'Net Features : page speed

Retail Websites Slowing Down

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 23:26:00 GMT

Today’s retail websites are getting slower according to new data released by Strangeloop Networks in its quarterly report on e-commerce page speed and website performance.

Strangeloop measured 2,000 retail websites and found that they were a discouraging 9 percent slower than they were on average in 2011. The median load time for first-time visitors (that’s important as there would be no caching benefit in that scenario) is now 6.5 seconds (up slightly from the 5.94 seconds averaged in November 2011). Each of the sites was tested using WebPageTest which simulates how pages perform across browsers including Chrome, Firefox and IE.

Most distressing is that the poor page speed and performance problems affect large merchants just as it does smaller ones. The top 100 sites in the Strangeloop study actually performed much worse on the whole – 12 percent slower in fact than the same group in 2011.

The report also revealed that page sizes have increased – by 5 percent. The media page size now requires 77 server round trips (which take on average between 20 and 50 milliseconds), up from 73 in 2011. A “round trip” is defined as the connections made between the user’s browser and the host server (to load objects such as images and CSS files).

“These tests are important because they focus on the user experience,” says Strangeloop CEO Jonathan Bixby. “Site owners are offered measurement statistics from many sources – employees, IT departments, CDNs – and these numbers can sometimes contradict each other. This report takes us back to what matters most: the real user experience for retail customers shopping via each major browser.”

Google: Site Speed a Ranking Factor

Mike Phillips — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:42:00 GMT

Google has officially announced that site load speed is a factor when determining rankings, not that it's a deal-breaker. According to Matt Cutts, ""While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point."

So, the chances your site will be affected are slim. But read between the lines on this one. Or, let Google's Webmaster Central Blog do it for you: "But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings."

It's only common sense that faster sites are more appealing to Web users. But knowing that Google places "a lot of value in speed" means that you should, too. The fact is, when Google decides to make a change to their search rankings -- any change -- website owners should take notice. While it might be a small factor in rankings today, it could loom much larger in the future.

Also from the Google blog are these suggested tools to check your site speed. Sometimes we can get caught up in the "cool" factor of Web page and lose sight of what's most important to users -- usability. Don't fall into that trap.

Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.

Page Speed @ Google Code

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on that you might be interested in checking out if you're concerned with how quickly your website is loading.

Webmasters and web developers can use the tool to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Page Speed evaluates performance from the client point of view, typically measured as the page load time (the lapsed time between the moment a user requests a new page and the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser). The best practices tested cover many of the steps involved in page load time, including resolving DNS names, setting up TCP connections, transmitting HTTP requests, downloading resources, fetching resources from cache, parsing and executing scripts, and rendering objects on the page.

Essentially, Page Speed evaluates how well your pages either eliminate these steps altogether, parallelize them, and shorten the time they take to complete. The best practices are grouped into five categories that cover different aspects of page load optimization including optimizing caching (keeping your application's data and logic off the network altogether), minimizing round-trip times (reducing the number of serial request-response cycles), minimizing request size (reducing upload size), minimizing payload size (reducing the size of responses, downloads, and cached pages), and optimizing browser rendering (improving the browser's layout of a page).

Seeking out more tools and resources like this to accelerate your Web success?
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