image courtesy of Corey Seeman – http://www.flickr.com/photos/cseeman/

As we moved through the traditional start of the holiday shopping season (Thanksgiving / Black Friday / Cyber Monday), it is clear that most sites were prepared for what was coming. No big names went down, no performance slowdowns rose to the headlines, and online revenue – both web and mobile – appears to have increased over 2011.

But when you these companies do their year-end review, they need to take a step back and ask: “Could we have done it better?”

While performance events were few and far between (if they occurred at all), companies will need to examine the cost of scaling their sites for performance. When planning for the peak performance period, companies will need to asses whether simply scaling-up to handle increased traffic and sales could have been managed more effectively, by implementing sites that were not only fast, but  also efficient.

Joshua Bixby (here) noted that web page size has increased 20% in the last 6 months, an indication that efficiency is not always at the top of mind when new web content is presented to visitors. In order to deliver ever more complex web content, companies are spending more on services such as CDNs and cloud services to deliver their own content, while incorporating ever increasing numbers of third-party items into their pages to supply additional content and services (analytics, performance, customer service, Help Desk, and many more) that they have outsourced.

Increasing page size, outside acceleration and cloud services, and third-party services – a potent mix that companies need to asses critically, with an eye to understanding what all of these mean for the performance experienced by their visitors and customers. Add in the increasing importance of the mobile internet, with its variable connection speeds and service quality, and things become even more interesting.

In 2013, I see companies assessing these three trends with a focus on making sites perform the same (or better!) at the same (or lower!) cost than they did in 2012.
Over the next 12 months, I will be watching the performance industry news to see if those companies that have been successful at making their sites perform under the heaviest loads increasingly focus not just on speed and availability, but on efficient delivery of their entire site at a lower cost with the best user experience possible.

The key strategics questions that online businesses will be asking in 2013 will be:

  • Have we optimized our content? This does not mean make it faster, this means make it better and more efficient. It is almost absurdly easy to make a big, inefficient site fast, but it is harder to step back and “edit” the site in a way that you deliver the same content with less work – think Chevy Volt, not Cadillac Escalade.
  • Are we in control of our third-party services? Managing what services get placed on your site is only the first step. Understanding where the content you have added comes from and whether it is optimized for the heaviest shared loads will also become important checklist items for companies.
  • Can we deliver the design and functionality our customers want at a lower cost? This is the hardest one to be successful at, as each company is different. But Devops teams should be prepared to be accountable for not just cool, but also for the cost of creating, deploying, and managing a site.