2014 Year in Review: Catchpoint’s Top Ten Blog Posts

It was a big year for the Catchpoint blog. The 51 articles that we posted by over a dozen different authors throughout the year were both new highs for the company. Meanwhile, you the reader proved to be very eclectic, devouring content about a huge range of topics – everything from highly technical articles about SACK Transmissions and DNS infrastructure to benchmark studies about web design and eCommerce performance.

We’re not going to rest on our laurels for too long because we have big plans to exceed those levels in 2015. But while we continue planning our editorial calendar for the coming year, let’s take a last look back at the one that we’re wrapping up with Catchpoint’s ten most popular blog posts from 2014.

Adaptive vs. Responsive Web Design: Which Is Right for Your Site?
Adaptive vs. Responsive Web Design: Quanitfying the Difference on Mobile

One of big initiatives this past year was to look at the effect of page design on web performance, specifically the positives and negatives of both Adaptive and Responsive web design. Both strategies bring their own distinct benefits, and we will continue to educate our readers in order to help make this difficult decision a little easier.

DNS Lookup: How a Domain Name is Translated to an IP Address
In the World of DNS, Cache is King

The effect of your DNS infrastructure on your overall site performance cannot be denied, few people – even in the IT and DevOps worlds – have a complete understanding of how DNS really works. We attempted to rectify that this year, and will continue to do so in 2015.

How SACK Transmissions Improve Web Performance

In a further testament to just how much our readers love to devour highly technical information, our article on how web performance is aided by SACK Transmissions and their positive effect on RTT was the third-most popular post of the year.

Lessons Learned from Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2014
Monitoring India eCommerce During the Great Online Shopping Festival

The holiday shopping season is like the playoffs of the eCommerce DevOps world, where all the new optimization strategies that have been honed over the previous 11 months get put into action. And it’s not just US and Indian consumers that descend en masse upon their favorite eCommerce sites at a certain time, as China and the UK have their own huge online sales days as well (and similar web performance problems that ensue).

Navigation Timing Now Supported in Safari

This article celebrated one of our proudest moments of the year, as Catchpoint’s longstanding initiative to get Apple to include the Navigation Timing API on its Safari browsers was finally rewarded. Even though Apple has since disabled the new feature due to what they cite as “performance problems,” we’re hopeful that it will soon return a new version and give the DevOps community the win that we’ve long been looking for.

DoubleClick Outage Causes Serious Issues Across the Web

One of our biggest tenets of ensuring great web performance is to be extremely selective about the third party content that you host on your site. Nobody is perfect, and even a third party with a massive internet footprint can cause problems for others. Such was the case last month when DoubleClick, an adserving network run by Google (and the location of Catchpoint’s own humble beginnings) experience outages that sent ripple effects across the web, not unlike a fellow internet giant who caused similar problems earlier in the year.

Google PageSpeed Insights vs. Extensions: Making Sense of Conflicting Scores

The internet giant’s tool for measuring page speed is great at providing a brief glance at your site’s speed, but can cause plenty of confusion by reporting different scores across different browsers and extensions. Hopefully we were able to provide some clarity to the situation with our detailed look at what goes into compiling the various scores.

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