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.

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!

We have two big announcements for you all today.

The first announcement is that we have finished rolling out a complete web design for Zoompf.com. The awesome folks over at Zero G Creative did the design and we worked with them to get everything tweaked (include the Sisyphean task of making everything look pretty even in dead browsers like IE6) and to hook it into our new backend systems. We are very pleased with the results and we will be implementing addition changes in the coming weeks.If you run into any issues please let us know.

We are very proud of our second announcement. Today we are unveiling Zoompf’s new automated web performance scanning service. Simply plug in a URL and we scan your website for over 300 performance issues and then email you a pretty report in minutes. It’s completely free, so please use it as much as you’d like and as often as you’d like. We are experimenting with new features, such as PDF reports, load graphs, resource hierarchy graphs, and other cool features and will keep you posted.

For now enjoy the new Zoompf website and take your favorite websites for a spin with our free web performance scanning service!