Website is not an island

Today I joined the Webinar from compuware talking about How to Mitigate the performance risk of 3rd party Web components. Apart from their impressive application delivery chain explanation of the necessity to test and monitor Web performance from end user perspective, "No website is an island" is also an interesting topic with regard to the importance of looking at third party web component performance.

There are quite a few talks about Ad and Google Analytics performance. Current Web sites are getting richer (average page size is keeping increasing). Most contents are not served from single host (domain), instead from different outside sources, like Advertisement, Analytics, NewsFeed, Blog, Social network, APIs, Video, Shopping cart, Search engine, Rating&Review and Cloud objects. The benefits of using 3rd party components outweigh the risks - it is not under your control.

The best way is to mitigate the risk using below guidelines:

• Choose 3rd party component with high SLA
• Decide on a mitigation strategy (fault-tolerance, fallback, design for failure, alternative)
• Test it under all conditions
• Figure out a way to monitor it

During the webinar, Compuware CTO also talked about 5 best practices, and I totally agree the tips for Mobile Web site because it covers 3 major factors (# of requests, download size and network latency) regarding mobile Web performance.

• Minimize third-party content
• Limit # of hosts, connections and requests
• Keep size small and use CDN