Everyone has their favourite statistic about how long users are happy to wait for web pages to load before they begin to get frustrated; however, the bottom line is that faster sites make for happier users, more productive businesses and greater revenue.

The problem is that the desire for a snappy end user experience conflicts with the pressure to provide ever more compelling and rich content. The capabilities of current IT infrastructure, combined with the laws of physics, means that end users end up having to settle for either a more basic application than is really required, or they have to accept that their impressive new application simply runs slow.

So are we stuck ‘between a rock and a hard place’? ... or is there a way to deliver world class applications that have performance as well as great capabilities? Yes we can.

Over the past couple of years we’ve been tracking the development of what has become known simply as WAX or Web Accelerator and which creates dramatic improvements for both SharePoint and web delivery. It has been created by the dedicated team at Aptimize in Wellington, New Zealand. When you talk to their CEO, Ed Robinson, you soon realize that, although living ‘just North of the South Pole’ has many benefits, being such a long way from the US and Europe means that when using websites, particularly those with complex and rich content, performance soon becomes a big problem.

You simply can’t get away from the fact that when loading an average web page containing 80 different elements; a user has to wait whilst each element is individually retrieved from half way round the world, assembled on the user’s PC and then finally displayed. When you are close to the data centre and have a super fast connection you simply don’t get this problem, as you don’t notice all the ‘back and forth’. But when you are any distance from your servers or have a network that is ‘performance challenged in any way’ you are bound to suffer.

So how has Aptimize set about solving this challenge?

In short the Aptimize Website Accelerator product has been created to dramatically reduce the number of times a web browser needs to connect to the web server before it can draw the page on your screen.

Reducing these round trips, as well as applying many other patent pending compression and minification means that out of the box web applications can be accelerated by 40-50%. More impressive still is that fact that the product can be installed on your web front-end servers in less than an hour delivering immediate performance increases!

There is no need to worry about complex software installations or the need to negotiate to install additional hardware in your data centre, you just benefit from reduced page load times sooner than you thought would be possible.

If you fancy taking a look at Aptimize, you will be in good company as RM Education and PZ Cussons in the UK and Ingram Micro, and even Microsoft in the US, already use this innovative solution to accelerate their SharePoint extranets and websites.

Next steps ...

• Watch this video to see what causes slow sites and how Aptimize can help >>
• Test any website’s speed using the speed test report >>
• Get in touch with us and we can help you speed up - contact>>