{"id":554,"date":"2014-12-23T16:31:46","date_gmt":"2014-12-24T00:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mozfundraising.wpengine.com\/?p=554"},"modified":"2019-02-27T07:42:40","modified_gmt":"2019-02-27T15:42:40","slug":"trimming-load-times-worldwide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/fundraising\/trimming-load-times-worldwide\/","title":{"rendered":"Trimming load times worldwide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>The Call<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>On Sunday evening, I got the call from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pagerduty.com\/\">Pagerduty<\/a>: \u00a0The always-amazing <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/valiant\">Andrea Wood<\/a> had noticed a discrepancy in bounce rates and load times for our<a href=\"https:\/\/donate.mozilla.org\"> fundraising page<\/a> on Firefox browsers.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>The Investigation<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I immediately hopped onto some\u00a0of our metrics systems, and started piecing together what seemed to be a huge discrepancy in performance of <a title=\"Donate to Mozilla\" href=\"https:\/\/donate.mozilla.org\" target=\"_blank\">our donation form<\/a> for a specific browser.\u00a0Firefox\u00a0itself was not the culprit, but rather it turned out to be where our population using the browser lived. \u00a0Firefox, being so heavily dominant in non-North American cultures, appeared to be overall slower, but what it actually meant was that more overseas folks used Firefox! \u00a0Yay!<\/p>\n<p>To figure this out, I went through the following steps (tools used: \u00a0<a title=\"Google Analytics\" href=\"google.com\/analytics\" target=\"_blank\">Google Analytics<\/a> and <a title=\"Webpagetest\" href=\"www.webpagetest.org\" target=\"_blank\">Webpagetest.org<\/a>):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Verified that browser load times of our <a title=\"Donate to Mozilla\" href=\"https:\/\/donate.mozilla.org\" target=\"_blank\">fundraising page<\/a> on Firefox were in fact worse than other browsers.<\/li>\n<li>Verified that bounce rate was in fact much higher for Firefox than other browsers.<\/li>\n<li>I used <a title=\"Webpagetest.org\" href=\"www.webpagetest.org\" target=\"_blank\">webpagetest.org<\/a> to test a Firefox load of the page versus Chrome\/IE8 from the same location. \u00a0These results did show that Firefox was on par with the other browsers for load time from the same geographical location.<\/li>\n<li>I used <a title=\"Webpagetest.org\" href=\"http:\/\/www.webpagetest.org\" target=\"_blank\">webpagetest.org<\/a> to test a Firefox load of the page from London, which showed we had a 18s load time in the UK compared to a 4s load time in the US.<\/li>\n<li>Having now identified the true culprit (geography), we assessed what our page was putting on browsers to load&#8230;. \u00a0 That turned out to be 49% images.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div id=\"attachment_558\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/mozfundraising.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/ffconversion.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-558\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-558 size-large\" src=\"http:\/\/mozfundraising.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/ffconversion-600x238.jpg\" alt=\"conversion-by-browser\" width=\"600\" height=\"238\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-558\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">If load times and bounce rates are so bad, I&#8217;d expect to see that reflected in conversion rates&#8230;but I don&#8217;t.<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"attachment_559\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/mozfundraising.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Screen-Shot-2014-12-21-at-4.25.42-PM.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-559\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-559 size-large\" src=\"http:\/\/mozfundraising.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Screen-Shot-2014-12-21-at-4.25.42-PM-600x245.jpg\" alt=\"Google Analytics does show that Firefox is much slower though!  \" width=\"600\" height=\"245\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-559\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Google Analytics does show that Firefox is much slower though!<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"attachment_562\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/mozfundraising.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Screen-Shot-2014-12-23-at-11.06.21-AM.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-562\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-large wp-image-562\" src=\"http:\/\/mozfundraising.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Screen-Shot-2014-12-23-at-11.06.21-AM-600x393.jpg\" alt=\"OK then, I see that performance for Firefox from the US is not bad at all!\" width=\"600\" height=\"393\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-562\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">OK then, I see that performance for Firefox from the US is not bad at all!<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_569\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/mozfundraising.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Screen-Shot-2014-12-23-at-12.40.02-PM.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-569\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-large wp-image-569\" src=\"http:\/\/mozfundraising.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Screen-Shot-2014-12-23-at-12.40.02-PM-600x417.jpg\" alt=\"But, I do see that overseas Firefox traffic is slow...thus it is not the browser impacting load time, but the geography of our users!\" width=\"600\" height=\"417\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-569\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">But, I do see that overseas Firefox traffic is slow&#8230;thus it is not the browser impacting load time, but the geography of our users!<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>The Improvements<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A CDN<a title=\"Content Delivery Network\" href=\"en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Content_delivery_network\" target=\"_blank\"> (Content Delivery Network) <\/a>is basically a collection of hundreds or thousands of\u00a0servers, dispersed all over the world. \u00a0You can host your static assets, such as .html files, .css files, images, and js files on these thousands of servers, and then when our friends overseas pull up the page, it pulls up those files from a geographically close CDN &#8220;edge server&#8221;. \u00a0Just like flying to a faraway land, the longer the trip, the longer the time spent\u00a0traveling! \u00a0If we use a CDN to make it so that trip is much shorter, the browser will spend less time &#8220;traveling&#8221; to the page.<\/p>\n<p>We decided to move just our images, 49% of our page load, onto\u00a0a CDN (Cloudfront, the AWS CDN). \u00a0We saw amazing results just from this small change.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>London: \u00a0<a title=\"Non-CDN London Timing\" href=\"http:\/\/www.webpagetest.org\/result\/141221_9H_RHG\/\" target=\"_blank\">Non-CDN load times of 19 seconds<\/a>, CDN load times of 12s. <em>(edit: correct 2s to 12s)<\/em><\/li>\n<li>South Korea: <a title=\"Webpagetest.org\" href=\"http:\/\/www.webpagetest.org\/result\/141222_Q7_XPD\/\" target=\"_blank\">Non-CDN load times of 25 seconds<\/a>, CDN load times of 6 seconds.<\/li>\n<li>Texas: Non-CDN load times of 2.9 seconds, CDN load times of 2.3 seconds.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong><em>Conclusion<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We know in this industry that one extra second of load time can bring conversion down 7%, so it is critical that our<a title=\"Donate to Mozilla\" href=\"https:\/\/donate.mozilla.org\" target=\"_blank\"> fundraising forms<\/a> load fast. \u00a0Since we are so global here at Mozilla, it is even more critical that we do not forget about non-North American audiences, and optimize our pages for them. \u00a0Shaving off 19 seconds for South Korea, 5-10\u00a0seconds for London, and even a half of a second here in the states should definitely help our already-amazing conversion rates!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mozfundraising.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/fortheuser.gif\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-575\" src=\"http:\/\/mozfundraising.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/fortheuser.gif\" alt=\"fortheuser\" width=\"350\" height=\"113\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Call On Sunday evening, I got the call from Pagerduty: \u00a0The always-amazing Andrea Wood had noticed a discrepancy in bounce rates and load times for our fundraising page on Firefox browsers. The Investigation I immediately hopped onto some\u00a0of our &hellip; <a class=\"go\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/fundraising\/trimming-load-times-worldwide\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[327515],"tags":[5],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}