Microsoft is running a challenge for developers where you can win pizza if you can improve the page load performance of your website.

The challenge was made on the Exploring IE blog where Justin Garrett of the IE team pointed out that while IE11 for Windows is:

“our fastest browser yet – 9% faster than IE10 and nearly 30% faster than the nearest competitive browser”

He goes on to say that the browser is only part of the story.

“The code that developers write – and its real-site performance – matters more than browser performance. Even one second correlates to what users do: whether they leave or stay, how long they browse, how many pages they view, and what they purchase. Best of all, most performance improvements don’t just help the users that visit in one browser – with HTML5 web standards, it can lead to a faster experience across many modern browsers.”

In view of this, the IE team instigated the 11% for IE11 challenge. If you can get 11% better page load performance from your site, you could win pizza!

The winning organizations will win 11 pizzas to feed their team, 11 copies of Parallels Desktop Virtualization, and 11 one-year subscriptions to BrowserStack testing.

To qualify, you need to show the performance increase, and Microsoft has released new performance scanning tools on modern.IE, but you can use any tools you want, such as webpagetest.org or Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

The new tools on modern.ie detect five common performance patterns, with suggested fixes. There’s an image optimization test that scans the images on your Web page and suggests how page load speed might improve by using an image optimization service such as kraken.io.

A compressed content test identifies whether the Web page is using compression techniques like gzip, which can improve site performance by only extracting and decompressing the content as the user needs it.

Prerendering content is another area where performance can be improved, and the third test detects HTML markup that helps the browser identify which content a user is most likely to view next, so the browser can fetch that content in advance.

The flip ahead browsing test detects whether a Web page has implemented “prev” and “next” link relations which allow browsers to predict Web pages in a series such as a multi-page article, and begin loading the page before the user requests it.

Finally, the HTML5 inputs test detects HTML5 Input Types to validate user input.