Small over the wire
The snippet is around 50 KB of source and arrives at the browser as roughly 15 KB with Brotli or gzip.
Performance
A 15 KB snippet,
served from your domain.
A small snippet from your own domain. Your page stays fast.
Delivery
How abdriven delivers
experiments fast.
Size, origin, cache, and the moment the variation takes effect.
Five minutes in the browser
Served with max-age=300 and stale-while-revalidate: later pages do not fetch it again, and a change still reaches everyone within minutes.
Blocked less often
Through a subdomain of your own domain the request looks like your own website to browsers and blockers, fewer gaps in measurement.
No flicker
The anti-flicker option pre-connects and hides the area for at most one second, after that the content is shown regardless.
CSS before the first frame
Variations that get by with CSS take effect before the first render. That is the safest route to an invisible test.
In single-page apps too
The SDK follows pushState and back/forward, undoes variations that no longer match, and waits for the element that signals the view is ready.
Anti-flicker
Hidden for one second
at most.
Hiding the page until the tool answers risks a white page. So abdriven hides it for one second at most.
- The area is hidden for at most one second, even if nothing else arrives.
- It becomes visible as soon as the variation is applied, nothing matches the page, or an error occurs.
- In previews the page always stays visible.
- Do not combine it with data-consent="required": abdriven may not start before consent, so the page would stay hidden until the timer runs out.
Honestly measured
Around 15 KB compressed,
50 KB of source.
Snippet sizes can be compared so that everybody wins. So here is the basis: what counts is what goes over the wire, not the uncompressed source.
- ≈ 50 KB of source, ≈ 15 KB compressed, that is the number in the network tab.
- Loaded with defer: the snippet does not block page rendering.
- An ETag means an unchanged version is answered with a 304 instead of being sent again.
- Redirect tests report the exposure before redirecting, and wait at most 400 ms to do so.
FAQ
Performance
Will abdriven hurt my Core Web Vitals?
No, the snippet does not block rendering. Just make sure a variation does not shift content at the top of the page.
Do I need a CDN?
Not necessarily. abdriven delivers compressed from your server. For worldwide delivery, put your CDN in front of it.
Can I load the snippet through a tag manager?
Technically yes. For speed, installing it directly in the head is better, because the tag manager has to load first, and that is exactly where flicker comes from.
Product