During one of my recent Tridion consulting assignments the client asked me about the performance difference between a website using a dynamic publishing approach vs a static approach. For he had concerns about the performance of dynamic websites. In the graph below you can see the difference the Google crawler noticed after a website, which consists mainly of article type content, changed from a static to a dynamic publishing approach. The left side of the graph shows the average time it took the Google crawler to download a page from the website (created by a well known Tridion implementation partner – not Deloitte) based on the static publishing model. The right side shows the average time it took to download pages from the exact same front-end, but with the back-end rebuilt based on the dynamic publishing model.
As you can see the average download times went down significantly. We have regularly seen the cached (home)page load within 100ms and uncached pages in double that time. The peaks that show up from the middle of December marked the go live of an application which was not fed with Tridion data and showed some mediocre performance until the first week of January.
The project of replacing the Tridion back-end for this particular website felt like killing my white whale. The website performance increase was an added bonus on top of the other improvements we realized during this project.
Why page load times matter: