Performance Engineering: Put your web application on steroids

and serve your visitors fast…wicked fast

Try loading one of the pages from my business website, which is heavily optimized, as the test results demonstrate, and notice how quickly it loads — this is a good example of solid performance engineering. This did not happen by accident and the page load time is an important ranking factor when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Performance engineering helps make a website responsive for visitors, which, in turn, should lower bounce rates as well as allow the business to handle more visitors with fewer resources.

Digging a bit deeper: visitors, as well as website owners, will feel the difference too:

• Improved response times across the entire website for all visitors
• Improved experience across the entire website for all visitors
• Improved technical search engine optimization (SEO) since response time is an important factor when it comes to search engine optimization.
• Lower cloud utilization expenses with a site that is fine-tuned for high performance and serves compressed images and text over SSL while utilizing important tools for high-performance websites, such as a content delivery network (CDN)
• Web servers that can handle higher traffic volumes and are better equipped to handled sudden spikes in traffic — this is especially important for e-commerce websites.

High-performance engineering inside

According to the article entitled Website Load Time Statistics: Why Speed Matters in 2021: “…pages that load within two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages that load in five seconds see their bounce rates skyrocket to 38%“. The magic number, according to this article, is an average page load time of at or under three seconds.

The image below includes a test result for the page mentioned previously — note that the speed index in this image is zero.

My focus is on web application architecture, development, performance engineering, site reliability, and technical search engine optimization

Some of the technologies that I focus on include:

• Apache HTTP server performance tuning
• WordPress Content Management System (CMS) performance tuning, in tandem with W3 Total Cache and other performance-related plugins
• PageSpeed Module configuration
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) configuration, in particular the StackPath CDN.
• Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack performance tuning
• Website performance testing using various tools
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Digital Ocean (DO) cloud platforms

Other services

• Interim or Fractional Technical Leadership
• Software Engineering
• Technical Content Generation for Technical Leaders

Recommended Reading

• Awesome Search Engine Optimization Ideas