I am happy to announce that Zoompf is starting a new series of web casts where we walk you through a performance analysis of real world websites. After all, the best way to learn about front-end web performance is to see what other people are doing right and doing wrong. Know a site we should make a video about? Contact us and you may see a future episode about it!

In this webcast, we analysis Bliss.com, a new website launached by Glam Media. Glam Media website’s get 200M+ visitors a month across their websites. They should be very proficient at making fast websites. Furthermore, Bliss.com is currently using a small place holder site, so the developers have no excuse no to optimize the site given how small the scope of work would be. However as you will see there are significant problems on the new Bliss.com website.

Last week was a big week for Zoompf. We launched our new On-Demand Zoompf WPO SaaS offering, we released our 2010 State of Web Performance report, and we presented our performance findings during the Ignite Sessions on Tuesday night at O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, CA . We were covered in the press at NetworkWorld.com, CTOEdge.com, and TMCnet.com.

We were also profiled on DiscoveringStartups.com. This site focuses exclusively on new startup companies and their product offerings. A cool feature of the site is that DiscoveringStartups.com encourages readers to vote for the coolest, most interesting startup company profiled each month. If you love what Zoompf does and our free performance scanning service, please vote for Zoompf at DiscoveringStartups.com. To vote, go to this article about Zoompf and click the blue Vote button to the right of the article title, as shown below. We appreciate your support!

Today we have two exciting announcements with Zoompf.

2010 State of Web Performance Report

Our first announcement is the release of our 2010 State of Web Performance report. Zoompf used our technology to assess the Alexa Top 1000 for performance defects to determine how well they have implemented proven web performance optimization techniques. Our research shows that even the largest sites on the web have trouble implementing even the most basic of performance optimization. Just consider lossless optimizations like HTTP compression, minification, and image crunching. Zoompf found that had these optimizations been properly implemented, there would be a 20% reduction in bandwidth across the entire Alexa Top 1000. This is a startling number. 1 byte of our every 5 bytes of web traffic is wasted bloat that can be eliminated using common performance optimizations, some of which are over a decade old!

There are way too many findings to reveal them all here. The 2010 State of Web Performance report is over 25 pages long and is packed full of statistics, analysis, and advice on how organizations can learn from the successes and failures of the Alexa Top 1000. Download your free copy now.

Download Zoompf’s 2010 State of Web Performance report.

I will be presenting results and highlights from our 2010 State of Web Performance at the Velocity Conference Tuesday night at the Ignite Sessions. If you are attending come watch a humorous trek through 90,000 URLs of content!

New Product Offering

Our second announcement is that today Zoompf launches a new product: Zoompf Web Performance Optimizer (WPO). Zoompf WPO is a web-based SaaS that allows you to assess any web application for over 300 different performance issues, from anywhere, at anytime. Zoompf WPO goes beyond our free performance assessment in several key ways:

• Coverage: Zoompf WPO Scans your entire application for performance problems.
• Depth: Zoompf WPO tests your app for over 300 problems and provides comprehensive information about each issue. Users receive details about each problem and its causes, complete with graphs and diagrams, as well as full remediation advice including configuration settings, code snippets, and implementation best practices.
• Root Cause: Zoompf WPO allows you to drill down into any performance issues and highlights the text or code in a response that is causing the performance problem.
• Rich Reports: Zoompf WPO offers 10 different reports to help you understand the issues and the impact of your changes. WPO also generates prioritized action plans, so you know exactly what IT operations or the designers should work on first to get the biggest improvement.
• Assessment History: Zoompf WPO keeps track of all your past performance assessments. This allows you to measure and track performance defects across the entire the development and deployment of the application.

Pricing for Zoompf WPO starts at just $99 a month and is available now. Learn more about Zoompf WPO.

We extremely excited and proud to launch our Zoompf Web Performance Optimizer product and release this groundbreaking industry report. Our mission at Zoompf is to enabled web designers, web developers, and IT operations to build fast web applications. The addition of Zoompf WPO to our existing free web performance scanning service and our professional services provides an entire suite of performance products and services to fulfill this mission. I encourage you to take a look at our web performance products and services today and see how Zoompf can help you.

If you are attending the Velocity conference drop by and say hello, or reach out to us for a face-to-face meeting. You can contact us on twitter (@zoompf), through email (info@zoompf.com) or call us at 1-404-414-2000.

Today we have a cool announcement. We have revamped the look and feel of our free performance reports and added a new feature: a Site Savings Estimate. Understanding the impact and savings of specific optimizations is critical to prioritize all the performance improvements you want to make to a website. This is why we added Savings Tables to our free report 2 months ago. Savings Tables allowed you to see exactly how many bytes would be saved with each resource and highlighted how a specific improvement would affect your web content.

While it important to know that, for example, losslessly optimizing your PNG images would save 17%, this figure could use more context. What is the total size of all the content that was downloaded? What percentage of the content are PNG images? If I reduce my PNG images by 17%, how much did I reduce the size of the total amount of content?

To help provide this context, Zoompf has added Site Savings Estimates to our reports. A Site Savings Estimate tells you how much bandwidth savings you will achieve across all of your site’s content. To calculate this we first look at all the content and resources that was downloaded. Next, we look at what optimizations have not been applied to all this content. If we applied those optimizations, such as HTTP compression or unoptimized images, how much smaller will the total amount of content be? This is how we determine the Site Savings Estimate.

Of course, the savings you achieve across all your content depends on the optimizations that you make. This is why Zoompf provides the Site Saving Estimate consists as range of savings. The lower number is how much savings occurs if lossless optimizations are applied across all of the content Zoompf analyzed. The higher number, we calculate how much savings would occur if we applied lossless optimizations, and, where appropriate, applied lossy optimizations such as converting PNG24 images to PNG8. Notice we say where appropriate. Sure you could save a ton of traffic by converting all your PNG images to PNG8. However that is not reasonable or appropriate. However, if a PNG24 is a reasonable candidate for a conversion to PNG8, that optimization would be considered. This allows us to provide a range of savings, based on how conservative or aggressive you wish to be in you size optimizations

The Site Savings Estimate, complemented with our Zoompf Performance Rank, provides a powerful way to quickly to assess the performance of a website. The Zoompf Performance Rank denotes how many performance issues you website has, while the Site Savings Estimate tells you how much bloated and waste your site has that can be removed to drop bandwidth consumption. Test your site now using our free web performance assessment service and find out how much you can save!

Lord Kelvin, the famous British scientist and mathematician, once said: “You cannot improve what you cannot measure.” Just as web developers track the quality of their code using unit testing, regression suites, and bug trackers to improve their work, performance metrics are needed as well.

So we created the Zoompf Performance Rank. This rank easily quantifies the performance status of your website. You can compare Performance Rank across different sites, or track how the performance of the same site varies over time.

Zoompf’s Performance Rank for a website is calculated by scoring each response individually on a scale from 0 to 100. The score of all the responses are averaged together to yield the Zoompf Performance Rank . If a response has no performance problems it scores 100 points. For every performance problem a resource has points are deducted from that resource’s score. The number of points deducted is based on the severity of the performance issue. Critical defects, like not HTTP compression for a compressable response subtract 25 points.High severity issues like Unoptimized images are 15 points. The lowest score any resource can have is a 0. This only happens if the page has a large number of performance issues. No page will have a score less than zero. This means if your website only consists of 2 pages, one that is completely awful and the other is perfect, the lowest Performance Rank you can have is 50, regardless of how awful that awful page is.

Zoompf Performance Rank is a very flexible scoring system that more accurately reflects the performance of a site than other scoring systems. Let’s say you run a photography site that consists of 1 HTML page and 19 images. Let’s say you don’t have HTTP compression turned on so your HTML page receives a score of 75 while the images have no problems and each receive a score of 100. The Zoompf Performance Rank would be 98.75. Other tools might take off a large number of points because such a critical issue as HTTP compression is not turned on. However for this photography site, HTTP compression is not a big concern. The vast majority of the site, both in bandwidth and page count, would not benefit from HTTP compression. Now consider the same photography site. HTTP compression is now turned on for the HTML page (100 points), but all of the images are unoptimized (85 points each). The Zoompf Performance Rank is 85.75. Even though the performance problem is less severe, it affects the vast majority of the photography website and so has a lower Zoompf Performance Rank.

You can find our your Zoompf Performance Rank and test your website for over 300 performance issues right now using our free web performance scanning service. We also setup a Twitter account for the performance scanner (@zoompfauto) which tweets out the Performance Rank and a link to the full Zoompf performance report for every werbsite it scans. This is a great way to see how your site compares with others. As always feedback and questions are always welcome. Enjoy!

Its been a very busy time recently for the crew at Zoompf. We will be a silver sponsor at Velocity 2010 so if you are attending please make sure to stop by and say hello. We always love to meet users and get their feedback about our offerings. You can reach us at @zoompf on Twitter is a quick way to find out whats going on and where we are at Velocity. We also have a number of exciting announcements coming out during Velocity so stay tuned! Its going to be a very exciting month!

Our free web performance scanning service continues to be wildly popular. We are constantly tweaking it, improving it, and adding new features to provide the best free performance scanning system available for web designers and developers.

Previously when you submitted a website for performance assessment you received very little in the way of feedback. Just a spinning progress wheel and a message that your report would appear soon. Today we are happy to announce a new release of our scanner with much more detailed progress messages. The new feedback system looks like this:

The scanner provides all kinds of progress feedback. It tells you where you on in the job queue, live updates of the scanner crawling your website and how many performance issues it has found, and when it is generating or uploading your report. We have also completely redesigned the error handling for our scanning service. In the unlikely event of an error, we log the issue, notify the user what happened, and allow the user to provide an email address to send the performance report to once we have solved the issue. This rich feedback system makes it that much easier to use our free service.

Want to see what performance problems your website has? Zoompf checks for over 320+ web performance issues when scanning your web applications. Get your instant free web performance assessment today!

We rolled out a minor update to our performance scanner software today to address a few bugs and add a feature. We are considering a more regular release cycle, perhaps weekly, of bug fixes, new checks, and new feature. We will keep you posted.

Style Attribute Parsing Bug

We had a bug when parsing CSS information stored in the style attribute for a tag that prevented Zoompf from detecting some references to background images. This has been fixed.

HTTP Compression Reporting Bug

There was an off-by-one bug in how we reported compressible responses that were not using HTTP compression. Our report would say show X number of affected URLs in the Savings Table but report would say that X+1 number of URLs were affected. This has been fixed.

Support for background Tag Attribute

Zoompf would only detect background images that were defined in CSS using the background or background-image properties. Older websites can use the background attribute on the <BODY>, <TABLE>, <TR>, <TH>, or <TD> tags to reference at background image. Zoompf will now detect these images and assess them for performance issues.

It’s human nature: People want to know what they are going to get in return before they do something. This is especially important for web developers and front-end designers concerned about web performance. Knowing the savings benefit from an optimization (along with the effort it takes to implement) is critical information required to properly prioritize your web performance optimization tasks. Its often required information to persuade project managers to devote resources to optimizing a website. Developers and designers need hard data about how much savings they will get when they implement a certain optimization. They don’t want rough estimates, or statements like “typical savings is 15% to 20%.” No, developers and designers want “This file is currently size X. If you make Y optimization, it will be reduced to size Z.”

To address this very issue for we have added a new feature to our free web performance scanning service: Savings Tables. With certain performance issues, the Zoompf report will have a Savings Table. It tells you what URLs were affected by the issue, what optimization tool you should you, and exactly how much savings there will be when you optimize the resource.

Savings Tables cleanly illustrate the benefits of common optimizations like minification and compression. Savings Tables for lesser known optimizations, such as PNG8 candidate images, Oversized Gradients, and reducing JPEG quality, can educate web developers and designers about the significant effects these techniques and how to optimize their websites even further.

Let’s use this Zoompf Performance Report for O’Reilly as an example. The Savings Table shows that HTTP compression can save O’reilly 73%. We see a similar breakdown for CSS minification and JavaScript minification.

Unexpected Savings

Then we come to something interesting: Oversized Gradients. This is where a very thin image is repeated using CSS along the X or Y axis to create a gradient background for some page element. Often web developers believe that converting a 10 pixel by 80 pixel gradient image into a 1 pixel by 80 pixel gradient won’t reduce image size by any reasonable amount. However, the Savings Table shows that O’Reilly could reduce the size of its CSS gradients by 22%! Multiple that out of over a day of traffic and we are taking serious savings. The Savings Tables demonstrate the value of other optimizations as well. Converting the candidate images identified by Zoompf to PNG8 will save 61%. Reducing JPEG quality to 70 would save 30%. And so on.

To justify the cost of implementing performance optimization, web developers and designers need hard numbers. The Savings Table feature of Zoompf’s free web performance scanning service can help you the information you need to fully understand the benefits of optimization. We also hope this new feature helps you discover a new technique to speed up your website that you didn’t even know existed. Remember, our free web performance scanning service is available for anyone to use as much as they want, as often as they want, on any site that they want. Scan your site today and see how you can save.

As anyone from a college fraternity or sorority will tell you: It’s not real until you have t-shirts.