Don't Panic!

I wanted to take a quick moment to dispel any fears that may be brewing about the future of WebPagetest with my move to Google (and in case this is the first time you're hearing it, surprise! I'm at Google now working on making the web faster).

This is actually a HUGELY positive move for WebPagetest.  Google is putting some engineering resources behind the development of WebPagetest (in addition to letting me work on it full-time) so expect to see lots of great things coming.  Additionally, WebPagetest.org itself is still independent and not owned by either Google or AOL so there is no risk of your favorite web performance tool going away (particularly once I migrate off of Dreamhost and into the Meenan Data Center).

We'll be sharing the roadmap for what we're planning on working on in the coming weeks but with more developers working on it now (and not just in our spare time) if you have ever wanted to ask for something to be implemented but were afraid it was too big of an effort or wouldn't get done please feel free to post suggestions in the forums (the bigger and crazier the better - well, as long as it is reasonably related to web performance).

2010 State of Optimization - The Short Version

Stoyan's (always excellent) Performance Calendar went live today with an article I provided looking at the state of performance optimization in 2010 compared to 2008 (based on the tests run on WebPagetest).  I highly recommend reading the article when you get a chance - there's lots of data and graphs.  One thing that struck me was how poorly even the most basic optimizations were being followed.  I thought it would be interesting to summarize it all into a single easy-to-understand table. So, without further ado....

Percent of sites that got a passing grade for the basic optimization checks:

Optimization	Percent of pages with a passing grade (2010)
Keep-alive Enabled	85%
Compress Text	43%
Compress Images	39%
Cache Static Content	15%
Combine JS/CSS	47%
CDN Usage	12%

These aren't the advanced optimizations - they're the most basic. Only 15% of pages are effectively leveraging the browser cache! (and "passing" is pretty generous here - a score of 80 or better).