Why ValidFIX likes Google (a tale of a pleasant, unexpected discovery.)

There was an interesting post on the official google web master blog in april: Using site speed in web search ranking

In short: speed matters, faster websites get a better ranking in google.

I read the post with interest and then moved on.

***

In developing our site we did not spend much effort in SEO – we just followed google standard rules – but we did obsess with performance.

People who work with FIX Messages deserve better tools to analyze their FIX messages and since we were going to deliver them through the web we did not want to sacrifice any aspect related to their usability.

To an extent, our obsession dictated our minimal GUI interface and made us work hard to follow strictly yahoo performance rules.

And then the pleasant discovery.

A week or two after google’s post we started seeing our ranking moving up. If a person was googling for ‘fix analyzer ‘ or ‘fix log analyzer’ we were coming as first or second result.

Beating onixs and firstfuturessoftware.

This was great news for us as more people were (and are) likely to find us but it made me wonder what was happening since I could not see new links from reputable websites (such as quickfixengine) linking to us.

Was the google engine just taking its time to update the ranking ?

Maybe, but I believe it’s more likely that we have been rewarded for designing and delivering a fast website.

Thanks for reading this.

Comparing a few browsers

Building a high performance Rich Internet Application, such as FIX Log Analyzer, requires a constant attention to every detail of your design.
We have been following the list of the best practices for speeding up your website published by yahoo.

We have made sure that our apps run on every a-graded browsers and now we wonder: how do our apps perform on different browsers ?

We ran a simple test with 3000 execution reports (FIX Messages), copied and pasted from 1,084KB file, on a Windows XP 32 bit machine with 1 GB Ram on different browsers.

Below are the results:

• 4 mins 20 secs I.E.8
• 0 mins 40 secs. Chrome 4.1.249
• 0 mins 48 secs. FireFox 3.5.9
• 0 mins 56 secs. Opera 10.50

It looks like we should recommend any browser but IE for any serious user of our FIX Log Analyzer.

Thanks for reading this.
Marcello