In the last two weeks, we significantly improved our feedback widget’s performance. Our widget now downloads faster and has better client-side caching.
(Our feedback widget is what puts the feedback button on your website.)
A trial customer helped us find these opportunities for improvement. He happens to be an expert in making websites faster. Unprompted, he used his expertise to analyse the performance of our widget.
The results of his analysis showed there was a lot of room for improvement. So, with the customer’s help, we made the improvements that we could.
What’s improved
The result for you is this:
- the download size of our widget is now much smaller.
- we now aggressively cache the parts of our widget that never change, such as images and stylesheets. This means when your customers revisit your website, these components don’t need to be re-downloaded.
- we’ve switched to HTTP/2, instead of HTTP/1.1. This allows our widget to download multiple resources at once, rather than downloading each resource separately.
The net benefit of these improvements is that your feedback button appears on your website faster than before, and faster still for repeat visitors.
How to benefit from these improvements
What do you need to do to get the benefit of these performance improvements? Nothing. They’re already done and delivered to all our customers.
There are more improvements coming!
We’re not finished with improving the performance of our widget. We’re working on a newer version that offers even more performance improvements. We will be delivering this new version in the coming months.
We’re already testing the new version in-house, to flush out problems and find more opportunities for improvement. There’s nothing like using your own product to find the rough edges.
When we’re confident it is bullet-proof, no matter what device, operating system, and browser your users are using, we’ll make our new widget available to all our customers.