ProjectX Blog

Introduction

This is the latest installment of the “Home page hall of Shame” which is an independent audit of the state of Web Page Optimisation in New Zealand. This test takes the top 100 New Zealand based websites from Alexa rankings and compares a number of different metrics – Page Size, Download time, optimisation scores and Javascript optimisation.

Summary

• The homepages for 100 of the top NZ based websites was measured using  webpagetest.org.nz on 1.5Mb DSL connection Thanks to aptimize.com.
• The average page size of homepages was 554.6K Up from (359.6K in May 2009 & 305.1K in 2008)
• Fastest home pages load < 2 sec. Top site loads in 1.46 secs ! The average download time was 9 secs using broadband connection. And average 4.6 seconds for a cached reload.
• 62% of websites use  WEB COMPRESSION
• The largest pages were over 2000K. The largest site was 4.6M and had images that were more than 1Mb.
• A lot Advertising javascript still is not being compressed
• Some sites have dozens of Javascript and CSS files, worst offender had 34 javascript files.
• The fastest sites have less total requests. There seems to be a strong co-relation to lower total requests to speed.

Percent of sites that got a passing grade for the basic optimization checks:

Download time distribution

Table 1 – Shows the distribution of download times of the top 100 home pages.

This

What should we do to improve

The Data

Optimisation

What? This table shows the top ranking home pages with highest optimisation scores as ranked by performance ranking tools YSlow and Pagespeed.

How? We used the website www.showslow.com to record the score for the test.

Why is this important? This result shows which sites are best optimised for web performance. The sites  are optimised sites for fastest downloading and reloading of pages.

Top 10 most optimised sites

Top 10 worst optimised sites

Download time

What? This table shows the top ranking home pages with fastest and slowest download times .

How? We used the website webpagetest.org website on 1.5Mb DSL connection Broadband in Wellington NZ to simulate a fair test of all the webpages. The test took page over the weekend 4th and 5th of December. *** (The ird.govt.nz site was re-tested on the 8th of December after they improved their download size from >2Mb)

Why is this important? This result shows which sites are fastest to load for users. The faster the website, the more pages that a user can visit in the allotted time.

Top 10 fastest home page download speed (Broadband)

Top 10 slowest home page download speed (Broadband)

Size

What? This table shows the largest and smallest home pages by total download size .

How? We used YSlow to provide the tool download size of the home page including all the HTML , Javascript, CSS, image and Flash files.

Why is this important? This highlights the total size of some of the home page. Some of these webpages sizes are out of control and webmaster need to think about the time that it takes to load their sites.

Top 10 largest home pages by size

*** 20/10 Public address have optimised their images and now the home page is 806K. Awesome work guys !

Top 10 smallest home pages by size

Cacheability

What? This table shows which sites have the fastest reload time. ie. this is the 2nd loading of a site after an initial load.  This is an indication of effective are the cacheability of the webpage.

How? We used the website webpagetest.org website on 1.5Mb DSL connection Broadband in Wellington NZ to simulate a fair test of all the webpages. The test took page over the weekend 4th and 5th of December.

Why is this important? This test shows which sites will load fastest for regular users. A cacheable site will load quickly as the browser does not have to reload all the content that hasn’t change (static content)

Top 10 fastest cached pages – 2nd reload of a page

Javascript

What? This table shows which sites have most javascript files on the home page.

How? We used YSlow to provide the number of the javascript files used on the web page.

Why is this important? Javascript files can be bad for your website if they are not properly optimised and loaded in the correct way. The scripts can be block the downloading of any other content on the webpage.  The more javascript files on the site can make the page very slow while the user has to wait until the browsers loads all the javascript then continues to render the page.

Top 10 home pages with most javascript files

I’ve been inspired by Pat Meenan’s excellent posts of the State of optimization summary and the state of web performance optimization 2010 , so I thought I’d do another “Homepage hall of shame“. – which is a web performance review of the top 100 NZ based websites. (Top 100 sites is based on Alexa traffic).

I’ll post the full report soon, here are some of the findings…

Summary Findings

• The homepages for 100 of the top NZ based websites was measured using  webpagetest.org.nz on 1.5Mb DSL connection Thanks to aptimize.com.
• The average page size of homepages was 554.6K Up from (359.6K in May 2009 & 305.1K in 2008)
• Fastest home pages load < 2 sec. Top site loads in 1.46 secs ! The average download time was 9 secs using broadband connection. And average 4.6 seconds for a cached reload.
• 62% of websites use  WEB COMPRESSION
• The largest pages were over 2000K. The largest site was 4.6M and had images that were more than 1Mb.
• A lot Advertising javascript still is not being compressed
• Some sites have dozens of Javascript and CSS files, worst offender had 34 javascript files.
• The fastest sites have less total requests. There seems to be a strong co-relation to lower total requests to speed.
• There are two main things that websites should do speed up their sites. 1) Properly Set cache expiry 2) Javascript + CSS bundling.

Percent of sites that got a passing grade for the basic optimization checks:

**Note: I’ve removed the CDN measurement as very few NZ sites use a CDN.

For more web optimisation comparison check out the Home Page drag race.

I’ve created a set of video’s highlighting the page load time differences of a selection of NZ top websites.

side edffects of prednisone

Its a drag race, lets see who can claim bragging rights????

Notes:

• The videos show download times from the US using a “broadband” IE 7.
• The page load times in NZ are faster, but this gives you an idea of which sites are faster.
• Sites are finished loading when they turn gray.
• The latency of connection from the US plays havoc with advertising page components causing some pages to take longer to complete.
• The page rendering of dynamic components also seems to load slowly.
• All the videos are made using the visual comparison on webpagetest.org.

News sites

• Winner: Scoop 13.5 seconds
• First readable page: Stuff 4.3 seconds.
• Slowest page: Stuff 40.5 seconds * Due to javascript delays

Banking

• Winner: ANZ – 12.9 seconds
• First readable page: ASB – 5.0 seconds
• Slowest page: Kiwibank – 30 seconds * Due to flash animation ?

Mobile carriers

• Winner: Telecom – 7.7 seconds
• First readable page: Telecom – 5.0 seconds
• Slowest page: Two Degrees – 21.8 seconds

Auction sites

• Winner: Trade Me – 10.4 seconds
• First readable page: Trade Me – 3.5 seconds
• Slowest page: Sella – 10.5 seconds

It been a long long while since I’ve written a blog post. This year has been a bit of a blur with lots of things happening – lots of consulting to companies, selling the services side of ProjectX, going on a holiday for two months and more consulting.

This blog will change as the focus of “ProjectX” the company has changed to represent my personal consulting business and interests. I’ve got a number of blog post queued up that I’ll be pushing out over the next few weeks and months.

Web performance: Its been a while since I posted an update to the “NZ Homepage hall of Shame” and I’ve created some interested videos on how “fast” a few of the key websites actually are to load compared to their market alternatives.

Blood rules: I’ve got some suggestions, advice, observations and learnings from the world of running an IT Start-up. These rules have been earned in “blood” ie. learnt the hard way via pain by those concerned. Topics that I will cover include founders, communication, seeking advice, partnerships and execution.

Geo-Location: I’ve been following with interest the rise of Foursquare and a demise of Yellowpages. I’ve got some interesting thoughts on where the industry is heading and how New Zealand will be lagging behind.

[The picture is of me posing next to a massive bath tube at Vatican Museum in Rome]