Today we are so happy to announce that Zoompf WPO is now available through CloudFlare’s App Store. We’ve been working with CloudFlare for a few months on the integration and were announced as a launch partner during their presentation at TechCrunch Disrupt last month.

CloudFlare and Zoompf complement each other so well. CloudFlare helps you quickly and automatically solve several of the long hanging performance issues affecting your site. This is a great way to rapidly boost a site’s performance or to free up development’s and IT’s time to focus on other issues. Zoompf’s technology analyzes your site and reveals the fundamental issues affecting the design or implementation of your site which CloudFlare cannot automatically resolve. This one-two punch gives you fast performance now and a detailed action plan to get even faster!

CloudFlare’s App Store is an easy way to purchase and embed different products or services into your website. But Zoompf WPO is cloud-based so how does this work? Simple, if you have a CloudFlare purchasing Zoompf WPO is a one click action. You will immediately receive an email with your Zoompf password and a URL to our customer portal.

To celebrate this announcement, we are offering a special discount. For the next week, when you purchase Zoompf WPO Basic accounts through CloudFlare, you will get 50% off for the entire first year. This is a yearly savings of $600 dollars but you have to sign before 6/22/2011.

Another year has passed and it’s time for the Velocity conference again. The conference is larger than last year with some amazing events and speakers lined up. For some silly reason I was choosen to give two presentations at Velocity 2011.

Ignite

The first is an Ignite talk Tuesday night. The talk gives a score card for Web Performance from 2010 to 2011. Last year we analyzed the Alexa Top 1000 to understand what type of performance problems existed in websites who were the most capable and had the biggest incentive to address them. Our results were pretty surprising and we wrote a colossal 35 page report about it. For our Ignite presentation last year, we very quickly summarized the major themes we observed and our conclusions.

I say “very quickly” because Ignite sessions do not follow your traditional conference format. Each speaker has only 5 minutes to present a deck of 20 slides with each slide auto advancing every 15 seconds. This format really forces presenters to stay focused and express a few ideas or points very succinctly.

This year we analyzed the Alexa Top 1000 again, to see how things have changed. While our formal report will be coming soon this presentation provides a sneak peek at our findings.

The Scandinavian Theory of Compression

On Wednesday, I’ll be presenting a short 20 minute talk entitled Take it All Off! Lossy Image Optimizations. I feel that this is such an important topic that I guest blogged about it over on phpied.com today. Images are the dominate content on the web, but rarely do anything to optimize them beyond a few lossless techniques. You just cannot achieve significant file size reduce for an image without touching the graphics data. This is because graphics data composes 95% of an optimized image. So we need to look at losing some of it.

Now this lossy aspect has caused most people to immediately discount lossy image optimization as a realistic option. However this is short sighted. MP3s achieve enormous size reduction by using knowledge about how we hear and process sound to discard audio data without significant losses in perceived quality. Similarly, by intelligently approaching images and their content, we can apply different image formats and lossy compression schemes to achieve substantially smaller file sizes while maintaining image quality and user experience.

The presentation has a lot to cover in a short about of time. And because it’s a talk about images, the slides will include plenty of pictures of Lena in various states of compression.

Meet Zoompf

If you are at Velocity and want to say send me a message on Twitter (@zoompf) or email me billy@zoompf.com. If you like our free scanning service, want to know more about Zoompf, or meet someone new who is way too passionate about web performance, drop me a line. I would love to talk with you.

Stoyan was nice enough to have me to contribute the final blog post in his Velocity Countdown series.

My post, Overlooked Optimizations: Images> looks at how images make up the largest amount of content on the web and yet we consistently forget to optimize them even though they are some of the easiest optimizations to do. It’s a theme I’ll be discussing further this week at Velocity 2011 in my presentation Take It All Off! Lossy Image Optimization.

Thanks to Stoyan for having me blog. Hope I get the chance again soon.

Our regular video series How Fast Is…? examines real world websites and details the cause of their performances issues as well as what should be done to solve them. After all, the best way to learn about front-end web performance is to see what other people are doing right and doing wrong. In this edition of How Fast Is…? we analyze the TechCrunch Disrupt.

TechCrunch Disrupt is a popular tech conference put on by TechCrunch which showcases startups and investors. Sadly the website is one of the slowest websites we have ever analyzed. This is really odd, given that TechCrunch’s main tech news website is a really fast site. In this video explore the performance problems and how they can be fixed.

Know a site we should make a video about? Contact us and you may see a future episode about it.

Zoompf is giving away a free ticket to the Web Performance Summit 2011. This is one day conference focused on web performance which is broadcast online around the world. It is a excellent event with lots of direct access to speakers, rich discussion with other attendees, and it covers a wide range of topics. There is an amazing lineup of speakers including: Mathias Bynens, Kyle Simpson, Joshua Bixby, and Aaron Peters. I will be giving a talk on lossy image optimization.

Zoompf has a free ticket and will be giving it away tonight at 9pm EDT. Want a change to get it? Here is what you need to do to be in the drawing:

1. Follow @zoompf on Twitter.
2. Retreet this tweet (also shown below)

That’s it! Simply follow @zoompf on Twitter, retweet our message, and you’re name will be in our drawing. We announce the winner tonight! Good luck and I hope to you can attend the Web Performance Summit 2011.

Our regular video series How Fast Is…? examines real world websites and details the cause of their performances issues as well as what should be done to solve them. After all, the best way to learn about front-end web performance is to see what other people are doing right and doing wrong. In this edition of How Fast Is…? we analyze the Federal Communication Commission.

The FCC just launched a new website as part of a $1.35 million redesign of their online presence. The site looks beautiful and leverages a number of open source technologies likes Durpal. In this video we see some configuration issues and developer mistakes lead to a large number of fontend performance problems.

Know a site we should make a video about? Contact us and you may see a future episode about it.

Our regular video series How Fast Is…? examines real world websites and details the cause of their performances issues as well as what should be done to solve them. After all, the best way to learn about front-end web performance is to see what other people are doing right and doing wrong. In this edition of How Fast Is…? we analyze UK ticketing vendor Seatwave.com.

As a online retailer for concert and event tickets, Seatwave faces some unique and interesting performance challenges. Specifically they must deal with extremely large spikes in traffic for extremely short periods of time as people mob the site trying to buy tickets when an event goes on sale and before it sells out. This video shows that while Seatwave has implemented some front-end performance optimizations there are still more things that can be done to improve their website’s performance.

Know a site we should make a video about? Contact us and you may see a future episode about it.

Our regular video series How Fast Is…? examines real world websites and details the cause of their performances issues as well as what should be done to solve them. After all, the best way to learn about front-end web performance is to see what other people are doing right and doing wrong. In this edition of How Fast Is…? we analyze Southgate Coins.

Southgate Coins is different the sites we have features on How Fast Is…? in the past. It is a small family business which sells rare coins in Reno Nevada. Even though Southgate Coins has less than a dozen in employees they care about web performance and one member of their staff has repeatedly used Zoompf’s free scanning service to help improve their website’s performance.

Know a site we should make a video about? Contact us and you may see a future episode about it.

Our regular video series How Fast Is…? examines real world websites and details the cause of their performances issues as well as what should be done to solve them. After all, the best way to learn about front-end web performance is to see what other people are doing right and doing wrong. In this edition of How Fast Is…? we analyze Twitter.

Twitter is a fairly dynamic site which has to worry about optimizing not only their content but user generated content as well. You will see that while Twitter does implement some performance optimizations there are several basic performance optimizations which spit through the cracks

Know a site we should make a video about? Contact us and you may see a future episode about it.

Our regular video series How Fast Is…? examines real world websites and details the cause of their performances issues as well as what should be done to solve them. After all, the best way to learn about front-end web performance is to see what other people are doing right and doing wrong. In this edition of How Fast Is…? we analyze Virgin America.

Know a site we should make a video about? Contact us and you may see a future episode about it.