The growth of Web browsing from smart phones and tablets is skyrocketing, putting pressure on site owners to improve the user experience on these devices. One of the top issues for mobile users is performance. With slower CPUs and slower connections, browsing speed can be painful. Creating a faster site on a growing variety of mobile devices is a major challenge for site owners. To address this need, Blaze is introducing a mobile optimization service that will automatically transform sites to make them load faster on smart phones and tablets.
The Web front end is the single largest performance bottleneck for most sites. Blaze is a Web Performance Optimization service that automatically optimizes frontend page elements to accelerate load times. A typical site will experience a doubling of performance after apply the Blaze optimizations.
Accelerating Mobile Business
Anyone who has browsed the Web on a Mobile device can attest to the frustration from slow sites. There is a growing body of research linking revenue, conversions and page views to performance. By doubling page performance, Blaze can reduce abandonment and increase site revenue. Secondly, since Blaze optimization make pages smaller in size, the service will save bandwidth costs for both the site owner and the device owner.
How it Works
Blaze is a cloud-based service. No software, hardware or code changes are required. Customers can be deployed in less than one hour. Blaze sits between the site and the user, optimizing requests to pages in real time. Depending on what device (phone, tablet or desktop browser) that requested the page, Blaze will apply the appropriate set of optimizations that will increase speed while not altering the original page format.
New Functionality
Blaze’s mobile service is a combination of existing optimizations that have been tuned for mobile devices coupled with new optimizations that will have a major impact on mobile performance. Some of our new feature additions include:
- Adaptive image sizing. Most images are formatted for desktop browsers on larger screens. Images are unnecessarily large for mobile devices. Blaze’s adaptive imaging sizing technology automatically delivers an optimally sized image for the phone, tablet or desktop browser that requested it resulting in a much faster page load.
- Just in time (JIT) image loading. When viewing large sized pages on a small screen, the browser will load all the images on the page regardless of which ones are in view. Blaze’s JIT optimization will cause a page to only load the images that are visible within the current screen view. As the user scrolls down, new images are loaded on demand. JIT helps improve page loading speed and also reduces bandwidth for cases where a user doesn’t actually scroll down a page.
- Intelligent image quality. Many images contain excess meta data that has no functional value to the browser. Secondly some images are saved at a higher pixel density than is perceivable on mobile display. Blaze applies lossless compression to strip out unnecessary metadata. Blaze lossy compression optimizes the pixel density to reduce size without a perceptible impact on quality.
- HTML5 Local storage. Caching previously downloaded page elements on users’ browsers is one of the best ways to improve performance of repeat views. However, since the cache size on mobile browsers is very small, few files last in the cache until the user returns to the site. Blaze cache optimization leverage a new capability in HTML5 to bypass the shared browser cache and create a dedicated cache for each site.
- Tablet support in Mobitest. In addition to our optimization service, Blaze also provides a free mobile performance measurement service called Mobitest. Adding to the current iPhone and Android phones, Mobitest now supports testing on iPad 1, iPad 2 and Motorola XOOM Android tablets.
Pricing and Availability
Blaze Mobile Optimization Service is bundled with the core desktop optimization service. Customers subscribing to Blaze get a combined optimization service that handles all devices requesting pages from desktop browsers to tablets and smart phones. Blaze is available now and starts at $399 per month. A 14-day free trial is available at: http://www.guypo.com/trial/