dsSearchAgent IDX: Now Available At The Speed of Ridiculous

Two days ago, we deployed a very significant change to the way our dsSearchAgent IDX product is served to our clients and our clients’ clients. Did you notice? No, there weren’t any new features this time around. This time, we focused our efforts on load time and performance.

Overall, we were able to make a number of changes that decreased the initial size of our IDX by nearly 30%!! We made all of our images much, much leaner, we further combined our JavaScript and CSS into fewer files, and we removed some preloading where it just didn’t make sense anymore.

Additionally, we moved nearly all of our JavaScript, CSS, and images / icons to the same global network infrastructure that twitter, SmugMug, WordPress.com, Amazon, and other multi-million/billion dollar companies are using! The advantages we gained by making that move is that the majority of our IDX is now served from 14 locations around the world depending on the visitor’s location instead of just a single location. In other words, a dsSearchAgent visitor located in Boston will no longer have to wait for a myriad of image, JavaScript, and CSS requests to be served up from a data center 2,600 miles away in Los Angeles; instead, that visitor will pull all of that data from a dedicated cache location in Newark, NJ.

Speed matters. Google found that their traffic to Google maps increased by 25% after they shaved 20-30% off the initial size of the Google maps home page.  Amazon found (PowerPoint presentation) that for every 100 millisecond delay that they introduced in testing scenarios, they experienced a 1% drop in revenue. That’s huge!! Now that we’re leaner and closer to our visitors, we’re really excited to see what this does for our own traffic.

Anyway, give it a whirl. Drop us a comment and let us know what you think!