Recently in Web Performance Category

Last night I watched an On Demand episode of The American Experience titled Blackout, which recounted the 1977 power failure in New York City and its lasting impact on city due to widespread looting and destruction. With the power completely out, the operators at Con Ed got to work restoring power using a manual that was last updated after another massive blackout - in 1965.

Late last month I attended the Future Stores 2015 conference in Seattle. If you haven't heard of Future Stores before, here's some brief background: it's held by Worldwide Business Research and brings together retail, omni-channel, customer web experience, and IT execs to focus on in-store innovation and how to bridge the digital and physical retail environments. As Chief Strategist of Commerce at Akamai, I was excited to learn how future-thinking stores are innovating and better understand how Akamai fits into the picture. This is the second follow post that I'm doing to recap some of the highlights I heard at the conference. My first post highlighted how Macy's Go was personalizing and streamlining the omnichannel shopping experience.

In June 2012, Akamai launched the Akamai Internet Observatory (IO) destination site that highlights browser usage across desktop and other connected devices. The data presented in the full Q1 2015 State of the Internet ReporBe and this blog post are derived from the Akamai IO site.

HTTP is ubiquitous. Seems like everything today is being served from the web. We are using smartphones to do everything from answering our doorbells while we are at work to remotely controlling SUV's. All of this, happening on a platform we call the World Wide Web. Websites are delivering richer and more personalized content than ever before, creating user experiences that were never conceived of. This means, more than ever, size matters.

The Q1 2015 State of the Internet Report records usage from: smartphones, tablets, computers, and any other device that connects to the Akamai Intelligent Platform via a mobile network provider. Usage is then aggregated at a country/region level. To qualify for inclusion in the report (and this blog post), a minimum of 25,000 unique IP addresses from a country/region are required to connect to Akamai's network. In total, 62 countries/regions qualified for inclusion in the first quarter of 2015, up from 50 qualifying countries/regions in the previous quarter.

In June 2013, Akamai announced the latest release of Ion. Ion is designed to meet the unique challenges of optimizing the desktop and mobile Web experience. One feature of Ion is a capability known as Real User Monitoring (RUM). RUM takes performance measurements from real Web users to provide developers with insights into performance across a multitude of devices and networks. Ideally, RUM is used in tandem with synthetic testing to generate a comprehensive picture of a user's Web experience to help developers best calibrate their applications.

Customer expectations are driving ever increasing demands on website performance. Delays are now measured in milliseconds, not seconds, and cause direct financial impact to the business. And yet, despite these pressures for each business to have lightning fast websites and large budgets being spent on performance, most businesses are still plagued with slow sites. The median page load time for the largest 1000 websites is a whopping 6.4 seconds, more than double what most users will tolerate before risks of abandonment! (*According to httparchive.org)

Through Akamai's globally deployed Intelligent PlatformTM, and by nature of servicing roughly two trillion requests for Web content on a daily basis, Akamai has unique insight into Internet penetration around the globe. In the first quarter of 2015, over 812 million unique IPv4 addresses from 243 unique countries/regions connected to the Akamai Intelligent PlatformTM--a 1.2% increase from the previous quarter.

In April of this year, we got the official word -- the average webpage now exceeds 2MB in size. If it seems like page size is increasing at an incredible rate...you aren't imagining things.  In July of last year, the average page size had just exceeded 1.5 MB for the top 1,000 websites. 

First Quarter, 2015 Internet Disruptions

Internet disruptions are still a frustrating reality in many regions across the globe. The most common types of disruptions generally fall into three categories: accidental (backhoes or ship anchors severing buried fiber), natural (hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.), or political (shut down by a government in response to protest). As a provider of customer content across the globe, Akamai is in a unique position to monitor traffic levels to each country/region. The following events are highlights of global disruptions that impacted Akamai traffic in specific countries during the first quarter of 2015.