High Performance Web Sites blog

This week I co-chaired Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly. It was great! Jesse and I told the story about how the conference came about. When we proposed the conference we believed there was a community of performance and operations engineers that needed a forum to share and learn, and the attendance at Velocity confirmed this. Velocity sold out with over 600 attendees!

The lineup of speakers was great. There was a lot of material packed in a 2-day conference. I stayed in the Performance track, but wanted to attend every session in the Operations track, too. Many speakers shared their slides, and there are videos and photos from some of the talks.

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Wow. On Thursday Google announced that an advertiser’s web page load time will affect their ad’s position and minimum bid: Landing page load time will soon be incorporated into Quality Score. What a message to advertisers. If their page loads slowly they’ll be moved to a lower position in the sponsored links. This is a huge boost to the cause for faster web performance. I was pleased to see that this announcement has suggestions for improving page load times that include YSlow and my performance best practices. The next question: How do we motivate advertisers to improve the load time of the rich media ads they embed in our web sites? (posted from SXSW)