Everybody knows that having a fast Website is important, especially now that Google officially factors a site’s load time into its search ranking score.
It’s simple enough to run a site speed test with Yahoo’s YSlow plugin or Google’s Web Accelerator, but how actionable the resulting reports are depends on how your Website was built and more importantly, what kind of development resources you have at your disposal.
Sponsor
Torbit is a brand new startup that aims to make site speed optimization easier by taking it off the plate of site owners. They claim their service can as much as double a site’s loading speed.
When it comes to sluggish Websites, the standard culprits typically include improperly compressed images, an unnecessarily high number of HTTP resource requests and front-end code (especially CSS and JavaScript) that contains extraneous white space or is not consolidated into as few files as possible. The order of scripts on a page and lack of a content delivery network (CDN) can also play a role.
Torbit takes care of optimizing code and content, requiring site owners to simply make some changes to their DNS records so that Torbit can do its thing.
As they explain on their Website:
You add an A record for direct.yourdomain.com that points to your server. Once that’s in place you move your primary DNS to point to Torbit. Torbit then proxies requests for your site via direct.yourdomain.com (passing along the headers, cookies, etc). Torbit then optimizes each page on the fly by switching out resources for their optimized versions and repositioning and modifying code for optimal loading.
Torbit is built on Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure, but is looking to add other providers in the future.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.