We have implemented a new set of compression technology to reduce the size of pages sent to the browser. This is especially important for mobile browsers since the connect speed is slow and anything we can do to reduce the size of downloaded pages is a win.
For example, some of the file size reductions have been:
- 35 KiloBytes (KB) to 7 KB
- 19 KB to 4.5 KB
- 88 KB to 16 KB
This improves the average response times for mobile users by about 10%.
For the very technical people in the audience, we are using gzip to compress static files like CSS and Javascript files. The cool trick we pulled off is that we had to do some work to get Amazon CloudFront to support this in a scalable manner. CloudFront is the content distribution network that we use and places files as close to the user as possible. With over 20 locations int he US, this also means fast response time.
We continue to work hard to make the user experience as fast and efficient as possible, and are proud to rank in the top 10% of all sites monitored by New Relic.
