Australian firm wins friends with the need for speed

Question: why should you care how fast your (or your customer’s) website loads?

Answer: because if it’s a bit faster, it may make you money.

As the former CIO of GraysOnline, Stewart McGrath knows this for a fact. The company behind this well-known auction site for commercial, industrial and consumer goods has been around for 100 years, employs 400 in Australia and New Zealand to run its warehouses and distribution centres, and moves more than 120,000 items a month. 

One of McGrath’s biggest challenges at GraysOnline was to engineer the site to withstand high-load periods when many customers would browse and buy. 

There was an enormous commercial incentive to maintain a fast-loading site. “Going from four seconds [of load time] to three seconds would mean a reduced bounce rate of about 10 percent,” McGrath says. “Just reducing the bounce rate alone for all those categories means people get to the cart and checkout pages more often and the conversion rate increases.”

But it was challenging to manage the increase in load times under all traffic conditions. Few developers had experience in managing performance under extreme loads.

And it wasn’t simple to find companies to do it for him. Suppliers were big content delivery networks (CDNs) that cut load speeds by caching web content near the user.

McGrath found them difficult to work with for two reasons. 

“For each off-the-shelf solution, we had to understand how each worked, and they all worked slightly differently. You need to understand the whole space,” McGrath says. And these big CDNs were commercially inflexible. They insisted on long-term contracts with no trial periods. Many used complicated pricing models that made it difficult to know how much a business would pay from month to month, McGrath says. 

Some CDNs charge by the number of requests or percentage of bandwidth throughput. A single web page might have 80-120 requests, multiplied by hundreds of thousands or millions of pages requested each month. A website owner struggles to know how much they will pay from month to month, McGrath says.

McGrath decided to solve the problem internally and worked out how to optimise GraysOnline’s code for viewers’ browsers. 

“Website performance is one of those things that as it slows down it becomes an insidious problem and you don’t feel it until your conversions start dropping off. Reducing time from four seconds to three seconds is hard to feel as a user but it makes a difference. We went through all those conversations at Grays,” McGrath says. He left GraysOnline with web development manager Daniel Bartholomew to build a website acceleration platform that could increase performance on the fly for other websites. 

Although e-commerce sites are a key market, the Squixa platform works with almost any site including publishers and brands. The fledgling company has already won marquee clients such as NRMA, NIB, Lorna Jane and Jigsaw.  

“We’ve had some very big websites moving from 0.5 percent to 1 percent, which is huge for those guys. Normally, a few percent would be a good result, especially when you think about how hard marketing managers fight for a conversion of 0.5 percent,” McGrath says.

Squixa has sizeable ambitions, given it is competing against global CDN players such as Akamai. But while a CDN can improve performance and offload content from originating servers, Squixa reviews the code in each page and optimises it before it reaches the viewer’s browser. It checks whether the headers have been set correctly, how the page will display in Chrome, Explorer or Firefox, or if they could be saved to a viewer’s browser. 

“If you look at what [Amazon Web Services] has done to the hosting market, it’s just blown it apart. The old school hosters are scrambling,” McGrath says. “There’s no reason why we can’t blow apart the web acceleration space.”