit into the desired action.

When the page-load time increases, likely conversion rates drop by 6.7%, peaking at approx. 2 seconds. If we look at this from the other point of view – every second longer that a web page takes to download, the higher the chance of page abandonment.XIV

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The abandonment rate is the percentage of visitors that start the ‘sales funnel’ (conversion process) but fail to complete it.

Download Speeds As web pages increase in size, download speeds are shown to suffer, even if the static information is cached.

First view of a web page in 2010 took an average of 11.21 seconds.

The second (and subsequent) view took 5.21 seconds

First view in 2011 was 10% faster than the previous year, mainly thanks to acceleration techniques

The second view took 6,6 seconds – 20% slower than the previous year.

According to Alexa.com, the top ranked sites are slower than the rest due to requesting, on average, 21 more resources. The top 100 sites took 4% longer than the top 2000.XV

Because the sites are requesting up to 35% more resources, this must mean that they are employing some other forms of acceleration to make up for it.

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The abandonment rate is the percentage of visitors that start the ‘sales funnel’ (conversion process) but fail to complete it.

Download Speeds As web pages increase in size, download speeds are shown to suffer, even if the static information is cached.

First view of a web page in 2010 took an average of 11.21 seconds.

The second (and subsequent) view took 5.21 seconds

First view in 2011 was 10% faster than the previous year, mainly thanks to acceleration techniques

The second view took 6,6 seconds – 20% slower than the previous year.

According to Alexa.com, the top ranked sites are slower than the rest due to requesting, on average, 21 more resources. The top 100 sites took 4% longer than the top 2000.XV

Because the sites are requesting up to 35% more resources, this must mean that they are employing some other forms of acceleration to make up for it.

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Performance So how do the top websites actually perform across Europe? We have focused on the retail sector, as the economic pitfalls are most acute.

United Kingdom Rank Site Response

(secs)

1. Tesco UK 0.692

2. BizRate 0.750

3. IKEA UK 0.916

Average 2.188

Germany Rank Site Response

1. Mercateo DE 0.735

2. Preisroboter DE 0.810

3. Alternate DE 0.855

Average 2.341

France Rank Site Response

1. Amazon 1.076

2. Voyage-SNCF.com 1.240

3. Darty 1.394

Average 3.017

Switzerland Rank Site Response

1. Team Viewer 0.573

2. Prixmoinscher 0.763

3. LeShop 0.918

Average 2.596

Netherlands Rank Site Response

1. GSMweb.nl 0.337

2. Arcandor AG 0.349

3. Kijkshop.nl 0.628

Average 2.148

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Italy Rank Site Response

1. Prada 1.109

2. Gucci 1.715

3. Replay 1.718

Average 3.193

Denmark Rank Site Response

1. Apple Denmark 1.191

2. IKEA 1.299

3. Cappelendamm 1.461

Average 3.120

Finland Rank Site Response

1. IKEA 1.076

2. Boozt.com 1.303

3. Ellos 1.349

Average 3.209

Norway Rank Site Response

1. IKEA 1.695

2. Apple 1.747

3. Cappelendamm 2.111

Average 3.232

Sweden Rank Site Response

1. Komplett 0.916

2. Expert International 0.961

3. ValueClick Inc 1.141

Average 2.782

Source: Gomez Benchmarking Collected: March 01, 2012 - April 01, 2012 / 0:00 - midnight EST

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Availability of your content is, as we have seen, very important, but availability is not just related to the download speed of each page. If you are using a hosting company, or data centre that has poor performance, your site could be down when your customers are looking for you.

Looking at the popular ecommerce brands, any downtime causes an eye-watering potential loss:

Amazon.com – Could lose nearly $1 million per hour if downXVI

General Financial Company - $100,000 per hour (52.3% of FS companies)XVII

eBay - $90,000 per hour (based on a 22 hour outage)XVIII

General Network - $42,000 per hourXIX

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Mobile Websites The modern digital environment has changed considerably from one where we were all tied to our desks, to one where mobility is the order of the day.

In 2000, mobile websites using WAP technology were cumbersome and graphically and interactively light. With the advent of new technology and smartphone handsets, the online experience of a pocket-sized device can rival many ‘computers’.

The launch of the Apple iPhone, and latterly the iPad has exploded the smartphone and tablet markets. By 2011, the market for ‘PC tablets’ was said to have touched $35.3 billion. According to InSat research, tablets, notebook PC’s and smartphones are set to see a compound annual growth rate of 25.7% until 2015. The mobile [only] market is projected to see 8.7% growth in the same period.XX

Smartphones account for the smallest share of the global market, but the largest share of mobile web usage – something that is only set to grow as tablets and ‘mobile computing’ expands.

Mobile Browsers XXI

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There is, however, still one big difference in the patience of users. Given that a mobile handset is such a personal item, delays in downloading content is an even greater inconvenience than on a ‘computer’. Coupled with this is the fact that many mobile networks charge extra for data downloads, so wasted time also means wasted money when customers abandon their pages!

Source: KISSmetric Infographic XXII

Page abandonment is even more prevalent for mobile websites, with most responses to a Gomez survey saying that they would wait 6-10 seconds before abandoning the page completely.

Mobile web performances are as follows:


1. Nextag 3.218

2. Shopping UK 3.279

3. Carphone Warehouse 3.506

Average 6.603

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There is, however, still one big difference in the patience of users. Given that a mobile handset is such a personal item, delays in downloading content is an even greater inconvenience than on a ‘computer’. Coupled with this is the fact that many mobile networks charge extra for data downloads, so wasted time also means wasted money when customers abandon their pages!

Source: KISSmetric Infographic XXII

Page abandonment is even more prevalent for mobile websites, with most responses to a Gomez survey saying that they would wait 6-10 seconds before abandoning the page completely.

Mobile web performances are as follows:


1. Nextag 3.218

2. Shopping UK 3.279

3. Carphone Warehouse 3.506

Average 6.603

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Germany Rank Site Response

1. Ciao DE 8.665

2. Idealo DE 8.903

3. NexTag DE 9.005

Average 17.994

France Rank Site Response

1. Fnac 1.598

2. Amazon 3.788

3. Darty 9.062

Average 25.581

Source: Gomez Benchmarking Collected: March 01, 2012 - April 01, 2012 / 0:00 - midnight EST

Psychological Case The reason that people abandon slow loading web pages is down to the frustration that the computer/network is in control. This is even worse when there is a lack of feedback on why the delay is occurring.

A survey showed that 43% of narrowband users were prepared to wait more than six seconds for their content to load – that is 50% more than broadband shoppers.XXIII

A phrase that another study coined was the ‘Tolerable Wait Time’ (TWT), which found that abandonment of non-working links without feedback peaked at 5-6 seconds. Adding feedback, such as a progress bar, increased the TWT to an average of 38 seconds.XXIV

Slow response times not only lead to page abandonment, but slow web pages have also been shown to be perceived as having lower credibility,XXV and quality.XXVI

When page load-times are ‘tolerable’, users are less frustrated, which leads to higher conversion rates.XXVII Wait time is, of course, also dependent on the contents – personalised or not. People will wait slightly longer for information that they believe is personalised for them.

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If you are looking to build trust and engagement with your customers, do not ignore the psychology of your digital marketing.

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Impact of Infrastructure So far this report has discussed how website design, coding and management can speed delivery. Another area that affects speed is the infrastructure that delivers your website and pages to your end customers.

Infrastructure for ‘content delivery’ involve: • Hosting environments • The middle mile • The last mile • Acceleration tools • Content delivery networks

Hosting The first important choice is the hosting environment. Choosing the wrong ISP or data centre can impact on your availability and deliverability. With the advent of cloud storage, your content can now be placed ‘closer’ to the end user.

The diagram below shows the traffic flow of data across first, middle and last mile, via numerous networks. Whilst this can be efficient at times of low traffic, it is also clear that there are plenty of opportunities for congestion and latency.

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Impact of Infrastructure So far this report has discussed how website design, coding and management can speed delivery. Another area that affects speed is the infrastructure that delivers your website and pages to your end customers.

Infrastructure for ‘content delivery’ involve: • Hosting environments • The middle mile • The last mile • Acceleration tools • Content delivery networks

Hosting The first important choice is the hosting environment. Choosing the wrong ISP or data centre can impact on your availability and deliverability. With the advent of cloud storage, your content can now be placed ‘closer’ to the end user.

The diagram below shows the traffic flow of data across first, middle and last mile, via numerous networks. Whilst this can be efficient at times of low traffic, it is also clear that there are plenty of opportunities for congestion and latency.

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For networks, such as Limelight’s private IP, the traffic has a less congested ‘middle mile’, reducing the number of requests and improving the speed of delivery and increasing customer satisfaction. This method also prevents loss of service through failure or attack on a single server within the infrastructure.

Middle Mile The ‘middle mile’ is the segment of a telecommunications network linking a network operator's core network to the local network plant.XXVIII Middle mile facilities can range from a few miles to a few hundred miles. They are often constructed of fibre optic lines, but microwave and satellite links can be used as well.XXIX It is shown in the diagram, previous page, as the ‘cloud’.

The middle mile is something most content delivery networks (CDN) can control, unless they use the public network. Networks using the public, as opposed private IP networks in this middle mile could suffer from ‘seasonal fluctuations’, or where two network companies don’t rate traffic efficiently.

Last Mile The ‘last mile’ is a term for the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer – it is not an absolute measurement of distance! It is the connection the end user has to the ‘Internet’ network (or middle mile infrastructure) – normally through the local telephone exchange. Many measurements are limited to measuring the network speeds, and do not reflect the last mile impact of connectivity.

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For networks, such as Limelight’s private IP, the traffic has a less congested ‘middle mile’, reducing the number of requests and improving the speed of delivery and increasing customer satisfaction. This method also prevents loss of service through failure or attack on a single server within the infrastructure.

Middle Mile The ‘middle mile’ is the segment of a telecommunications network linking a network operator's core network to the local network plant.XXVIII Middle mile facilities can range from a few miles to a few hundred miles. They are often constructed of fibre optic lines, but microwave and satellite links can be used as well.XXIX It is shown in the diagram, previous page, as the ‘cloud’.

The middle mile is something most content delivery networks (CDN) can control, unless they use the public network. Networks using the public, as opposed private IP networks in this middle mile could suffer from ‘seasonal fluctuations’, or where two network companies don’t rate traffic efficiently.

Last Mile The ‘last mile’ is a term for the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer – it is not an absolute measurement of distance! It is the connection the end user has to the ‘Internet’ network (or middle mile infrastructure) – normally through the local telephone exchange. Many measurements are limited to measuring the network speeds, and do not reflect the last mile impact of connectivity.

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Acceleration Tools There are also web content acceleration tools – they come in two broad varieties:

• Network acceleration – this improves the long-haul non-cached content

• Presentation layer acceleration – FEA technology to improve the server to browser communication.

Content Delivery Networks A CDN can increase the speed of page downloads by providing more efficient content delivery.

The fact that research shows CDN-powered site to be slower could be caused by the fact that sites using CDN’s contain more content than lower ranked sites. The latter may not use CDN’s because their pages are more lightweight, with fewer objects, images, etc.

CDN’s provide methods to optimise content delivery, and cover three broad areas:

- Reducing Page Requests - By limiting the number of ‘Get’ requests for a particular page, delivery is improved. This can be in terms of streamlining the request processes that a webpage needn’t fetch scripts sequentially, but including the script correctly in the page code.

This is called ‘inlining’ and can be an automated function within FEA solutions. Other techniques that may help include:

• Selective image combining

• Just-in-time image loading, for example when scrolled or resized

• Small image imbedding

• Small JavaScript file embedding

• HTML 5 persistent cache using localStorage to create a dedicated cache

• HTML 5 adaptive cache – a scriptable cache to consolidate page resources

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- Accelerated Page Rendering – A part of the front-end or presentation layer acceleration (or optimisation) process is deciding on the loading priority of the different elements of the page. Browsers will, by default, download page resources indiscriminately. By ordering this, the FEA improves the time to the point where the page is visibly loaded in an end-user browser.

What is your content prioritisation in the display of the HTML page? FEA solutions often have the ability to postpone the rendering time of certain page elements, including promoting certain elements from third party sites. In addition to analysing the order in which objects load, acceleration solutions may also utilise the following techniques to accelerate page rendering:

• Domain sharding: serves resources across multiple domains to increase simultaneous connections

• Image prefetching: pulling important images before they are requested by the end user browser

• Response prediction: helps to speed rendering by anticipating the HEAD section of the HTML before the server has dynamically generated the page

• Asynchronous JavaScript Execution: processes scripts without blocking other page resources.

• Asynchronous CSS: unblocks the CSS from holding up the loading of other page objects.

• Lazy load: postponing images below the browser fold from loading until the user scrolls down.

- Reducing Page Sizes - From 2003 to 2011 the average web page grew from 93.7K to over 679K, equating to a 7-fold increase. During the same eight-year period, the number of objects in the average web page more than tripled, going from 25.7 to 85 objects per page.

Longer term statistics show that since 1995 the size of the average web page has increased by 48 times, and the number of objects per page has grown by nearly 37 times.XXX

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The Unique Limelight Web Acceleration Solution Limelight Accelerate combines both Dynamic Site Acceleration functionality for improving non-cacheable, dynamic websites with network acceleration and advanced cache control functionality.

For maximum content offload, the Front-End Acceleration capability addresses presentation layer optimisation to dynamically apply best practices to the HTML pages in a seamless fashion.

The Limelight CDN offers customers access to a private IP network – one of the largest in the world, with Points of Presence (POP) strategically placed around the globe. This provides an unencumbered path back to the customer’s origin in support of dynamic content retrieval.

The CDN provides not only storage capacity at the network edge, but also processing power. Combined, the CDN and Front-End Acceleration offer a powerful combination to deliver content in the fastest manner possible to your end users by caching common reference objects and optimising non-cacheable content back to the origin. Unlike other CDN-only solutions, FEA picks up where CDN’s leave off the server to browser communication to improve the end user’s perceived webpage load time.

The scalable, elastic cloud-based service expands on traditional notions of content delivery, building on content caching’s crucial role to deliver even bigger acceleration gains at the end of the delivery chain — the web browser. It’s a proven approach that has helped Limelight’s clients increase engagement, reduce abandonment, and extend their web experiences to mobile devices.

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Don’t keep your online visitors waiting.

Limelight acceleration technology can also make decisions based on the browser that’s requesting content. Since different browsers handle HTML rendering differently, the instructions delivered to a Chrome browser, for example, should be different from those delivered to an Internet Explorer window.

The type of browser also matters. Mobile browsers have to factor in the constraints of available screen real estate, hardware processing power, and bandwidth connectivity. Limelight Acceleration Services have the power to consider all these variables — optimising for every user and every device in real time.

The Limelight suite of content delivery solutions allows seamless integration of the FEA and CDN, along with the Limelight Video Platform and Dynamic Site Platform. APIs allow easy integration into a wide variety of other platforms and corporate systems, giving you maximum flexibility in your digital marketing execution.

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Warp Speed: The Nuts and Bolts of Web Acceleration Solutions Share this report:

Don’t keep your online visitors waiting. With Limelight Accelerate, they can take immediate action on your

site—while the same page has barely started to load without Limelight Accelerate.

Limelight acceleration technology can also make decisions based on the browser that’s requesting content. Since dif ferent browsers handle HTML rendering dif ferently, the instructions delivered to a Chrome browser, for example, should be dif ferent from those delivered to an Internet Explorer window. The type of browser also matters. Mobile browsers have to factor in the constraints of available screen real estate, hardware processing power, and bandwidth connectivity. Limelight Acceleration Services have the power to consider all these variables—optimizing for every user and every device

Limelight Accelerate provides key dif ferentiators that allow both your regular and mobile users to experience faster web performance:

Optimizes dynamic content all the time, every time, while other solutions must learn over time. This is not good for optimizing dynamic content.

No plugins at the origin server or browser

No changes to any HTML code

Integrated into a powerful and robust cloud platform

Limelight owns the optimization code and is not dependent on third party developer resources

ConclusionAs websites continue to become more complex—with more and more objects, images, and scripts—the greatest opportunity for web acceleration lies with the browser. The challenge for an IT or web administrator is to consistently optimize their site for every browser variation. Automated web acceleration solutions can give you the performance you need—allowing you to deliver content at warp speed, across every device.

To find out how Limelight acceleration solutions can help you increase your web page rendering performance:

Call a Limelight representative at 866-544-4831 to have your site optimized while you wait

Learn about Limelight Accelerate at http://www.limelight.com/website-application-acceleration/

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The Limelight Video Platform (LVP) is a simple video publishing tool on the surface, that provides a depth of sophisticated metadata management, seamless integration with your existing CMS, real-time analytics, in-video search, and full support for multiple publishing models including free, subscription, and ad-supported video.

LVP is used by many of the world’s largest broadcasters – traditional and digital, to deliver store, manage and deliver their audio-visual materials.

The Limelight Dynamic Site Platform (DSP) combines web content management; site marketing and personalisation tools, mobile publishing, and an express solution to help an organisation be sophisticated web publishers and marketers. It benefits from a simplified interface and powerful workflow tools, you can quickly push a wide range of content to your website - or launch new websites quickly using existing assets.

The private, global fibre-optic IP network adds to your delivery success and security. Limelight is a cloud-based SaaS provider, and as such you are always on the best version of the platform, future-proofing your investment and able to support your planned seasonal events and short-notice campaigns.

Limelight Accelerate provides key differentiators that allow both your regular and mobile users to experience faster web performance:

• Optimises dynamic content all the time, every time, while other solutions must learn over time, because many websites are very dynamic, competitive solutions that never approach their optimised state. This is not good for optimising dynamic content.

• No plug-ins at the origin server or browser

• No changes to any HTML code at their origin

• Integrated into a powerful and robust cloud platform

• Limelight owns the optimisation code and is not dependent on third party developer resources

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Glossary Abandonment The rate at which visitors abandon the

web page, shopping cart, or action.

Bounce rate The rate at which a visitor ‘bounce off’ a web page without viewing any further pages.

Broadband In this sense, a technical term for ‘fast’ Internet connectivity – the opposite of ‘Narrow-band’ or ‘Dial-up’ connect-ivity.

Browser The interface used by the visitor to view web pages – be it on a computer, tablet or mobile device.

Cache A high-speed storage buffer, generally within the central processing unit of a computer, or in commercial storage, within the servers.

Cascading Style Sheets Cascading style sheets (CSS) are used to format the layout of Web pages. They can be used to define text styles, table sizes, and other aspects of Web pages that previously could only be defined in a page's HTML.XXXI

CDN see Content Delivery Network (abbr.)

Chrome The Google branded Internet browser.

Cloud Computing Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams.XXXII

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Content Delivery Network A content delivery network (CDN) is an interconnected system of computers on the Internet that provides Web content rapidly to numerous users by duplicating the content on multiple server s and directing the content to users based on proximity. CDNs are used by Internet service providers (ISPs) to deliver static or dynamic Web pages but the technology is especially well suited to streaming audio, video, and Internet television (IPTV) programming.XXXIII

CSS see Cascading Style Sheets (abbr.)

Customer conversion The customer conversion rate is probably the most important number you should know about your website. You can calculate this number by taking the number of people who actually buy something from your site, and then divide by the total number of unique visitors to your site.XXXIV

FEA see Front End Acceleration (abbr.)

Firefox The Mozilla branded Internet browser.

Front End Acceleration A specific deployment of a proxy server that optimises web pages by applying heuristics to improve the server to browser communications.

GB Gigabyte – measurement of digital data. One gigabyte is equivalent to 1,073,741,824 bytes. (abbr.)

Graphic User Interface A graphical user interface (GUI) is a human-computer interface (i.e., a way for humans to interact with computers) that uses windows, icons and menus and that can be manipulated by a mouse (and often to a limited extent by a keyboard as well).XXXV

GUI see Graphic User Interface (abbr.)

HTML HyperText Markup Language – the programming language of the Internet (abbr.).

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HTML 5 The latest version of HTML. HTML5 is designed to provide a comprehensive application development platform for Web pages that eliminates the need to install third-party browser plug-ins such as Java and Flash. It provides support for 2D graphics, document editing, drag and drop, browser history management, video playback and local file storage.

HTTP HyperText Transfer Protocol - the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web. HTTP defines how messages are formatted and trans-mitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands (abbr.).

IE see Internet Explorer (abbr.).

Internet Explorer The Microsoft branded Internet browser, the latest is version Internet Explorer 9 (IE9).

Internet Service Provider The means by which Internet users can access the World Wide Web. An ISP has the equipment and the telecom-munication line access required to have a point-of-presence on the Internet for the geographic area served. The larger ISPs have their own high-speed leased lines so that they are less dependent on the tele-communication providers and can provide better service to their customers.

IP Network Internet Protocol Network - IP has become the global standard for networking, which includes the entire Internet, private LANs and many of the data and voice networks of the carriers.

ISP see Internet Service Provider (abbr.).

JavaScript A coding language that can interact with HTML source code, enabling Web authors to spice up their sites with dynamic content.

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KB Kilobyte – measurement of digital data. One kilobyte is equivalent to 1,024 bytes (abbr.).

Landing page A landing page is the first page a visitor ‘lands’ on went accessing the website. This can be a generic page, or a specific page for a campaign or event.

Last Mile The last mile is the notional distance between the user’s device (computer or mobile device) and the ‘network’. Traditionally this has been the link between the user and the local tele-phone exchange or mobile cell transmitter.

MB Megabyte – measurement of digital data. One megabyte is equivalent to 1,048,576 bytes (abbr.).

Middle Mile The "middle mile" is the segment of a telecommunications network, which connects a network operator's core network to the local network plant. Middle mile facilities provide relatively fast, large-capacity connections between the network backbone (or backhaul) and last mile connection.XIX

ms Milliseconds - one thousandth of a second (abbr.).

Narrowband Generally, narrowband describes telecommunication that carries voice information in a narrow band of frequencies. Recently it is used to describe slow Internet connections via a dial-up modem.

Page 'weight' The ‘weight’ is the page file size. The heavier the weight, the larger the size and therefore the more the visitor must download/transfer.

Page views The number pages the visitor has accessed (and assumed to have viewed.

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Plug-in A plug-in is an add-on typically for a software programme that adds functionality to it. For example, a browser plug-in allows you to play certain multimedia files within your Web browser.

Point of Presence On the Internet, a Point of Presence (POP) is an access point from one place to the rest of the Internet. A POP necessarily has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address.XXXVI

POP see Point of Presence (abbr.).

SaaS see Software-as-a-Service (abbr.).

Search Engine Optimisation The art of optimising a website to appear high in the search engine rankings – abbreviated as SEO.

SEO see Search Engine Optimisation (abbr.).

Software-as-a-Service This is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet. It is popular as the software is constantly updated, and reduces the capital expenditure of a business.

Style Sheet see Cascading Style Sheets.

WAP see Wireless Application Protocol (abbr.).

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 is the term given to describe a second generation of the World Wide Web that is focused on the ability for people to collaborate and share information online. Web 2.0 basically refers to the transition from static HTML Web pages to a more dynamic Web that is more organised and is based on serving Web applications to users.XXXVII

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Web servers This is a computer that runs a website. Using the HTTP protocol, the web server delivers web pages to browsers as well as other data files to web-based applications. The web server includes the hardware, operating system, web server software, TCP/IP protocols and site content (Web pages, images and other files).XXXVIII

Wireless Application Protocol This is a specification for a set of communication protocols to standardise the way that wireless devices, such as cellular telephones and radio transceivers, can be used for Internet access, including e-mail, the World Wide Web, newsgroups, and instant messaging.XXXIX

© 2012 Limelight Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Limelight Networks is a registered trademark of Limelight Networks, Inc. Other products and company names may be trademarks of their respective companies. All services are subject to change or discontinuance without notice. January 2012

Key Takeaways

1. Web content speed is a key metric for business success

2. Improving the webpage download experience leads to better engagement, customer satisfaction and higher revenues

3. Multi-platform delivery complicates the workflow but increases reach (to smartphones, tablets and PC’s) and engagement

4. Use of end-to-end content delivery systems improves performance

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Sources

I E-Commerce Page Speed & Website Performance – Strangeloop Networks 2012 II Jackson, W. www.williejackson.com III Linden, 2006 IV Farber, 2006 V Kohavi & Longbotham, 2007 VI Aberdeen Group – The performance of Web Applications: Customers are won or lost in one second, November 2008 VII Jackson, W. www.williejackson.com VIII Nielsen, J. useit.com Alertbox June 21, 2010 IX Ecommerce Page Speed Survey – TagMan (www.tagman.com) July 18, 2011 X Beheshti, H – Strangeloop, July 1, 2010 XI E-Commerce Page Speed & Website Performance – Strangeloop Networks 2012 XII Customers are Won or Lost in One Second – Simic, B – Aberdeen Group, November 2008 XIII Kohavi, R & Longbotham, R – Online Experiments: Lessons Learned. September 2007 XIV Strangeloop Networks website blog - 2012 XV Alexa.com analysis of website load speeds XVI NVT, 2008 XVII Nextslt.org XVIII Internetnews, 1993 XIX Gartner, 2003 XX http://www.istockanalyist.com/finance/story/5654129/tablet-pc-growth-a-death-knell-for-desktop-pc XXI from WebPerformanceToday.com XXII How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line – Inforgraphic from KISSmetrics.com. XXIII JupiterResearch presented by Akamai, 2006 XXIV Nah, F – A Study On Tolerable Waiting Time: How Long Are Web Users Willing To Wait?, 2004. From Web Optimization – 30 May 2008 XXV Fogg, B.J., et al. – What Makes Websites Credible? A Report On A Large Quantitative Study. From Web Optimization – 30 May 2008 XXVI Bouch, A.,Kuchinskey, A., and Bhatti, N – Quality s in the Eye of the Beholder: Meeting Users’ Requirements for Internet Quality. From Web Optimization – 30 May 2008 XXVII Akamai – Boosting Online Commerce Profitability…” 2007 XXVIII Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_mile XXIX About.com Broadband - http://broadband.about.com/od/glossary/g/Middle-Mile.htm XXX http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/ XXXI http://www.techterms.com XXXII http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com XXXIII http://whatis.techtarget.com XXXIV http://www.thesitedoctor.com XXXV http://www.linfo.org XXXVI http://searchtelecom.techtarget.com XXXVII http://www.webopedia.com XXXVIII http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term XXXIX http://searchmobilecomputing.techtarget.com