I’m excited to finally talk about my new project. Josh Fraser and I have founded a company called Torbit. Torbit is a service to make websites faster. On an average site 80% of the time a user spends waiting is actually on the frontend (downloading images, running js, etc), not the backend (page generation time). This means that the majority of the performance of your site is actually determined by the contents of the page rather than the servers generating it.
There are a lot of relatively simple things developers can do to improve their performance. Combining files to reduce the number of HTTP requests, minifying files to reduce the size of the download, etc, but many of these are still not done because they’re annoying and tedious to do and developers are often focused on other things. Many of these optimizations (along with many others) can be automated though, freeing developers from the hassle. We intend to make this process super simple and free developers from these headaches. We can also do a lot of optimizations that don’t make sense for the average site to do themselves. For example, browser specific and mobile optimizations. If you’re curious about the details you can check out our how it works section.
Josh and I met in TechStars in 2007 when he was working on Eventvue. We’ve both been itching to start something new and are passionate about the web performance space. I’m thrilled to be working with him.
40% of people will leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. We’re ready to make the web faster for everyone. You can sign up for our beta now, we’ll be opening this up wider soon.
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