May 13, 2015

Maximizing Site Speed with Mercy Corps#mercyspeed

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Nice to Meet You!

Nice to meet you!

John BrandenburgDeveloper, Forum One

@johnbburg

Drew BettsUX Designer, Mercy Corps

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Representative Clients 4

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Partnership with Forum OneOur support services are designed to drive consistent long-term progress toward your organizational goals.

● Dedicated team of developers, themers, quality assurance testers, and project managers are available to help support your web presence.

● Bi-annual strategic planning workshops to discuss current business imperatives and audience needs that inform and drive future work.

● Quarterly retainer support for sprint-based development and as-needed ticket-based support.

● Fully managed hosting services with 24/7 on-call site support, 365 days a year.

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Who is Mercy Corps?

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Responding to Emergencies

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Building Back Better

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Why is Site Speed Important?10

Introduction to speed

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Mobile was worse

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Conversion rateFor every one second of improvement in load time, they experienced up to a 2% increase in conversions

For every 100 milliseconds of improvement, incremental revenues grew by up to 1%

Source: Walmart

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Other negative effects● Negatively impacts SEO● Lowers perceived credibility and quality● Frustrates users● Increases bailout rate

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Evaluating Performance & Engagement

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What is Site Speed?

Evaluating Performance and Engagement

How fast a page loads (load time)How fast a page appears to load (start render)

● Page load● Time to first byte● Start render

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It’s actually a pretty complex subject

Evaluating Performance and Engagement

● DNS Address Lookup● Establishing a Connection● CMS response time● Executing Javascript● Image optimization● Server environment● Downloading assets● Caching

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Tools: What you need

Evaluating Performance and Engagement

● Analyze your page structure/behavior.● How optimized are your assets.● Load testing.

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What we used

Evaluating Performance and Engagement

● WebPageTest.org● Google PageSpeed Insights● Apache Benchmark● New Relic● Google Analytics

Future consideration: JMeter

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Script is available on GitHub

Evaluating Performance and Engagement

https://github.com/johnbburg/performance-testing

Content engagement script herehttp://cutroni.com/blog/2014/02/12/advanced-content-tracking-with-universal-analytics/

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Process

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Process

Process

1. Choose metrics and tests2. Decide on changes and prioritize3. Establish baseline 4. Develop and apply changes5. Measure6. Repeat

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Metrics and tests

Process

1. Page load speed2. Conversion rate3. Engagement rate4. Response time (Apache)

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Load

Begin

25%

50%

75%

100%

What to Improve?

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Before we begin, here are some easy wins

Maximizing Performance

Page Cache for Anonymous Users

CSS/JS Aggregation and Page compression

See my blog post on forumone.com

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Improvements for Mercy Corps

What to Improve?

1. Enable Views Caching2. Get Page Cache to be consistent3. Implement Memcache as the back-end

cache

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First Measure: Views Caching

Maximizing Performance 27

10 Users 50 Users

Views Cache Disabled Vs. Enabled: Homepage

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Page cache debugging

Maximizing Performance

Cached pages were served in an erratic way.

Use of the $_SESSION variable.

Expiration changed from 5 minutes to 1 hour.

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Maximizing Performance

Second Measure: Memcache

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Bonus: Entity Cache

Maximizing Performance 32

Impact

Maximizing Performance

Simulated load tests show Time to first byte went from 4.5 s to 1.5 s on the Donation page.

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Responding in Nepal

Maximizing Performance

On April 26th, 2015, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal.

Another 7.3 earthquake struck Tuesday morning.

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Responding in Nepal

Maximizing Performance

Traffic spiked over the weekend to 30-40x normal levels.

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116,0004,000

Responding in Nepal

Maximizing Performance 36

Responding in Nepal

Maximizing Performance 37

DesktopResults

Before:

Load time

-1.344s

After:

First Byte

- 0.648sStart render

-0.744sVisually complete

-6.4sImpact:

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MobileResults

Before:

Load time

-2.879s

After:

Start render

-2.516sImpact: Visually complete

0s

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Content engagement - Haiyan & Nepal

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-10.3%

-5.21%

-8.91%

+.08%

-8.85%

Content engagementBaseline vs. all changes

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After changes41% of people reached 100%

Baseline46% of people reached 100%

Conversion rate Nepal earthquake

4/22/15 - 5/6/15Typhoon Haiyan

11/8/13 - 11/22/13

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Baseline

5.57%2.83%3.11%

3.05%1.09%2.66%

For the future

Maximizing Performance

● Deferred Javascript● Varnish● Image compression● Spriting

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Thank you!Q&A

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