Optimizing The Digital Experience

Optimizing
the Digital
Experience:
A Step by Step Guide to High Performing
Websites and Web Applications
2
Published by Limelight Networks
222 S. Mill Ave. Ste. 800
Tempe, AZ 85281
www.limelight.com
2014 Limelight Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this document may
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recording, or otherwise) without the express written permission of Limelight Networks,
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reserved. All other trademarks referred to herein are the property of their respective
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Limit of liability/disclaimer of warranty: Limelight Networks, Inc. makes no representations
or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this
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L I MEL I GHT NET WORKS
3
Table Of Contents
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
CHAPTER 1:
Understanding Your Digital Presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
CHAPTER 2:
What is Performance? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
CHAPTER 3:
Establishing KPIs and Measuring Performance. . . . . . . . . . . 34
CHAPTER 4:
How to Structure Your Technology Ecosystem . . . . . . . . . . . 49
CHAPTER 5
Optimizing the Infrastructure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
CHAPTER 6
Additional Optimizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
CHAPTER 7
Making the Case: Your Optimization Checklist . . . . . . . . . . 93
TABL E OF CONT ENTS
4
Introduction
5
I NT RODUCT I ON
For businesses, audience
engagement is a hot topic.
Your marketing team, in collaboration with IT, is collecting
and analyzing all kinds of data on the success of web content,
social media, and its effect on audience engagement. However
there is one critical element of audience engagement that is often
overlooked: the user experience. When your audience members
attempt to access your content, how long do they have to wait
for it to arrive? The path from your content to your audience
is complex. Understanding and managing this path is critical
to your business.
This book is an introduction to the complexity of this path
between people and content. It is loaded with information
on how you can measure and increase the performance
of web content and web applications, resulting in shorter
wait times and better audience engagement. We start with
basic content, defining digital presence, and then quickly
move on to the more complex topic of understanding web
performance. We then guide you through key performance
indicators (KPIs) for assessment and ongoing management of
the digital experience of your audience. Finally, we provide
an introduction to content delivery networks and provide
more information on optimizing the delivery of both static
6
and dynamic web content. We will end with an optimization
checklist to ensure you are delivering a digital experience that
meets your business objectives.
Who Is This Book For?
This book is for IT staff and leaders who have one or more of
the below goals.
1. You know that online performance matters to your business
and you want to optimize website performance.
2. You manage or are responsible for the performance
of your companys web based applications.
3. Your 2014 goals include a line item to reduce the
costs or increase the return on investments required
for online performance.
4. You want to know why certain websites get more traffic
and have better audience engagement than others, and
how to join their ranks.
I NT RODUCT I ON
7
Foolish Assumptions
Youre a technologist who has a basic understanding of
the Internet and how it works. You may be a performance
architect, a web developer, a network architect or an IT
leader. We dont start with the history of the Internet. We
assume you have that covered.
You speak the language of KPI because you use KPIs to
measure the effectiveness of every IT project.
We also assume that IT and Marketing collaborate in
your organization and we discuss how to involve key
stakeholders in the quest for optimizing the delivery of your
websites and web applications.
Lets Get Started
Each chapter builds on the previous chapter, so we recommend
that you read this book from beginning to end for the greatest
benefit. Once you have finished this book, you can develop
and execute a digital experience optimization strategy that
suits your specific business needs. No one size fits all, but you
will know how to assess your organizations requirements
and understand the options available to enhance web
performance.
I NT RODUCT I ON
8
CHAPTER 1
Understanding
Your Digital
Presence
9
Every organization has a
digital presence.
Your digital presence is the overall effect of your online
touch points. Its your website, your Facebook
page, your
Twitter
account, your blog. It is anything you create and

deliver digitally.
To learn more about the concept of digital presence, refer to
Digital Presence for Dummies, a Wiley Brand book brought to
you by Limelight Networks.
1

CHAPT ER 1: UNDERSTANDI NG YOUR DI GI TAL PRESENCE
1
Jason Thibeault with Ryan C. Williams, Digital Presence for Dummies (New Jersey: John
Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013). http://resources.limelight.com/DPM_For_Dummies

10
Your digital presence is the key to your organizations
competitive edge, and delivering it well may be central to your
professional success. The quality of the digital experiences you
create for your visitors is just as important as the quality of your
content itself. Slow response, in any form, for any reason, can
negate all the work youve put into telling great stories and
promoting great offerings.
Every digital presence has two sides:
Building/Managing: This is the software you use and the
processes that you employ to actually make your website,
publish blog posts, engage with social media. This might
be a content management system or a social CRM. It is not
the intent of this book to delve into details of building and
managing your digital presence.
Delivering/Optimizing: This is the software you use and the
processes that you employ to deliver your content to your
Building/Managing Delivering/Optimizing
THE TWO SIDES OF DIGITAL PRESENCE
11
What is Performance?
Performance, in a nutshell, is the measure of how well your
digital content is delivered when an end user requests it.
Maybe thats a webpage. Maybe its a software download.
Maybe its a video. Regardless, every time a user requests
content from you, the delivery of that request can be measured.
We define performance in much more detail later in this book.
For now, just know that its a way to measure how well your
digital content is delivered.
Why is Performance Important?
When any component of your digital presence underperforms,
the impact can hit the bottom line directly. Collaboration
stalls and painstakingly developed apps do not perform as
intended. Visitors bounce, walk away from video downloads,
and abandon shopping carts.
audience. This might be a content delivery network, cloud
storage, or optimization software. This book is focused
on helping you understand the ins-and-outs of delivering
your digital presence for an optimized user experience,
answering questions like, How do I make my website
load faster?
12
Consider these facts:
Every 100 milliseconds delay in load time decreases sales
by 1% (Amazon.com, Inc.)
2

1
/
2
second delay in search results loading decreases traffic
and revenue by 20% (Google, Inc.)
3

1 second delay in page-load times equals 11% fewer
page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction and
a 7% decrease in conversion (Aberdeen Group, Inc.)
4
85% of mobile users expect desktop-quality experience
(IBM Corp.)
5

As you think about performance in the context of the visitor
experience, take note of the precise correlation between
milliseconds and user satisfaction. Todays Internet visitors bring
wildly unrealistic performance expectations. A 2013 Google,
Inc. test
6
identified one second (100 milliseconds) as the point
at which users react negatively to delay. This study confirms
2
Amazon.com, Inc. Make Data Useful, 2006. https://sites.google.com/site/glinden/Home/
StanfordDataMining.2006-11-28.ppt?attredirects=0. Accessed December 2013.
3
Greg Linden, Marissa Mayer at Web 2.0, November 9, 2006, http://glinden.blogspot.
com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html. Accessed December 2013.
4
Aberdeen Group, The Performance of Web Applications: Customers Are Won or Lost in
One Second, November 30, 2008, http://www.aberdeen.com/aberdeen-library/5136/RA-
performance-web-application.aspx. Accessed December 2013.
5
IBM Tealeaf, Meeting the expectations of the mobile customer, May 2013. http://lp.tealeaf.com/
cem_masterclass_1.html. Accessed December 2013.
6
Ilya Grigorik, Building Faster Mobile Websites, (presentation, San Francisco HTML5 Meetup,
March 21, 2013), https://plus.google.com/u/0/+IlyaGrigorik/posts/WZeETYCcm1X. Accessed
December 2013.
13
7
Nielsen Norman Group Response Times: The 3 Important Limits, January 1, 1993,
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-limits/. Accessed December 2013.
longstanding findings from the Nielsen Norman Group that
one second is the threshold at which a user loses the feeling
of operating directly on the data.
7
In optimizing the user experience, you have to think about how
to meet unreasonable user expectations using the technology
available today. When digital experiences fail to deliver the
appropriate level of performance to meet user expectations the
obvious happenstime spent on your site drops, the number
of pages viewed diminishes, downloads of your software or
collateral dwindle.
Most organizations have a rudimentary plan in place to
mitigate web performance issues. When sites slow down, they
look at the web logs. When visitors complain about lackluster
digital experiences, they examine source code. But most of
these strategies are very reactive. In fact, you are probably
already optimizing your use of the public Internet, wide area
networks (WAN), and code.
So if technology is improving and networks are getting faster,
why does performance still falter? And what can you do about it?
As it turns out, quite a lot.
14
The importance that users place on performance mandates
that you think about it differently, that you get out of the break/
fix model and into the performance is a strategy model.
DEMANDS ON IT MANAGERS
There is no one else on whom the burden of performance
falls more than the IT staff. Because digital is becoming such
an important part of the business, IT managers are required
to think about the end user experience like never before. So
when it breaks, you fix it. But is being a fire-fighter putting focus
on performance? Is fixing things when they break a strategy?
Challenges of Performance
Your focus on your digital presence to date may have been
all about building and managing content: making the website
more interactive, integrating tools like online video players,
or otherwise enabling your marketing team. Delivering and
optimizing the visitor experience is just as important, but there
are challenges.
15
1. Performance is complex.
Performance is often discussed in terms of speed: how quickly
a system responds to a user request, how quickly bytes move
across the network, or how quickly images render in the browser.
And speed is an important aspect of performance, perhaps
the most important. But from a user perspective, performance
is more about wait. In addition, issues like availability, multi
device delivery, and security come into play. Chapter 2 of this
book will propose a more complete definition of performance,
one that considers all of these factors.
2. Performance is notoriously difficult to measure.
Knowing where to focus your performance improvement
efforts requires you to identify the precise bottlenecks and
points of failure in a complex digital landscape. But how do
you measure performance success? First byte response time?
Increased average revenue per user? Or something else? If
you are responsible for improving performance, then you want
to know how to measure it accurately. In Chapter 3 of this
book you will learn how to realistically approach performance
testing, and which bottlenecks are worth the chase.
16
3. Improving performance requires new technologies and
partnerships.
Marketing departments need to speed the flow of engaging
content to capture and retain audience attention and build
relationships across digital channels. The fulfillment of that need,
more often than not, falls to IT. CTOs, CIOs, network engineers,
web developers, and others are thinking as much about
servicing external audiences as internal, and in an entirely new
way. In Chapter 4 you will learn how to go about structuring your
technology ecosystem to support these changes.
4. The network that delivers your content is slow and invisible.
There is a vast, un-optimized stretch of public Internet between
your origin servers and the access networks that connect you
to your end users. It is made up of overlapping networks and
carriers to support long haul, regional and metro traffic. It was
built to be resilient, and has proven so. Other than compressing
files and optimizing scripts, how much control do you have? Do
you have insight into the path your content takes to reach end
users with their multiple locations, devices, and browsers? How
do you protect your content from security vulnerabilities along
the way? We will explore this topic in Chapter 5.
17
5. Dynamic content is exploding.
Certainly your digital presence has evolved to the point that
much of what a visitor experiences is dynamically created and
presented on the fly - just for them. And multiple technologies
are required to support dynamic websites and apps. Chapter
6 of this book covers the technologies required to optimize
dynamic content and create the experience you as an IT
manager are responsible for delivering.
Is There a Solution?
Are there ways around these problems? Certainly. You could
achieve significant performance gains with worldwide data
center build outs: servers on every continent, storing and
delivering your content at local speeds to global users. Of
course, few organizations have the resources to build such a
superhighway on their own. The capital investment required to
get the project off the ground, not to mention the expertise and
resources required to maintain it, has understandably put this
solution out of reach for most content providers.
But what if you could, in effect, get the same thing through
a partnership? What if you could have what amounts to a
phalanx of data centers serving your content from locations
close to your website visitors wherever they may be, and then
18
link these data centers along a private high speed network?
Then, you would not have to live by public Internet rules. By the
time you are finished reading this book, you will know what
you can do to drive performance not just at your origin or in
your users browser, but along the entire length of the content
delivery path.
What You Learned and Next Steps
In this chapter, we defined digital presence and showed that
your digital presence is comprised of two facetsbuilding/
managing and delivering/optimizing. Delivering and optimizing
your digital presence requires a strategy that incorporates
performance into its very building blocks.
You also learned that optimizing the audience experience is
critical to you and your business. But it is difficult. A complex
delivery landscape and new technologies create significant
challenges.
Regardless of whether you are thinking about doing it all
yourself, just doing part of it in-house augmented by partners, or
even outsourcing the entire process, you need to build a digital
experience optimization strategy to stay competitive. The first
order of business is to understand more about performance and
the factors that affect it. That is where we will begin in Chapter 2.
19
CHAPTER 2
What is
Performance?
20
CHAPT ER 2: WHAT I S PERFORMANCE?
Very few organizations in the
world can effectively optimize
the digital experience all by
themselves.
For the vast majority, they need partners to ensure the best
possible end user experience. In Chapter 1 we briefly defined
performance as the measurement of how well your digital
content is delivered when it is requested by an end user. But
to truly understand performance, you must look into the vast
network that delivers your content. This network is composed of
three distinct segments: the first mile, middle mile, and last mile.
These segments connect audiences from their devices through
content delivery networks or the Internet to your valuable
content. The quality of your end users experience results from
the performance along all three segments. You already know
that a large portion of the network is beyond your control. But
by controlling more aspects of the content delivery path, you
can better optimize performance.
21
Rethinking Web Performance
Today, web performance is often synonymous with just speed.
Many organizations define web performance as a measure
of how fast the website loads according to server side data
collection. This definition of web performance is very limiting
because it does not take into account what is happening
across the entire delivery path, all the way to the end user. Are
they on a mobile network? Is their computer running slowly?
Yes, it is critical to understand how quickly internal systems are
responding. But it is just as critical to understand how users
are interacting with content when it is delivered. Defining web
performance based purely on server side data does not
present a whole picture of the digital experience.
Web performance, from a technical perspective, is really about
responsiveness. How fast does an object render in the browser?
How fast does DNS resolve a request? What is the difference
in time between when a user requests something and when a
system responds? But from a user perspective, performance is
more about wait. How long did I have to wait before I could
start that video? How long did I have to wait for that button to
appear before I could click on it?
The web team may have optimized the website or app but
users are frustrated that they still have to wait for content to
22
appear. What could be happening between these points-the
origin server and end user-to cause delay?
The Complex Path of Content
Delivery
There are constantly changing external factors impacting
your web performance right now. As content becomes more
personalized, online interactions more complex, Internet traffic
heavier and requirements more real-time, there is a huge ripple
effect across the network that delivers your content.
Each segment of that network is defined below. The network
segments are usually discussed in sequence from last to first
because a users experience begins not at the origin server,
but at the first attempt to access content in the last mile.
The last mile is when content and content requests travel
between your users Internet service provider (ISP) or
mobile access network and their device. What happens
in the last mile in terms of performance is dictated by more
than the speed of your users access network. Your users
device type, operating system and browser all play a role,
and so does the distance content must travel across the last
mile access network to arrive at your end user.
23
The middle mile is the longest network segment,
spanning the distance between your end users access
network and the server where your content is stored.
If your content is stored in an edge server near your
end user, then the middle mile is the distance between
that edge server where content is cached and the server
where it originated (referred to as the origin). Otherwise,
the middle mile is the distance directly between your users
access network and your origin serversin other words,
the public Internet: a collection of networks maintained by
various third parties that cannot be seen or controlled by
most organizations. Its made up of overlapping networks
and carriers to support long haul, regional, and metro
traffic. Think of it as international freeways, highways and
city streets, all owned by different transit systems. And
dispersed throughout these different transit systems are
Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), where different networks
agree to exchange traffic. Depending on where your
online audience is located, there may not be a direct route
between your origin servers and your website visitors across
the middle mile. That means your content may be routed
across different networks to get to your website visitors or
app users.
24
The first mile begins at your origin servers and extends to
the point where you give up control to another party. In
the absence of a content delivery network (CDN), the first
mile is the distance between your origin server and the
transit provider that moves content toward your end user,
or perhaps to another data center in your own network.
In the event that you are using a CDN, the first mile is the
distance between your origin server and the CDNs origin
server. Ideally, the first mile is short; the closer your servers
are to the point at which you hand off content to another
party, the lower the latency. In Chapter 5, we will talk more
about CDNs.

Performance Bottlenecks for
Content Delivery
Each network segment introduces unique performance
bottlenecks. To understand and thus improve performance, you
must know what these bottlenecks are and where they can
Last Mile Middle Mile First Mile
25
occur along the content delivery path. Lets examine them in
the context of the three distinct network segments.
1. Last mile: This is the zone most prone to performance issues
that can go undetected, but impact the user experience in
an exponential manner. These bottlenecks are in the final hop
between your end users device and ISP or mobile access
network. They include latency, congestion, browser diversity,
content complexity and content structure.
Latency: Latency is the biggest performance killer in the last
mile. Even if broadband penetration is increasing globally
through DSL and cable networks, end users increasingly
access your content through multiple devices like mobile
phones and tablets, over wireless connections. Wireless
networks introduce hundreds of milliseconds of latency.
Delivering an object just a few miles across a wireless
network can introduce as much latency as delivering that
same object halfway around the world across a wired
connection. In the face of high latency, Internet protocols
reduce throughputa vicious cycle which can damage
performance even further.
Congestion: Bandwidth availability is high, and increasing
worldwide. However, traffic can still exceed capacity
in certain situations. Particularly in emerging markets,
26
oversubscription poses a major problem. Requests from
hundreds of thousands or even millions of end users may
all be converging on the same 1-gigabit-per-second link
exiting the region. Flash crowds converging on a particular
piece of content can also cause congestion; if a single
video file becomes popular in one location, bandwidth to
access that file may be constrained.
Browser diversity: Trying to keep up with optimizing content
to perform well on every type of browser (and every version
of those different types) is a losing proposition; even the
worlds most talented developers have yet to outsmart
the browser game. In fact, the mechanisms that your
developers are putting in place to optimize performance
for certain browsers today may turn out to be performance
inhibitors when the next version of the browser is released.
For example, a practice known as domain sharding first
emerged to circumvent older browsers two connections
per server limit and increase parallelism. Modern browsers
have raised that limit to six or more connections. So
unconditionally implementing this supposed best practice
could cause problems.
Content complexity: The number, type, and nature of
the components at work in a given website or app has
significant implications for performance. Web 1.0 and Web
27
2.0 users self-guided their digital experiences, navigating
to and through websites and apps to find specific content.
But these days, the content guides the userdelivering
search results based on user profiles, creating personalized
journeys through websites based on individual preferences,
and otherwise shaping the digital experience. This level
of personalization involves a huge amount of dynamic
content, which in turn means more round trip requests are
traveling across the Internet to more servers for more users
than ever before.
Content structure: A simple webpage can contain tens of
styling libraries, which introduce round trip time delays and
have different execution times. These libraries load up in
the order they are downloaded, forcing end users to wait
before they can interact with the page. And as user devices
become more and more capable of displaying high
resolution media, more and more high resolution media is
usedconsuming browser resources and bandwidth. This
runaway train concept is illustrated in the graphs on the
next page; even though the number of image and object
requests has remained relatively flat year over year, the
average size of images and web objects has increased
disproportionately.
28
2. Middle mile: Now that you understand last mile performance
issues, we will take a look at the middle mile. Whereas ISPs and
mobile networks have an incentive to improve performance
across the last mile of the delivery path, the middle mile is a
different story. It can be a vast, un-optimized, and ungovernable
stretch of public Internet over which you have absolutely no
control. It is also where HTML chattiness and TCP latency pile
up fast. Every request that travels back to the origin must cross
the middle mile, and is subject to the performance threats
1000kB
900kB
800kB
700kB
600kB
90
80
70
60
50
40
11/1 12/1 1/1 2/1 3/1 4/1 5/1 6/1 7/1 8/1 9/1 10/1 11/1
753kB
53
54 54 54
55 55
56 56 56 56 56 55 55
779kB 793kB 790kB
812kB
853kB
872kB
891kB
909kB
932kB
951kB
970kB
2000
1500
1000
150
130
110
90
70
11/1 12/1 1/1 2/1 3/1 4/1 5/1 6/1 7/1 8/1 9/1 10/1 11/1
1249kB
86
88 88 88
90 90 91
92 93
94 94 94
95
1285kB
1284kB
1270kB
1311kB
1400kB
1427kB
1462kB
1485kB
1521kB
1551kB
1590kB
11614kB
56
Image Transfer Size (kB) Image Requests
Total Transfer Size (kB) Total Requests
Image Transfer Size and Image Requests
Total Transfer Size and Total Requests
Data from the HTTP Archive shows the year-over-year rise in average image
size and total transfer size of web based objects from 2012 to 2013.
1

1
Courtesy of HTTP Archive, http://httparchive.org/trends.php#bytesImg&reqImg.
29
that occur along the way. Middle mile latency, complex
network connections, content rules and network equipment
configurations all affect web performance.
Latency: Not just a last mile problem, latency in the middle
mile is also a performance killer. Requests and data
moving from end user access networks to your origin and
back can travel through dozens of networks in just one
round trip. Transmission control protocol (TCP) only allows
those requests to be transferred incrementally, and limits
the amount of data transferred during each request or TCP
window. Any amount of packet loss requires retransmission,
which further decreases throughput. Latency inducing
round trip time (RTT) increases and performance suffers.
Lack of control over network types: The biggest portion of
the Internet resides between your ISP and your end users
access network. Many heterogeneous networks, Border
Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions, public routes, latency,
packet loss and variance in quality of service (QoS) affect
your content in the middle mile.
Content rules: Caching behavior (cache control headers)
can easily be manipulated by a malicious proxy sitting
in the middle mile, causing performance issues on HTTP
traffic. Poorly configured websites and applications may
30
have many fragmented components including scripts,
stylesheets, and images, mostly in an HTML container. The
way that browsers request sequentially and in parallel
adds many round trips to render a webpage. The simple
formula for latency can thus be attributed to two main
factors: latency between two nodes, and the number of
round trips required.
Network equipment configuration: Fewer hops do not
necessarily mean that content is transferred more quickly.
Two hops across a path that has high latency and packet
loss are inferior to three hops across a faster route.
Depending on how equipment is configured, content may
not be moving efficiently across the delivery path.
3. First mile: The first mile is the third segment of the delivery
network that we will discuss in terms of performance bottlenecks.
Many organizations spend considerable capital on both the
development and maintenance of IT resources at their origin,
where the first mile begins. These resources include custom
developed applications, servers, data centers and networking
equipment like routers and switches. And every one of them
is performance sensitive. Complex technology ecosystems,
network device resource limitations, web server resource
limitations, content rules, and SSL processing all have an impact
on first mile performance.
31
Complex technology ecosystem: Many IT resources are
custom developed applications built on a mix of varied
technologies like PHP, J2EE, and .NET frameworks. Utilizing
fragmented technologies not only adds complexity to
your design and architecture, but protocol differences can
also lead to performance degradation. Lack of software
integration on the digital presence management side can
mean that information is not shared among sales and
marketing automation, CRM, content management, and
other platformslimiting insight into performance issues
and creating a disjointed end user experience.
Network device resource limitations: Hardware devices
such as servers, switches and routing equipment have
limited computing memory; if they are not optimally load
balanced, they can become quickly overloaded with
a simple web application clocking a few million hits a
day. Overhead, such as compressing content (think the
Gzip approach), reduces the payload size and forces a
tradeoff between server consumption and performance.
Load and reduced file transfer size could be the key
difference between a highly optimized origin server and a
misconfigured one.
Web server resource limitations: Most webpages and
applications that are hosted on your equipment have
32
transaction-completion-time boundaries. Assets like script,
images, and stylesheets have to be fetched and served
over the wire in milliseconds. The cycle repeats millions of
times per day (billions for popular applications). But when
RAM and available CPU capacity are limited, a database
query, disk read/write or a cached response could be the
difference between increasing and reducing response time
by several seconds.
Content rules: A server has to set content rules on caching
and how much time an object can be retained in the
browser (called time to live or TTL) before sending a request
to refresh it. Each refresh request adds a read/write load to
all of the components of your origin: router, storage disk,
bandwidth and CPU.
SSL processing: SSL transactions have more server
consumption and utilization than normal transactions, and
they are time sensitive. Using the same CPU for concurrent
SSL transactions introduces latency in the overall system
due to extra steps required in authentication, certificate
handling and digital handshakes.
With so many bottlenecks to overcome, its no surprise that the
worlds leading web performance experts have shifted from
advocating hand-tuning to implementation of automated
web performance optimization technologies.
33
Even if all of your resources are optimized at the origin,
there are many external moving parts in the last, middle and
first mile network segments that undermine performance.
The performance bottlenecks in each network segment
can reduce the speed and availability of websites and
web applications, limit scalability, inhibit delivery to certain
devices, and reduce end user engagement levels. With so
many factors impacting performance and so much of what
happens to your content seemingly out of your control,
how do you go about formulating a digital experience
optimization strategy that supports performance? Identify
your KPIs.
Measurement is perhaps the most critical component of
ensuring that your end user experience is optimized. But what
do you measure? And, more importantly, how do you know if
what you are measuring is the right thing to measure? Read on
to find out how setting KPIs will help you create a measurement
framework that will guide your future content delivery decisions.
34
CHAPTER 3
Establishing
KPIs and
Measuring
Performance
35
CHAPT ER 3: ESTABL I SHI NG KPI S AND MEASURI NG PERFORMANCE
Now that you understand the
forces driving the need for
high performance and the
factors that influence it ,
you can begin to formulate a strategy to improve the delivery
of your content for an optimized user experience. This strategy
starts with establishing key performance indicators (KPIs).
Performance KPIs are not the same to everyone. Marketers,
for example, consider the number of visitors an important KPI
for their website. Web developers might consider time to first
paint as a KPI. Thats why you need to define what delivery
optimization means to you. Is it a faster shopping cart? Is it
more time spent on each page? Is it more pages viewed?
Whatever the metrics you define, they need to reflect what you
expect from web performance optimization efforts. Your KPIs
will determine how your organization measures performance
success. So, establish a baseline set of KPIs and then test
performance using real user measurements (RUM).
36
Baseline KPIs
Before you start pulling server logs and utilizing third party
services to gather client data, you need to have a baseline set
of KPIs. What are acceptable numbers for your KPIs? Is 1,000
new visitors each day an adequate number? Is 36 seconds
enough time spent on each page? The point of setting
baselines for your KPIs is that it gives you something against
which to gauge improvements.
In thinking about baseline performance testing, its important to
understand one critical aspect: Performance is about more than
speed alone. As we discussed in Chapter 2, multiple factors
impact the delivery of your content. Thats why establishing a
baseline is so important. That baseline allows you to continually
monitor every aspect of your user experience and improve
upon the parts that matter most.
Focusing your digital experience optimization strategy on
a single type of KPI not only provides an incomplete picture
of performance; it undermines it. For example, delivering
a user experience that is fast (focusing on speed) but
doing so inconsistently (overlooking availability) has a net
negative effect.
How do you chose your performance KPIs? Generally speaking,
37
performance related KPIs can be grouped into five categories:
Speed
Availability
Scalability
Multi device support
End user experience
Speed: As you have learned, speed is the most commonly
used indicator of performance. The primary ways to measure
speed are a systems responsiveness to a request, and the
end users ability to interact with content once that response is
completed. Therefore, KPIs for speed may include:
Connection time
DNS lookup time
Download time
First byte response
Latency
Page load time
Response to request time
Throughput
Time to first paint
Time to interaction
Availability: Availability is a given; your content must be
consistently available and secure at all times. If visitors go to
your website and cannot find the content desired, they are
38
gone, possibly forever. There are too many alternatives out
there. In this case, speed has little to do with it. You need to
make certain that your website, content servers, and network
links are always up and running. Availability based KPIs
may include:
Error rate
Packet loss
Security event response time
Uptime
Scalability: Your ability to accommodate changing needs and
traffic patterns is highly correlated to the quality of your users
experiences over time. Distributing or removing content for
audiences of highly variable behavior patterns, sizes, locations,
and access devices requires elasticity. Knowing the capacity of
every component in your technology ecosystem ensures that
flash crowds and traffic surges will not pose an issue. Scaling
down is equally important; unless traffic is 100% consistent,
building out your own infrastructure for peak capacity is going
to yield poor return on investment. KPIs around scalability may
include:
Backlogs
Bandwidth utilization
Failover recovery time
Source of demand
39
Source of load
Storage utilization
Uptime versus traffic
Multi Device Support: It is not just the number of users
accessing your content that creates performance challenges,
but the proliferation of different types of devices, with different
browsers and operating systems. Each device has its own
presentation requirements, processing, caching, storage,
and networking capabilities, which influence performance.
Some can open multiple concurrent connections, others just
a few. Similarly, some can cache a large number of objects,
others just a few. If your audience is using multiple devices or
platforms, remember to measure performance across each
one. You will apply KPIs in the categories of speed, availability,
and scalability to every device your audience uses. These
may include:
Error rate for mobile content
First byte download time
Initial connection time
Mobile redirect time
Number of page views
Support for multiple devices
Time to first interaction
Transaction completion rate
40
End User Experience: Ultimately, organizations work to
improve performance in the interest of the end user. Machine
metrics such as error rate or site load time are valuable, but
they exist only as indicators of how easily your audience can
locate and interact with your content. KPIs associated with the
end user experience signal how usable, relevant, and valuable
your content is. Examples are listed below; later in this chapter,
we will discuss the best methods for monitoring end user
experience on an ongoing basis.
Abandonment rate
Average revenue per user
Bounce rate
Completed tasks
Conversion rate
Engagement score
Repeat visits
Time on site
Rather than just speed, the true delivery performance is
a holistic measurement combining KPIs from all of these
five categories: speed, availability, scalability, multi device
support, and end user experience.
41
THE OPTIMIZED EXPERIENCE
What does a successful visitor experience look like? Here are
two real examples, each with unique KPIsincluding more than
just speed.
SoundCloud
: SoundCloud is the leading audio platform

that gives users unprecedented access to the worlds largest
community of music and audio creators. Twelve hours of music
and audio are posted every minute. 90% of tracks get played,
most on the day that theyre postedmore than half within the
hour that theyre posted. SoundCloud must deliver more than
speed; its KPIs also include reliability (an uninterrupted listening
experience) and scalability (the ability to accommodate traffic
spikes when a track goes viral). Focusing solely on speed would
shortchange SoundClouds overall performance.
1
HBO GO
: Reliability and multi device delivery are critical for

this cable television site. HBO GO is part of HBOs TV Everywhere
platform, which allows users to stream HBO content on nine
popular devices including mobile phones, tablets, e-readers, and
gaming consoles.
2
Minimizing error rates (reliability) across these
devices (multi device support) is an important KPI for HBO GO;
both encompass more than raw speed.
1
Information courtesy of SoundCloud.
2
Gina Hall, Will HBO Go come to the masses? L.A. Biz, September 26, 2013, http://
www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/news/2013/09/26/will-hbo-go-come-to-the-masses.
html. Accessed December 2013.
42
Evaluating Performance
Performance is not a one-time engagement. In the same way that
you should expand the KPIs you use to measure performance,
you should expand the testing window. Once you establish
baseline KPIs, you will continually monitor and evaluate progress,
diagnosing and re-diagnosing performance issues.
One common way to measure performance is to log on to the
company website or portal and take note of response time. For
many IT managers who log on to the corporate network directly
connected to the content origin server, performance seems
good. It can come as a surprise when one of the organizations
road warriors complains about poor web performance at a
distant customer office. Hey, it was fine a moment ago when
I logged on! the IT manager replies. But one thousand miles
away, even one hundred miles away, that is not necessarily
the case. That is because on-site testing bypasses the middle
mile altogetherthat vast, un-optimized stretch of public
Internet that has such a major impact on performance. The
optimizations you made on the development side make no
difference when you deploy in production, because too many
bottlenecks occur in the real world environment.
In truth, you generally cannot experience your website
performance from corporate data centers the same way your
43
audience experiences it. You can have the most blazing fast
delivery on the server side, but find out that objects are loading
slowly in web browsers because they are not optimized. Or,
the wrong things are loading in the wrong order. If nothing
else, the latency resulting from distance adds a few seconds,
even just a few milliseconds; still, it is enough to push user wait
times into the noticeably unacceptable range.
Another common way to measure website performance, used
by most web teams, is synthetic monitoring. Using a testing
agent, scripts are run that simulate the actions a site visitor would
likely take. The monitoring provides usage data, showing if the
site is up and how its most common processes are running. This
is great for testing your raw speed in the absence of variables
such as browser protocols. But it does not really provide a
good sense of user wait times since real world factors are not
part of the equation. And because it is pre-scripted, it cannot
mimic the random and erratic paths users typically take.
Meanwhile, Internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile access
networks do not know the real performance they deliver. At best,
they have synthetic simulations or backbone testing, where test
agents are inserted into major points deep inside the network.
With backbone testing, however, you are testing performance
at the big hubs, where Internet network speed is essentially
infinite and would rarely become bottlenecked. In effect, you
44
end up monitoring the delivery speed of individual objects in a
vacuum, without taking into account neighborhood issues with
ISPs or individual connectivity to any of those networks. In the
end, you are measuring a networknot what your audience
actually experiences. Even putting agents out in the last mile
does not provide a complete picture of performance.
Optimizing Measurements for
Real Users
Operational system metrics gathered from your own infrastructure
will tell you how your internal systems are performing. Synthetic
usage data indicates how well you are delivering your content
to machine testing agents. Application data such as CRM reports
can reveal how your audience is reacting to your content.
But only user centric metrics will reveal if the user experience will
improve as a result of your digital experience optimization
strategy. The best option to measure performance with a user
centric approach is with real user monitoring (RUM). RUM is a
type of reactive monitoring mechanism. It monitors actual user
interaction with a website or application. RUM is critical to truly
understanding the end user perception of the digital experience. It
answers questions like: Is the element that users are expecting to
load not available until the website has completely rendered?
45
Are there errors occurring? Is there a business process (i.e., sales
funnel) failing?
RUM functions by injecting a small piece of code, typically
JavaScript, into the digital touch point you want to analyze;
a webpage or media player, for example. The code captures
statistics like available bandwidth, CPU usage, time to action
and similar trends. It records and relays download times and
task completion times and flags certain events if they are not
within the normal threshold. It then relays these details to help
build beacons. RUM testing can be performed in-house or by
a specialized third party provider.
The most compelling feature of RUM is that it provides
feedback on performance as seen by actual users, giving you
a sense of how your content will actually perform when users
are interacting with it. It captures specific details like type of
device, browser choice, and ISP. Since it can be embedded
LOAD TIME:
6.7sec
LOAD TIME:
7.2 sec
LOAD TIME:
4.6 sec
REAL USER MONITORING (RUM)
46
into any webpage, you do not have to generalize and guess
about overall performance based on the limited metrics made
available by a few pages or transactions. With RUM, any page
or transaction can be analyzed by geographical location, IP
blocks, and regions.
RUM gives you the best chance of understanding the end
user experience without actually having to test it from a hotel
room or coffee shop hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Combined with operational system metrics, synthetic data, and
application data, RUM gives you the insight you need to know
if your performance optimizations are really working.
47
HOW EFFECTIVE IS YOUR VISITOR EXPERIENCE?
Logging onto your website from the office will tell you if your site is
up and running, but not end user wait times. These tools can show
you how others experience your website in the real world.
HTTP Archive: Enter any URL to view granular data such as
millisecond-level screen shots, or larger trends in transfer size and
request. http://httparchive.org/websites.php.
Gomez
: Test your total page download time with details by

object type from locations across North America, Latin America,
Europe, and Asia Pacific regions. http://www.gomez.com/website-
performance-test/.
Keynote
: Download free apps (including mobile and Internet

testing environments) with a focus on real user monitoring.
http://www.keynote.com/.
Webpagetest: Test your webpage by browser and mobile device
type. Create a video file of the filmstrip to include in presentations.
http://www.webpagetest.org/.
Most performance test results are presented in the form of a waterfall
chart. A waterfall chart measures time to execute each step of the
page load: DNS lookup, TCP connection, first byte, throughput, and
download. This is useful information for identifying bottlenecks, but
remember that performance is more than just speed.
48
What really matters in all of this is the end user experience.
You can have the biggest data center, pay for huge network
pipes, and code the slickest content, but if your end users
are experiencing unacceptable performance, none of the
rest matters. Delivering your content in the best way possible
means identifying baseline KPIs that span the categories of
speed, availability, scalability, multi device delivery, and end
user experience.
With RUM, you have a tool that can guide your understanding
and measurement of user wait times. Now that you have
KPIs defined and baselines established, how do you improve
performance and nullify those wait times? You will need to
build a technology ecosystem to support performance for the
long term. This is where we will begin in Chapter 4.
49
CHAPTER 4
How to
Structure Your
Technology
Ecosystem
50
The previous chapters have
given you a good sense of
how well you are delivering
your content to your
audience today.
You understand what bottlenecks stand in the way of high
performance, you have defined baseline KPIs, and you have
looked into RUM testing. Now you can choose the tools and
technologies required to further optimize web performance
and reduce user wait times.
Further optimizing performance requires an entire partner
ecosystem. You do not want to do it alone. Five years ago, in-
house optimizations were often the first line of defense against
poor web performance. But today, in-house performance
optimizations are just a starting point. With the rise in dynamic
content and rich media, increased traffic on the public Internet,
the need to reach a global audience, and the proliferation of end
user systems and devices, few IT departments can fully optimize
web performance on their own. The performance challenge is
also magnified by the continuous evolution of technology itself,
which is constantly reshaping the landscape of the digital world.
CHAPTER 4: HOW TO STRUCTURE YOUR TECHNOLOGY ECOSYSTEM
51
To choose the right partners, it is important to examine your
content mix by conducting an audit to identify requirements.
You will want to collaborate with other stakeholders during this
process and ensure cross-functional alignment.
Conducting a Content Audit
To build a partner ecosystem that supports performance, you
and other performance stakeholders in your organization
have to understand your content: how much you have, where
it resides, how it is stored and protected, the format and data
types, frequency of access, whether dynamic or static; anything
you can use to characterize your content will ensure that you
address the right issues as you build out your infrastructure to
support your KPIs.
Suppose that you have a KPI around speed and multi device
delivery. Your objective is to reduce latency by 20% on mobile
devices. RUM tells you that your mobile users are experiencing
five to seven second delays versus desktop users. Now what?
A content audit can provide you and your potential partners
with insight into what bottlenecks may be standing in the way
of your objectives. Suppose an audit of your mobile site reveals
multiple dynamic thumbnails being refreshed on every request.
The resulting round trips back to origin could cause potential
52
server overload and delay deliveryproblems that require a
very different solution than on-demand rich media files would
require, for example.
The below five-factor framework will guide you through the
process of auditing your content for performance.
1. Target device
How does your audience consume your content? Most IT
managers are responsible for delivering content to more
than one type of user device. Even if you deliver content to a
dedicated device type, such as a gaming console, chances are
that there is more than one version of the device on the market.
Your technology ecosystem will need to include technology
that supports every user devicepast, present, and future.
2. Content type
Dynamic and static content each present unique delivery
challenges. Delivering dynamic content can involve constant
round trips back across the middle mile, to origin servers, to
retrieve the most current version of a file. Static content, on the
other hand, can be cached closer to end users, and optimized
using different techniques. As you consider which technologies
you will select to optimize both static and dynamic content,
keep in mind that some technologies are capable of delivering
53
both types of content, but not necessarily accelerating that
deliverya critical distinction.
3. Size
The structure of your technology ecosystem may vary depending
on the size of objects you deliver: small, or large. Small objects
such as HTML, CSS, scripts, text, and low resolution images
each take up a single CPU cycle; without proper optimizations,
they have an aggregate negative effect on performance.
Large objects such as rich media files and software updates
require different optimizations, such as caching and progressive
download. If your content mix includes both small and large
objects, then selecting a delivery partner with the capability to
optimize both large and small objects is important.
4. Media type
Are you delivering rich media? A large number of video files
in your content mix requires video-specific storage and delivery
solutions such as media servers, and specific optimizations
such as adaptive bitrate streaming. And whether you deliver
live video or video on demand (VOD) impacts how you will
ingest, encode, and replicate files. A technology system that
is not specifically designed to support rich media may hinder
performance when rich media is introduced.
54
As you can see, not all content is optimized the same way. As
you prepare to discuss your digital experience optimization
strategy with internal and external stakeholders, your content
audit will guide the conversation.
Getting Buy-in from Internal
Stakeholders
You will benefit greatly from discussing the results of your
content audit with internal stakeholders across the four key
digital content functions: creation, management, delivery, and
optimization. What systems are these stakeholders using now?
And do those systems improve or undermine the delivery of
your organizations particular content mix?
Below is an overview of each function, and how it relates to
performance.
Creation: Content creators can be externalsuch as
customers submitting user generated content via an app
or internalsuch as the multimedia team producing videos
55
to post on your website. Internally created content is most
often the work of the marketing team, directly or indirectly.
(Other teams may be involved, too: sales teams build training
video libraries, product teams release software updates,
and accounting teams develop online billing systems.) If
you have conducted a content audit, you already know
the characteristics of the content that you need to deliver;
working with content creators gives you foresight into how
that may change in the short and long term, so you can plan
capacity accordingly. A global marketing campaign, a new
software release, or a live event can all have a tremendous
impact on performance. Building a technology ecosystem
that can support your evolving needs requires input from
content creators.
Management: Responsibility for content management, such as
maintaining the corporate website, varies from organization
to organization. It most commonly falls to IT, marketing, or a
combination of the two. Cross-functional scenarios are also
common; for example, IT may be called upon to troubleshoot
but is not responsible for the day-to-day management
of an organizations website. Content managers have a
significant stake in the technology ecosystem; your storage
solution, for example, will need to be universally accessible to
content managers.
56
Delivery: The delivery of digital content nearly always falls to IT.
That includes your networking group, storage team, database
group, developers, and others. Though non-IT teams contribute
and manage content, it is virtually guaranteed that it is ITs job
to ensure that the right systems are in place to deliver it, and
deliver it fast. From video storage and streaming, to website
acceleration and CRM software, IT will take the call if something
goes wrong. You therefore have a significant role in selecting
and purchasing the solutions required to deliver content
(though other departments may have a say in the process).
Optimization: Optimizing performance is a discipline, not a one-
time engagement. It really spans the building, management,
and delivery of content. Optimizing content for the best
possible performance should be an ongoing organizational
effort; it must be continually revisited and re-evaluated by cross-
functional teams. Performance optimizing initiatives may begin
with IT, but over time the success of your digital experience
optimization strategy is a shared responsibility among multiple
stakeholders.
A Partner Ecosystem
Now that you have completed your content audit and you
have involved all the right stakeholders, it is time to look at
your infrastructure.
57
Recent research suggests that IT spending is shifting from
traditional IT infrastructure to infrastructure focused on the
various aspects of an organizations digital presence. This is a
natural evolution, considering that performance has become
absolutely vital to organizational success and IT controls only
the first mile of the content delivery path (from the origin to the
point where it is handed off to a third party network). This shift
in budget also reflects the reality that high performing content
has the ability to drive revenue in many industries in ways
conventional IT infrastructure never has. This new infrastructure
requires a new partner ecosystem to support it. The ecosystem
is made up of hardware, software, and networks. It is distributed
on premise and in the cloud, and leverages in-house and
partner solutions.
In its simplest form, the ecosystem consists of a central platform
that integrates with the various systems required to build,
manage, deliver, and optimize a digital presence: analytics,
social networks, video management systems, web content
management systems, content delivery networks, social
customer relationship management (CRM) tools, sales force
automation (SFA), marketing automation, and others.
CONTENT
MANAGEMENT
SFA/CRM CDN MARKETING
AUTOMATION
SOCIAL VIDEO
MANAGEMENT
ANALYTICS SOCIAL CRM
58
But too often, organizations must try to cobble these systems
together, with unsatisfactory results. Either the APIs are not good
or pathways are incomplete. The effort quickly becomes time
consuming, labor intensive, and costlywhile still failing to
deliver results. You may find yourself unable to perform small
tasks without disturbing the delicate balance created by the
varied software, hardware, and networks that make up your
ecosystem. Moreover, you have no insight into how systems are
working together to improve or undermine your performance.
A
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Digital Presence
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59
Optimizing Your Infrastructure
The right partner ecosystem reins in the complexity of the digital
world with its multitude of tools and technologies and seemingly
constant proliferation of services. It not only integrates services
and technologies that plug into it, but enables you to extend
the digital platform to other systems too.
The technology ecosystem required to deliver a superior digital
experience must seamlessly integrate the tools used to build,
manage, deliver, and optimize your organizations digital
presence.
As the previous illustration visualized, weve identified a number
of categories that make up a digital presence ecosystem:
Analytics
Social
Video management
Content management
CDN
Social CRM
SFA/CRM
Marketing automation
There are numerous vendors offering these services. A quality
platform can integrate fully with the components of your
60
ecosystem. Just as importantly, the platform should provide
you with access to the portions of the delivery path that are
otherwise unreachable to youeverything past your origin.
It is within the unique purview of a content delivery network
(CDN) to improve performance across the entire delivery path.
The CDN is the cornerstone piece in your performance mix.
In Chapters 5 and 6, we will discuss the technologies that
CDNs and content acceleration service providers can utilize to
improve the performance of your content.
CLOUD OR ON PREMISE?
Many organizations today are opting for cloud-based software
that they can integrate through Application Programming
Interfaces (API). This enables the software to be more scalable,
reliable, and available. Whats more, the organization is
not responsible for upgrades and many software-as-a-
service (SaaS) providers integrate security into their offerings.
Evaluating Ecosystem Partners
So what should you keep in mind as you look for partners?
Weve assembled six key things to consider:
Integration. The platform must not only integrate services that
are connected to it, but it must provide a framework that
61
enables you to extend the platform to other systems. It must be
flexible in design.
Manageability. The platform and services that are connected
to it must include elements of management (i.e., through
application program interface [API] or graphic user interface
[GUI]) that enable you to control access, security, distribution of
content, etc.
High Performance. The platform must include technologies
and features that actively work to increase the speed and
performance of delivery to your end user. Your users wont wait.
Resiliency. The platform must not only respond favorably
to outside pressures (e.g. a DDoS attack), but the individual
components must work independently enough that a problem
with one component does not bring down the entire platform
(e.g. loose coupling).
Elasticity. The platform must be able to scale up or down
based on demand. For example, storage should increase
naturally to accommodate increased numbers of online assets
or decrease as those assets are removed.
Future Proofing. The platform must continually adapt to the
most recent technologies, approaches, and strategies to
reduce the demand on your organization to optimize for
62
endlessly multiplying device types, browser types, and user
behavior patterns.
In addition to those six core functions, an ideal platform should
also provide some form of automation. The digital world is
simply moving too quickly to rely entirely on manual processes,
regardless of how efficient they are.
THINK GLOBAL
A Silicon Valley based startup wanted to target consumers in
North Americatheir business model did not expand to other
markets. The company built a technology ecosystem to optimize
performance across the North American continent, confident that
their digital experience optimization strategy was comprehensive
based on their business model. However, they were not aware
that an investor in Qatar had been proactively researching the
company, and was experiencing frustratingly slow load times
when seeking information from the companys website. The result
of this short-sightedness? A negative digital experience for a key
stakeholder that the company did not even know existed.
When seeking a digital platform, remember to think global.
You may start regionally but, sooner than you expect, you will
want content cached around the world to deliver acceptable
performance to a far-flung audience.
63
The performance challenge is complex, but the solution does
not need to be. It begins with a content audit, knowing how
your content mix impacts performance, and involving cross-
functional teams in the development of a partner ecosystem to
support optimized delivery.
Optimizing the delivery of your online content is not about
displacing existing systems wholesale, but augmenting what
is already in place. As IT spend shifts to the cloud, consider
a platform with a strong content delivery network (CDN)
component. Chapter 5 provides more details on how CDNs
are critical to achieving the best possible performance.
64
CHAPTER 5
Optimizing the
Infrastructure
65
CHAPT ER 5: OPT I MI ZI NG T HE I NF RAST RUCT URE
You already know that a
large portion of the network
that delivers your content is
beyond your control.
But the fact remains that by controlling more aspects of the
content delivery path, you can better optimize performance.
The reach of most organizations does not extend past the first
mile, or the point where your servers hand off content to a
third party. Though Internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile
networks claim to provide increasingly fast connection speeds,
a host of variables along every mile of the content delivery
path mean those speeds are not consistent in the real world.
And even if they were, other factorsincluding availability,
scalability, and user devicewould potentially undermine
performance.
The best way to optimize performance across the entire
delivery path is to utilize a CDN. In this chapter, we will discuss
how CDNs optimize performance. Based on the outcome of
your content audit (presented in Chapter 4), you can identify
which optimizations will yield the greatest benefit to your
organization.
66
What is a Content Delivery
Network (CDN)?
According to Wikipedia, a content delivery network
is a large distributed system of servers deployed in
multiple data centers across the Internet. The goal of a
CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability
and high performance. CDNs serve a large fraction of
the Internet content today, including web objects (text,
graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files,
software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals),
live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and
social networks.
1

A content delivery network connects two points on the
delivery path: a content providers origin in the first mile and
the edge of the networks that end users rely on to access
that content in the last mile. These servers are located in
clusters referred to as points of presence (POPs). POPs must
interconnect with one another across the middle mile. Those
interconnections vary depending on network architecture
and ownership structures, discussed later in this chapter.
1
Wikipedia contributors, Content delivery network, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network. Accessed December 2013.
67
By extending your infrastructure with a CDN (either self-
hosted or through a service provider), you can provide a
better experience by caching popular content closer to your
audience so that new requests dont have to travel all the way
back to the origin. In essence, a CDN serves as your proxy to
end users located far from your origin, cutting down on the
distance that content must travel to reach them.
Static Object Caching
All CDNs employ static object caching: storing copies of your
content in edge servers near end users, refreshing it as needed,
and ensuring its availability through replication and backup.
The amount of time that static content can stay in cache on
these edge servers, or its time to live (TTL) value, is high; you can
set policies that dictate when content needs to be invalidated
or refreshed, but for the most part it can be cached near your
end users indefinitelyeliminating the need to cross the first
and middle mile each time it is requested. Therefore, data does
not have to travel from your origin with every request.
If you have a largely static content library (typically image files,
script libraries, and stylesheets) you may not even maintain your
own storage infrastructure, offloading everything to your CDNs
origin servers in the cloud. This cuts the number of hops required
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to transfer content from your origin to your CDNs edge servers.
These servers are designed expressly for serving static content,
which reduces processing overhead and increases throughput
for dramatically increased download speed. Static content is
mostly beaconed based on file size, type, and parameters
such as domain names (e.g. static.example.com). This type of
segmentation is not only a good business practice, but also
provides clarity to developers and engineers working on web
applications.
Exchanging Traffic for a Better
Experience
Not only can a CDN manage the storage and distribution
of your content; it also manages the relationships required
to transfer that content across the many connection points
between you and your end user.
Every CDN interoperates with other networks, from mobile
access networks to the ISPs that transfer content between its
POPs. This interoperability is what allows you access to the
entire content delivery path; a CDN maintains the physical
connections with every network that stands between you and
your end user, as well as the relationships required to keep
those connections open.
69
Organizations achieve interoperability via a CDN through either
peering or transit. Peering involves voluntarily interconnecting
with separate networks so that traffic can move freely among
them. Peering is usually settlement-free; neither party pays the
other for the traffic exchanged. The mutual benefit for peering
networks is the increased volume of traffic each can handle.
The benefit passed on to you is the ease with which your
content can move across these various networks.
Peering requires physical interconnection of the networks
involved, and an exchange of routing information through the
border gateway protocol (BGP), a routing protocol that enables
the exchange of network path information between networks.
The information includes network addresses and router table
data about how to reach other networks, the number of hops,
and packet loss statistics.
Transit connections are similar to peering arrangements, but
paid for. One party pays another party to increase the reach
of its network (recall that ISPs or mobile networks usually control
Origin Server
DIRECT

CONNECTION
DIRECT
CONNECTION

USER
CONNECTION

Edge Server User Access Network End User Parent
Caching Server

ISP
70
last mile access networks, or the path between the edge and
end user).
Because a host of physical, technological, economic, and
even political factors affect interoperability, content providers
rely on CDNs to navigate this landscape on an ongoing
basis. Imagine having to maintain physical connections and
individual relationships with each one of the networks involved
in the transmission of your content!
CDN Architecture
In addition to moving content among third party networks, a
CDN must move content among its own POPsfor example,
from the server in the POP that ingests content near your origin
to the server in the POP that caches content near your end
users access network. CDN architecture, or the positioning of
POPs throughout service areas, varies from provider to provider.
There are two main types of CDN architecture: sparse and
dense.
In a sparse network architecture, POPs are smaller (with fewer
servers) but more numerous. These small concentrations of
servers are typically located at universities and other inexpensive
hosting locations. The servers can be deployed quite far into
last mile access networks, placing your content very close to
71
end users. Because servers are located so close to end users,
sparsely architected networks provide the benefit of extended
reach into locations worldwide. However, that may mean
those servers are located farther from your origin, and from
one another. And because there are fewer servers in each POP,
those servers may not be able to hold all of the content that
your CDN is responsible for cachingincreasing the likelihood
that a request must travel among POPs before your content
can be located. Content from larger or higher traffic clients may
take precedence, and cache efficiency and offload of origin
traffic can suffer as a result.
In a dense network architecture, larger POPs are clustered
closely around key interconnection points with last mile access
networks. These interconnection points exist over massive
capacity gigabit (over 100GB) ports, which allow seamless,
fast and secure transfer of assets like images, media files
and application centric data. Densely architected network
POPs generally contain more numerous and larger servers
than sparely architected network POPs, and are capable of
handling both small and large objects. They provide higher
cache retention, efficiency, and performance gains to both the
origin infrastructure and the end users; with larger POPs, no
single customers traffic is significant enough to utilize the entire
capacity, reducing the need to flush out the cache.
72
Your CDNs architecture can impact your performance, but it is
not the only factor.
Bypassing the Congestion
As discussed in the previous section, in addition to connecting
to last mile access networks, a CDNs servers must connect
to one another. The nature of those connections can impact
performance just as significantly as the location of the POPs
themselves. Network conditions such as lower latency paths,
packet loss and retransmission levels are constantly changing;
routing algorithms therefore have to continually adjust to move
content on the optimal path between POPs. There are two
ways that CDNs can optimize that path.
The first way is by sending content across the access networks
(a method which relies on the public Internet) that connect
POPs to one another. Because public networks are congested,
complex algorithms are required to determine the best way
to route content along them at all times. This approach
routing content based on algorithms designed to avoid public
Internet congestionhas proven to be successful in solving the
architectural problems of Internet 1.0. But for enterprise class
connectivity and quality of service, some CDNs have developed
more robust interconnection systems.
73
That leads to the second way CDNs optimize connections
between POPs: by bypassing the public Internet completely
and exercising direct control over how the POPs are connected
to one another. In this case, the CDN owns or leases the
direct connections between all of its POPs. Therefore, the CDN
can better respond to any disruptions, such as sudden traffic
spikes, that affect performance. This approach also increases
reliability. Factors such as modified initial congestion windows,
higher persistent connection times and the ability to handle
both compressed and uncompressed content allow these
distributed networks to achieve the performance benefits that
would be impossible at higher traffic volumes across the public
Internet. Moreover, a CDN that exerts control over its own
delivery path does not pay for the transit charges to move
traffic between POPsa benefit that is passed on to you.
Having a self controlled connection system also allows privately
operated CDNs to provide enhanced service level agreements
(SLAs) as they control the bitstream all the way to the end user
and back to the origin.
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Large and Small Object Delivery
In Chapter 4 you discovered that websites are made up of
objects large and small. Each requires a different approach
to performance optimization. Small objects, such as thumbnail
images, procedural transactions, Ajax calls, and the database
queries required to set up the delivery of a large file or video
stream, are everywhere in todays digital environment. The
performance of static small objects can be addressed with
the static object caching strategies discussed above, and with
front end acceleration (discussed in Chapter 6).
When it comes to large static objects such as on demand
video, software updates, or game releases, different strategies
are required. In these cases, last mile bandwidth has a major
impact on performance. If an end users ISP connection is slow,
the results are obvious: higher wait times. Your first impulse
may be to optimize performance for maximum bandwidth,
forcing bits across the wire ever so quickly. However, you may
be delivering a huge amount of content that is not actually
ISP LAST MILE
Last Mile Optimizations Middle Mile Optimizations First Mile Optimizations
EDGE SERVER
(NEAR USER)
EDGE SERVER
(NEAR ORIGIN)
CUSTOMER
DATA CENTER
PRIVATE
BACKBONE
CONNECTED
OVER LOW RTT TO
CUSTOMERS
DATA CENTER
(ORIGIN)
75
consumedsuch as a video file that is abandoned halfway
through viewing because it suddenly buffered. In this case,
youve paid to deliver content that nobody consumed.
Unfortunately, many CDNs shy away from delivering large
objects for this reason. Optimizing performance for a large
object consumes more of the CDNs resources: CPU cycles,
network usage, and bandwidth. It also lowers cache efficiency
in the case of a sparse architecture. The criteria for a large
file vary among CDNs; some might classify it as anything larger
than 1MB, and for others that threshold could be 5MB. The
difference doesnt matter for a few downloads, but at a higher
scale, the difference in the cost of delivery could be exponential
to the CDN. And that added large object delivery cost could
be passed on to you.
A CDN capable of large object performance optimization
should be able to achieve intelligent speed: fast enough to
avoid end user perception of latency, but not so fast that an
entire file is delivered even if it is not consumed.
How do you know that the speed your CDN provides is
intelligent? Or whether a download was a success or failure?
The answer is analytics. You need details such as point of
abandonment, confirmation of downloads, and performance
against strict service level agreement (SLA) requirements for
76
acceptable performance. Specifically, real user monitoring
(RUM), discussed in Chapter 3, gives you insight into how your
objects are performing in the real world.
Whole Site Delivery
Whole site delivery is a term used to refer to the delivery of both
large and small objects as well as the containers of those files
such as HTML. A CDN may use different architectures to support
objects of different sizes; recall that a densely architected
network consisting of large server concentrations is capable of
handling both large and small objects. Delivering whole sites
is more challenging because they present a heterogeneous
mix of cacheable and non-cacheable content. The main HTML
file could be non-cacheable, but the various components
that make up a page (scripts, images, stylesheets) could be
cacheable. This requires intelligent cache management and
header parsing rules at the edge to differentiate among complex
content needs.
77
A CDN provides access to global storage, delivery
infrastructure, and optimization techniques that are otherwise
inaccessible to most organizations. Moreover, a CDN
overcomes a major delivery challenge: the inability to access
or control the vast network that transports your content between
you and your end users. Depending on the architecture of the
CDN, content is either optimized to traverse the public Internet
more quickly or routed around it altogether. The ability of any
CDN to control most, if not all, of the end-to-end delivery
network enables better performance for a better end user
experience.
Dynamic content and small objects, however, can be further
optimized with even more extensive techniques. Specialized
CDNs can improve how your dynamic content performs, and
even employ browser specific optimizations on the front end
to speed delivery in the last mile. These optimizations are
discussed in Chapter 6.
78
CHAPTER 6
Additional
Optimizations
79
CHAPT ER 6: ADDI T I ONAL OPT I MI ZAT I ONS
In the previous chapter, we
discussed how you can
improve performance by
caching static objects on a
content delivery network (CDN).
However, external factors including the rise of dynamic content
and the evolution of browsers mean that static object caching
alone cannot fully address todays performance issues.
The personalization of the web is driving more dynamic
content. Users increasingly expect sites and apps to remember
who they are, and present them with unique, relevant content
at every turn. Dynamic content acceleration is required to meet
those evolving expectations. At the same time, the number
and type of browsers on the market is changing faster than
any organization can keep pace. Optimizing performance for
these evolving conditions is challenging; best practices du jour
may prove useless or even harmful for tomorrows browser. Front
end acceleration (FEA) is the key to improving performance in
this changing environment.
Together, dynamic content acceleration and front end
80
acceleration can yield performance gains above and beyond
traditional CDN services.
The Dynamic Paradox
Caching is a key performance strategy. The general rule: the
closer your end user is to your content, the better. Shorter
distances minimize latency and cut down on unnecessary
network hops that can lead to packet loss and retransmissions.
Caching enables those short distances.
Due to its changing nature, however, most dynamic content
presents problems for caching. It must be repeatedly refreshed
or it risks becoming out of date and inaccurate. (Nobody
wants to view their bank account balance with data from
last week.) The cache-control header values on dynamic
content are typically set to ensure that caching is disabled.
And unlike static content, which can be efficiently cached
in an edge server and counted on not to change for long
periods of time, dynamic content must be uniquely generated
each time it is requested. That means every request for
dynamic content, and in turn the content itself, must travel
all the way across the middle mile and back to the origin;
a network round trip, at minimum.
This round trip occurs not just for the content being rendered
81
on your end users screen, but for all of the elements required to
support that contentsuch as scripts, AJAX calls, and database
queries. And every one of those round trips introduces latency.
HTTPS adds further latency due to the authentication, certificate
handling and digital handshakes required to secure identities.
Even if multiple round trips occur in parallel, most networking
equipment and servers have hard set limitations about how
much content and how large of a payload they can hold until
they start getting congestedlimiting the amount of data that
can be transmitted during each round trip. Every packet that
could combine to make up an image, text file, or other web
asset is transmitted through your servers memory buffer. The
shorter the memory buffer, the smaller the payload and hence
more trips required to transfer your content from one point to
another.
Dynamic content providers, then, face a challenge: how
to achieve the kind of performance gains that static object
caching can yield, given the limitations of dynamic content?
Overcoming the Dynamic Challenge
While most CDNs are capable of delivering dynamic content,
few are capable of accelerating that delivery. Specialized
CDNs can help you overcome the dynamic challenge with
82
specific optimizations across the middle milein essence,
opening up a bottleneck-free world where data can travel
freely between origin and end user.
These specialized CDNs accelerate delivery without affecting
or compromising the availability of your content for true
performance improvements. This is achieved in two ways: route
optimization and TCP acceleration.
Route optimization means selecting a delivery path that
produces the best possible performance. This can involve
optimizing the path your content takes across public networks,
or bypassing those networks altogether on a private network
(see Chapter 5, Bypassing the Congestion). In the same way
that POPs can connect to one another via either publicly or
privately operated networks, origin servers can transfer content
to end users and back using either approachdepending
on the network architecture at work. CDNs that rely on public
networks constantly monitor all connections and control the
flow of your data according to the path of least resistance. In
addition to controlling the flow of your data, privately operated
CDNs control everyone elses traffic on their network as well.
Transmission control protocol (TCP) acceleration is really a
combination of techniques to improve the performance of
your dynamic content as it travels across the middle mile. Since
83
TCP sets limitations on how your content can move across the
Internet, specialized techniques are required to either respond
to or overcome those limitations. The following are the key TCP
acceleration techniques applied by CDNs.
Persistent connections: Every request for content introduces
more latency. Persistent connections mean that once a
connection is opened, it is kept alive for an extended
period of time. Data moves repeatedly across that same
connection, reducing the total number of connections (and
thus congestion) across the network. A specialized CDN
should be able to automate the establishment of persistent
connections based on a number of changing factors
including your end users device and browser type.
Congestion window scaling: TCP window size is determined
based on the amount of data that can be buffered during
a connection. Rather than coding TCP window sizes into
your content, a CDN offers congestion window scaling to
maximize throughput on the fly, during the connection, to
adapt to changing conditions.
TCP buffer management: If a data packet is dropped
because of buffering, the receiving side cannot accept any
data and a new round trip must be initiated to re-request
the packet, introducing additional latency and wasting
valuable resources. Buffer management means applying
84
algorithms to select which packet is discarded in the event
of buffering, based on the potential performance impact.
Rather than hard code those decisions into your content, a
CDN can make them on a case by case basis to optimize
your performance.
Retransmission timeouts: Retransmissions occur when a
receiver does not acknowledge data in the time frame
established by the predetermined retransmission timer.
However, if too many retransmissions occur, it results in a
retransmission timeout; the sender must wait for the timeout
period to complete before sending any further data, and the
retransmission time for the next TCP segment may be reduced.
On a congested link, retransmission timeouts can occur by
the million. To remedy this issue, your CDN should be able to
retransmit data before the timeout even occurs, and set the
retransmission time for the next TCP segment accordingly.
Between route optimization and TCP acceleration, dynamic
content acceleration opens a bottleneck free tunnel between
an edge server and the origin, accelerating data transfers and
improving availability.
85
Front End Acceleration
While dynamic content acceleration optimizes the manner in
which content travels to end users, front end acceleration (FEA)
improves performance by transforming the content itself. You
know that performance is about more than speed; You now
have a full list of KPIs (discussed in Chapter 3). In the case of FEA,
performance is about lowering perceived wait times for your
end user in order to speed time to interaction, or the point
that the user can start interacting with your content.
In many websites and web applications, a user is unable to
click, browse, search, or transact until all of the elements and
components of that site or app have loaded. On its own, your
site or app might not be able to determine which portion of
your content is visible without scrolling; for example, a browser
does not know to load the buy now button before all scripts
have run. Tasks are executed in the order they are coded, not
necessarily in the order that the end user cares about them.
And even if your development team is already optimizing
code to load content based on user preferences for better
performance, the number and evolution of browsers on the
market makes that a self defeating exercise.
FEA analyzes and actually alters your code to load content
86
more intelligently, based on user expectations. This is done
with a variety of techniques that can be applied to your
content as well as any third party content on your site (such
as advertisements). These techniques fall into two categories:
browser optimizations, and script optimizations.
By placing the responsibility of staying ahead of the most
recent trends and changes in the browser market on your
CDN, you free your development team to focus on business-
building tasks like developing new features and functionalities.
A mobile banking app developer, for instance, should be
able to improve product usability without worrying whether
downloading more client-side scripts will reduce application
performance or introduce more latency.
Understanding Browser Performance
Browsers can both add to and detract from the end user
experience. The good news: they are constantly evolving, and
improving workarounds to bottlenecks. The bad news: the
improvement can introduce even more, new bottlenecks. The
rapid proliferation of browsers and non standardization leaves
350
100
100
MS MS
MS
MS
250
87
web development teams scrambling to keep up with every
advance in every browser from every vendor in an effort to
ensure the best website performance.
As stated previously in this chapter, self performed optimizations
are commonbut can actually work against you. Shaving
milliseconds off load times for the latest version of a browser
may add milliseconds on the next release. For instance,
efforts to boost browser parallelism now enable six or more
connections. But unconditionally implementing this parallelism
can run into client CPU and home router limitations. (In most
cases, two connections still yield a benefit but four connections
push the point of diminishing returns.) Adding more parallel
connections to the browser that open to the origin does not
necessarily guarantee a parallel download of content. And
many origin servers are misconfigured to prevent persistent
connections, thus making it incredibly difficult to download
content that is dynamic.
Mobile browsers have even more latency problems, and higher
network and hardware dependency. Caching content closer
to end users can reduce round trip time from 100 milliseconds
around the country to two or four milliseconds within the state.
But that solves only a part of the problem; the segmentation
of web content and complex nature of todays websites and
applications include hundreds of individual file and page
88
elements that get downloaded separately. When scaled up
for these hundreds of objects, a few milliseconds of latency can
lead to major delays.
CDNs can improve browser performance by optimizing the
number of user browser connections to download additional
resources during page loading for faster page rendering.
Furthermore, your CDN should be capable of compressing
content to free up bandwidth and storage; compression
generally reduces the file size by about 70%.
1
Anything text
based can be compressed including XML and JSON; most
websites zip their HTML documents as well. Compression reduces
response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response. It is
also worthwhile to compress scripts and stylesheets, but many
content providers miss this opportunity.
Currently, the Gzip approach is the most popular and
effective compression method. Approximately 90% of
todays Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to
support the Gzip approach.
2
The Gzip approach should
not be applied to image and PDF files because they are
already compressed. Trying to apply it in these cases not only
wastes CPU, but can also potentially increase file sizes. Still,
compressing as many file types as possible is a simple way
1
Steve Souders, Rule 4: Gzip components, in High Performance Web Sites:
Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (OReilly Media, Inc., 2007), 31.
2
Souders, Rule 4: Gzip components, 34.
89
to reduce page weight and accelerate the user experience.
3
Though they cannot be compressed, images can be combined
into larger payloads (such as single compressed packages)
that can be delivered that much more efficiently to your
end user.
Script Optimizations
The way web pages are loaded greatly affects the users
perception of page performance. Ideally, the most important
content appears first, or to borrow a term from the newspaper
publishing industry, above the fold (in the top half of the display,
before the user navigates downward). Code, however, is
sometimes written to load scripts first, even though many of those
scripts will not be needed right away. Specifically with respect to
the JavaScript programming language, your page may behave
differently when some script loading is deferred.
4
For example, if
the script is written to expect certain user actions, such as onclick
or onkeypress, these actions will not be triggered until the page
is rendered completely.
Deferring scripts and giving prioritized loading to other
content elements can dramatically improve the end users
3
Yahoo! Inc., Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site, http://developer.yahoo.com/
performance/rules.html. Accessed December 2013.
4
Google Inc. Google Developers, Defer JavaScript, last modified May 23, 2013,
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service/DeferJavaScript. Accessed
December 2013.
90
perception of your sites rendering speed (more critical than the
rendering speed itself; recall your KPIs). Critical elements can
be programmed to appear above the fold first and fast while
compensating for any actions that have been delayed. It can
also spare valuable memory and processing on the back end.
It makes sense for your developers to work with CDN
engineers to plan a transparent integration of CDN services in
advance. If executed correctly, intelligent scripting techniques
allow should pages and apps to retain their original look
and feel. The goal is to create an experience so seamless
that the entire delivery path is invisible to the end user, who
experiences near instantaneous response to each request.
91
A WORD ON MOBILE
Given the projected penetration of mobile browsing on the
Internet, mobile access networks are poised to dominate the last
mile of the delivery path. Mobile should be a consideration in any
effort to optimize online performance.
For now, redirects to mobile websites are the only way to keep
response time under 100 milliseconds, the point at which users
perceive delay. Yet on many sites, the mobile device has to follow
multiple redirects just to load the desired page. Keeping web
server configuration files as short as possible through redirects
may have some merit, but in the case of mobile, it may not be
worth the price users have to pay on every visit.
Device detection in general is easily accomplished by setting
proper headers. Once detected, the system loads content
optimized for that particular device down to the make, model,
and release version. For example, an iPhone
device receives
a smaller version of the content compared to Microsoft

Internet Explorer
11, which requires the full resolution version

of a piece of content. Device detection is an area where a
CDN can be particularly helpful. While most organizations
optimize their websites for a browser, a good CDN will
optimize for almost every browser, desktop and mobile device.
92
Traditional CDN services (static object caching) are not
enough to improve performance in todays digital landscape.
Increasingly dynamic content requires a new approach, one
that involves improving performance across the middle mile
of the delivery path. Whats more, a quickly evolving browser
market requires optimizations on the front end to stay on top
of the latest standards.
How do you know if these optimizations are working to
support your KPIs? After all, the network where they are
executed is invisible to you. Your CDN should provide
detailed analytics about how your content performs, from
the end user perspectivecommonly in the form of real user
monitoring (RUM). Based on these analytics, you can ensure
that optimizations are performed at the right intervals and with
minimal overhead. Or, set new policies and adjust optimizations
to improve performance even further.
Combined with static object caching, dynamic content
acceleration and front end acceleration are critical parts of
any technology ecosystem designed to optimize content
delivery. So now what do you do? That is what we will take up
in Chapter 7.
93
CHAPTER 7
Making the
Case: Your
Optimization
Checklist
94
CHAPTER 7: MAKI NG THE CASE: YOUR OPTI MI ZATI ON CHECKLI ST
By now you know what it
takes to successfully deliver
your websites and web
applications.
With full insight into the networks and technologies that impact
your online performance, you are prepared to play the role of
performance champion in your organization.
There is just one more critical aspect to the successful execution
of your digital experience optimization strategy: support from
executive leadership. In this chapter you will learn how to
create a compelling case for performance in business terms.
Summary
Lets review what you have learned in this book so far.
Performance matters. The business cost of poor
performance is proven and measurable; 1% of lost sales
for every second of delay by one measure,
1
and 20%
decrease in traffic and revenues for every half-second
1
Amazon.com, Inc., Make Data Useful, (presentation, 2009), https://sites.google.com/site/
glinden/Home/StanfordDataMining.2006-11-28.ppt?attredirects=0. Accessed December 2013.
95
delay by another.
2
At the same time, user expectations are
high; after 100 milliseconds, you lose their attention.
3

Your organizations digital presence is the key to its
competitive edge. Achieving high performance (i.e. making
your content available when a user requests it) is a complex
challenge. In-house optimizations are a valuable start, but
a comprehensive strategy can improve performance to a
greater extent than many organizations realize is possible.
To better deliver your digital content, it is important to
understand the network where it resides. The first, middle,
and last miles of the content delivery path (all of the points
between you and your end users) are each impacted by
different bottlenecks. Your access to that content delivery
path is limited, and you have limited control over the
bottlenecks that occur there.
When it comes to improving performance, consider elements
in addition to just raw network speed. As you establish a
performance baseline to improve against, factor in KPIs in the
areas of speed, availability, scalability, multi device support,
and end user experience. Real user monitoring (RUM) will give
you the most accurate sense of how well you are performing
in the real world, and how you can improve.
2
Greg Linden, Marissa Mayer at Web 2.0, November 9, 2006, http://glinden.blogspot.
com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html. Accessed December 2013
3
Ilya Grigorik, Building Faster Mobile Websites, (presentation, San Francisco HTML5
Meetup, March 21, 2013), https://plus.google.com/u/0/+IlyaGrigorik/posts/WZeETYCcm1X.
Accessed December 2013.
96
Improving performance requires a partner ecosystem.
Building that ecosystem begins with a content audit to
identify the characteristics most important to performance.
Internal stakeholders, especially marketing, can then
productively discuss optimization requirements. Together
you can impact some aspects of performance; others
require a CDN partner to deliver your content for the best
possible performance.
In terms of performance, a content delivery network (CDN)
is the cornerstone of your partner ecosystem. By caching
your static content near end users, a CDN can optimize
performance across the entire delivery path on your behalf,
providing access and control otherwise unavailable to you.
Depending on the architecture of your CDN, you may be
able to bypass the congested public Internet altogether
on a private network.
Traditional CDN services alone will not adequately
address todays performance issues. The explosion of
dynamic content (which cannot be cached like static
content) and changing browser requirements (which
require ongoing specialized knowledge to optimize
for) mean that you cannot just cache static content and
walk away. Route optimization and TCP acceleration
across the middle mile, as well as front end acceleration
97
in the browser, complete the picture when it comes to
the technology required to improve performance
for todays web.
The time has come for every organization to put performance
front and center. Here are the steps that will assist you in
developing a performance proposal that can garner broad
support with stakeholders.
Step 1: Benchmark Yourself
Chapter 3 of this book provides you with a list of potential KPIs
you will use to establish a performance baseline. These KPIs
will be directly related to the kind of content you are delivering
(we explained how to perform a content audit in Chapter 4).
It is important to review the results of both your KPI benchmark
exercise and content audit with all performance stakeholders
in your organization to confirm that they are aligned with the
goals of your business.
Knowing how you perform against your competitors is
also important in making the case for performance to your
executive leadership. The tools provided in Chapter 3 (How
Effective is Your Visitor Experience?) provide information to help
you analyze the effectiveness of the digital experiences you
create. Many of them can do the same for your competition.
98
Whenever possible, the tests you run on your own web content
should be run on your competitors as well.
In fact, some tools exist to help you benchmark your performance
against the standards of your industry as a whole. Compuware
APMs
benchmark tool
4
and Alexa Internet, Inc.s Top Sites list
5

are both valuable resources.
Step 2: Quantify Value
Executive management may not be interested in knowing that
you shaved milliseconds off load times or deferred script loads.
You must build the case for performance in terms that are
important to them, and that is not likely to be technical speeds
and feeds.
The key to securing managements investment in performance
is to quantify its financial value. It may be a lower total cost
of ownership (TCO) or higher return on investment (ROI). It
may be increased revenues or decreased capital expenses.
Whatever the metric, there is a financial impact attached to
your performance. And above all, management will want to
know what that financial impact is.
The statistics presented in this book regarding the general
4
Compuware APM, Compuware APM Benchmarks, http://www.compuware.com/en_us/
application-performance-management/Benchmarks/view-benchmarks.html. Accessed
December 2013.
5
Alexa Internet, Inc., Top Site, http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category. Accessed
December 2013.
99
importance and value of performance are a good way to
begin the conversation, but to truly win support from executive
management you must contextualize the value of performance
for your business specifically. You will also want to present that
value in the context of senior managements own KPIs and the
overall strategic goals of your organization.
Step 3: Build Your Partner
Ecosystem
Once you have established a baseline and agreed on
performance goals with key stakeholders, you will need an
ecosystem built to optimize content delivery. This should be
done seamlessly, automating workflows at every opportunity
for higher return on investment. A CDN is a critical element of
this partner ecosystem and is required to significantly improve
web performance. Pay attention to these qualities as you
consider potential partners:
Integration
Manageability
High performance
Resiliency
Elasticity
Future proofing
100
Step 4: Schedule System Checks
Youve heard it before: improving performance is not a
one-time engagement. Though aspects of performance
optimization can be automated, the improvements yielded by
those optimizations need to be continually assessed and re-
evaluated. (For example, content will change and the size of
your content library may fluctuate.)
Day to day, you will rely on RUM to measure users experience
in the real world, while live reporting and analytics should be
made available to you by your CDN on a geographical basis
in real time or near real time. It is also best practice to conduct
a high-level performance review against your KPIs and re-audit
your content on a monthly basis, to monitor changes or trends
worthy of your attention.
But the performance stakeholders in your organization will
want to know how you are progressing against the objectives
laid out in your initial proposal. You will want to show results
that speak to revenue, savings, business value, customer
satisfaction, and other matters uniquely important to each
stakeholder, particularly executive management. In addition to
tracking the KPIs, remember to track your progress against the
initial goals.
101
Youve Got This!
Your organization has invested a tremendous amount of work
in developing a strong digital presence. But unless it is delivered
successfullyunless content performs in a way that allows end
users to locate and interact with it in the way they want
all is lost.
As the person responsible for optimizing the delivery of your
online content, you face significant challenges across the entire
path that connects you to your end users. First, middle, and last
mile bottlenecks are not only numerous, but often out of your
reach and direct control.
Fortunately, there is a wealth of tools at your disposal to overcome
these challenges. An architected and managed approach to
performance optimization yields significant performance gains
along the entire delivery path. It maximizes internal resources.
It future proofs your business. And most importantly, it creates a
superior digital experience for your end users. They wont have
to wait for your valuable content!
When it comes to performance, every millisecond matters.
Make them count. Start now.
102
About Limelight Networks
Limelight Networks, a global leader in digital content delivery,
empowers customers to better engage digital audiences by
enabling them to manage and deliver digital content on any
device, anywhere in the world. The companys award winning
Limelight Orchestrate platform includes an integrated
suite of content delivery technology and services that helps
organizations deliver exceptional multi-screen experiences,
improve brand awareness, drive revenue, and enhance
customer relationships all while reducing costs. For more
information, please visit www.limelight.com and follow us on
Twitter at @LLNW.
ABOUT L I MEL I GHT NET WORKS

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