On the connection between website speed and motorcycle racing
Or how do you make your site grow wings?
At the launch event, where the support staff gathered in the meeting room and the company's engineers presented X-BOOST, the advanced website acceleration tool they developed (based on products from F5 and NGNIX PLUS), an international motorcycle racer happened to be sitting in the room – Yael Kadshai. Kadshai, a decorated rally racer and, among other things, the only Israeli to have competed in the prestigious Dakar Rally, is sponsored and supported by uPress and serves as the company's ambassador. That day she came to take part in a "company evening" at which she would share her fascinating personal story with the employees. Whether the topic interested her or she simply didn't feel comfortable getting up and leaving, she ended up sitting in the room during the launch.
The world of imagery of each and every one of us is based on the things closest to our heart, but still, after the launch, it was surprising to hear from Kadshai (who, in addition to being an athlete, is also quite a "technologist") that for much of the time it seemed to her that the presentation was actually about motorcycle racing. To be honest, it is true that the company's engineers, alongside the explanations and data presented (including LIVE illustrations and comparisons), used words such as "peak performance", "sharpness" and "overall vision", but none of those present, except Kadshai, noticed any particular similarity between the fields, beyond the self-evident fact that "speed" is a keyword in both cases.
"Site speed", leaving the racing world aside, is one of the topics that occupies those in the field the most. In a world where everything must be here, now and immediately, no one will take the risk that a visitor to the site will wait a moment longer than necessary for the page to load. Accordingly, the web is flooded with various supposedly "objective" tools for testing your site's speed (spoiler: the tools usually use fairly simple manipulations to arrive at the displayed results, but more on that another time).
When discussions are held about site performance, they focus mainly on the type of infrastructure and the specification offered to the site owner. But the truth is that the key to a fast-performing site is more complex. A strong, high-quality infrastructure is a basic building block, but it is not enough to "persuade" a site that is not maintained, or that was built unprofessionally and without adaptation, to "move" fast enough. Unnecessary, outdated or faulty plugins, outdated components, flaws in how the code is written and organized, and wasteful image files are only a few examples of the various "diseases" that can lead to a poor browsing experience, even if the site sits on a powerful server.
If we go back for a moment to the world of rally racing, this can be compared to a rider who gets a new, powerful and advanced motorcycle, but in the race itself blunders, takes wrong turns, enters mud for no reason, lengthens the route, and in short – rides in a very inefficient way.
This is not a negligible phenomenon: the relative ease with which a WordPress site can be built (with the enormous scope of ready-made plugins and solutions available for almost every issue) is a large part of the platform's great success, but also of the fact that many sites are built and maintained in a way that is far from optimal.
These phenomena are not new, and good solutions can be found on the market from companies such as Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai and others. However, to ensure effectiveness, they usually require implementation and tailored adjustments, and they are less "accessible" to bodies that are not "enterprise". uPress's engineers set out to tackle these challenges. The "objective function" was a solution that would be technically accessible to every customer, at the click of a button, without any real technological background, and no less important – at a cost of just a few dollars a month. X-BOOST, which is based on advanced caching technology (and combines capabilities of the giants F5 and NGINX PLUS), was tested for a period on a variety of sites, including heavy and cumbersome ones, and the results are impressive.
In summary: there is no real substitute for properly building and regularly maintaining your site, but if the need arises, it is worth getting to know the existing solutions and examining their use.
Good luck.
