ProjectX Blog

Patrick Meenan of AOL has released aggregated data results of a years data of web page testing from webpagetest.org.

Here a quick summary of the results:

Average Load Time: 10.1 seconds
Average Time to First Byte: 1.1 seconds
Average Time to Start Render: 3.8 seconds

Average Page Size: 510 KB
Average Number of Requests: 50
Average Number of Redirects: 1

Comparing that to the web performance audit of the top 100 NZ websites.

Average homepage size: 359.6K
Average download time: 3.85
Average total requests: 57.2

Looks like NZ homepages are starting to get the message.

I decided to have a look at “The NZ homepage hall of shame” , 1 year on. ( Part of the speeding up NZ Internet series, I’ve just finished retesting the web performance of top 75 NZ homepages and added another 25 websites to cover the departure of a few sites) .

This time around, I’ve added a couple new metrics, including website download time. I’ve used Webpagetest.org.nz to calculate download time. The webpagetest service is equivalent download speed to a fast office connection. (ie. they have 15Mb Down 1Mb Up connection !)

The bragging rights for NZ’s fastest webpage does not belong to Trade Me but to Land Transport at #1 and Canterbury University at #2. (Although Trade Me dominate the Top 10).

The key takeaway from this audit is the effect of too many page elements will kill download speed. Reducing the number of page elements will speed up the site!

Summary Findings

• The average page size of homepages was 359.6K. ( Up from 305.1K)
• Fastest sites load < 1 sec. Top site loads in 0.246 secs ! The average download time was 3.85 secs
• 33% of websites use NO WEB COMPRESSION (Down from 52% – Great improvement)
• The largest pages were over 1000K
• A lot Advertising javascript still is not being compressed
• Some sites have dozens of Javascript and CSS files, worst offender had 35 javascript files
• The fastest sites have less total requests. There seems to be a strong co-relation to lower total requests to speed.

Here are the summary results: (The raw results are found here – http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p94gU-OKvrDhp7ggKO8iiBw )

Here is a graph of the distribution of homepage download time.

Wow, looking at the blog, we haven’t made any posts in months.

Lots of changes happening, new staff, new office, lots of work! We’ve been busy on productionising some code, working with Gooddata and our new project with GWRC.

More details to come…..