Talk:Web performance optimization/Draft

Web performance optimization, WPO, or website optimization is a relatively recent and upcoming field in Web analytics. The term was coined in 2004 by Steve Souders. WPO is similar to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with one major difference in approach: whereas SEO focuses on optimizing content for search engines, WPO emphasizes optimizing the website’s structure as a whole to decrease loading time and deliver a better end-user experience. WPO can lead to improved organic search engine listings and greater user loyalty (citation needed).

History
Steve Souders first introduced the idea of improving the performance of websites for the user-experience in 2004. At that time Souders made several predictions regarding the impact that WPO as an "emerging industry" would bring to the web, such as websites being fast by default, consolidation, web standards for performance, environmental impacts of optimization, and speed as a differentiator.

At its inception, WPO was focused mainly on optimizing website code and pushing hardware limitations. According to Patrick Killelea’s book Web Performance Tuning, some of the techniques proposed were to use simple servlets or CGI, increase server memory, and look for packet loss and retransmission. Although these principles now comprise much the optimized foundation of our internet applications, one could argue that the focus was not so much on how to improve the front-end experience but on how to transfer the data from the server to the user.

One major point that Souders made is that at least 80% of the time that it takes to download/view a website is controlled by the front-end structure. Web developers are strictly responsible for that 80% lag, and can decrease it by learning more about how the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) works.

Best Practices
There are a number of guidelines that web developers can adhere to in order to optimize web performance. Below is a short list of individuals and/or prominent companies that offer WPO guidelines: Regardless of the approach or set of tools, optimization gains are always made on one of three levels: High, Medium, or Low. These levels correspond to the amount of time it takes to leverage these changes, the highest of which should take the least amount of time and therefore yield the most in optimization gains. These steps can enhance the user experience, and make Web apps better.
 * Steve Souders, who is considered by many to be the pioneer of the field, mentions 28 steps for optimizing web performance, from greatest gains to smallest, in his two books on the subject, entitled High Performance Websites and Even Faster Websites. He has also created a plugin (YSlow) and heads the initiative for Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
 * Yahoo! has a list of 35 best practices divided into 7 categories.
 * In 2009 Google launched a developers initiative to provide web developers with tools and best practices for making the web faster . There is a section solely devoted to articles about WPO. Google additionally offers a service that will do the optimizing automagically.

Purpose/Benefits

 * WPO is an organic way to increase visit retention and loyalty.


 * "Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and... as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve".


 * Less data traveling across the web.


 * Better for mobile devices.


 * WPO creates a more efficient web - lowering costs, power consumption, resources used, and helps decrease the environmental impact of the web.

Projects that utilize WPO

 * HTML5BoilerPlate.com (https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/v4.0.1/doc/htaccess.md)