Site speed matters. Web Performance is the differentiator for online businesses. In the last few days, two new web performance projects announced by Google caught many people’s eyes.

In the world of web performance, it has been a busy and exciting week! The growing amount of attention to web performance from companies like Google as well as the community at large speak to the growing importance of web performance. Further, they are signals for an emerging market opportunity that quite a few startups, including Yottaa, are pursuing.

First, the famous Steve Souders gave us a pleasant surprise by announcing his new project, www.httparchive.org: “In addition to the content of web pages, it?s important to record how this digitized content is constructed and served. The HTTP Archive provides this record. It is a permanent repository of web performance information such as size of pages, failed requests, and technologies utilized. This performance information allows us to see trends in how the Web is built and provides a common data set from which to conduct web performance research”.

Part of the feature in our Yottaa Insight offering is very similar to HTTPArchive.org – we monitor and achive web performance data for over 35,000 sites right now from multiple geographic locations around the globe and making the data openly available. Anyone can go and check out the historical performance of any site from Yottaa. It would be very interesting if Yottaa and HTTPArchive.org do something together to provide an even bigger and better open web performance archive.

Then there is PageSpeed Online, an online service to analyze the content of a web page and get recommendations to make that page faster. PageSpeed Online provides an easier way to use PageSpeed, which requires a download and install. At Yottaa, we integrated with YSlow in our free
web performance assessment and monitoring service last year, but haven’t got a chance to integrate PageSpeed yet. PageSpeed Online may make it easier to integrate now. I am very impressed by the progress made by Google PageSpeed team over the last 12 months.

An interesting tweet from @ jonpierce this morning: “Battle of the Web Performance Analysis Tools: PageSpeed in Yottaa: https://t.co/wRaxrB2 Yottaa in PageSpeed: https://t.co/lwkN5E6“.

Great to see the amount of attention web performance tools are getting. It speaks to the fact that more people are becoming aware of the importance of web performance. BTW, PageSpeed and Yottaa Insight are very different web performance tools. Yottaa Insight is a web performance monitoring and assessment tool that uses real browsers around the world to assess and monitor the performance of a web site. In our tool, we actually integrate the results from a wide range of open source solutions like FireBug, YSlow and hopefully PageSpeed as well. The great work done by Google PageSpeed team will  help make it better for our users.

Web speed matters. Let’s all work together to make the web faster!