Mr. Roger Lopez

This month we’ll cover another topic that, while a touch technical, should be of interest since it can greatly improve the performance of your website by reducing response times, meaning your website pages load faster.

Websites, as you know, are made up of a variety of ‘parts’ such as images, JavaScript files and the like. Each one of this ‘parts’ is known as an object. Each object has to make its way from your organization’s web server to your customer’s web browser in order for the page to be displayed. How these objects get from server to browser can greatly influence the time it takes for the page to display on your customer’s computer. The objects can be sent one by one as was done in the early days of the internet. But a more efficient approach is to send several objects together.

Persistent connections, also known as HTTP keep-alive, are a way of sending multiple objects using only one connection. Allow me to use a hotel analogy to explain:

Two groups are planning a trip to Alaska in January. Group A decides on a hotel but, since there are bound to be plenty of rooms available, see no need to bother making reservations. As a result each member books their room individually when they arrive at the hotel. This means that each member of Group A must go to the front desk to ask if there are rooms available, provide a form of payment and finally book a room. Group B, on the other hand, decides to appoint someone to talk to the hotel and make reservations for everybody in the group. So when each member of Group B arrives, the hotel is expecting them with their rooms reserved – all they need do is collect their room key from the front desk.

Reducing the number of times the server and browser have to ‘talk’ about what’s being sent is where the time savings can be achieved.

Using the Harrahs.com home page as an example, I setup some tests to see how much of a difference using persistent connections would make to a website. Three tests were set up in total, the first test uses persistent connections, and the second does not. The third test was set up using secure non persistent connections to demonstrate what can happen if keep-alive is not setup properly for the secure part of your site.

The blue line shows harrahs.com using persistent connections. The average response time was near 2.672 seconds. The next line up was the same harrahs.com page but without persistent connections. You can see there is an increase in response time - harrahs.com with non persistent connections took on average 5.191 seconds to complete the page load. The red line is harrahs.com using https and non persistent connections. On average its response time was 7.262.

Most sites nowadays use persistent connections, but there are a few that do not. Even if you think your organization is using them, it’s a good idea to check what your users are seeing, as some proxy or firewall settings might ‘break’ them. From your side it might look like you’re using persistent connections but your customer might be experiencing something else.

Ultimately, a faster performing website will keep your customers engaged and more likely to not only make a purchase, but to associate the positive web experience with your brand. This will keep them coming back – rather than hopping to another, better performing competitor’s website.

Gomez Hotel Performance Index

December Results (12/1/07 – 1/1/08)

The Gomez Hotel Performance Index helps hoteliers keep an eye on the competition, measure customer experiences, and accurately understand the connection between web application performance, customer behavior and business results. Covering the top online hoteliers and aggregators, it measures the responsiveness; availability and consistency of the benchmark participants along these metrics (see full methodology):

Success Rate Summary

The majority of the hoteliers had a success rate above the benchmark average of 97.27%, which was lower than last month’s average of 98.97%. Gomez considers a rate above 98% as excellent performance. In the month of December, 20 of the 25 hoteliers performed above the benchmark average. Those performing above the average include Marriott, Priceline, Radisson and Expedia. Notables that performed below the benchmark average were Starwood and Hilton.

Response Time Summary

The benchmark average of 11.42 seconds is almost identical to the previous months 11.93 seconds. Radisson, Marriott and Expedia continued to lead the pack with sub 6 second response times. LasVegas.com was bottom of the chart with 23.75 seconds average response time.

Consistency Summary

Consistency is a measure of the disparity of the response time from visit to visit for completed transactions. The average consistency for the benchmark in December was 5.06 seconds, which is up a little from last month’s average of 5.52 seconds. Radisson tops the chart with a consistency of 2.10 seconds. 14 of the 25 hoteliers performed above the benchmark average. Notables below the benchmark average include Hyatt and Priceline.

Roger Lopez is a Benchmark Analyst in Gomez’s Professional Services Group. His role includes analyzing benchmark data reported by Gomez ExperienceFirstTM network and working directly with customers to optimize their testing. Prior to joining Gomez almost two years ago, Roger held positions as a technology support executive at TTG, Inc., a business territory design software company and in search engine optimization for BizX, a bartering service for online marketplaces. Roger has a degree in Systems Engineering from the Universidad de las Americas. Roger can be reached at rlopez@gomez.com