ProjectX Blog

47 Responses to “The New Zealand homepage Hall of Shame”

1. Ed Corkery Says:
   May 14th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

   Er, Stuff isn’t gzipped?!

   Interesting though, that some of NZ’s most popular sites aren’t at all efficiently designed. Suggests the average user will put up with significant page loading times to reach desired content.

2. Ed Corkery Says:
   May 14th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

   Further thought: maybe very quick page loading speeds help acquire new users, but don’t necessarily retain existing users.

3. ProjectX Blog » Blog Archive » Website and Database optimisation consulting Says:
   May 14th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

   […] of Code « The New Zealand homepage Hall of Shame 14 05 […]

4. Bwooce Says:
   May 14th, 2008 at 2:11 pm

   Nice. I think you need a column for etag support as well — the overhead of static graphics and text is quite low when they’re properly cached.

5. john Says:
   May 14th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

   Good Idea.

   I’d add the total number of HTTPD requests and etags next time.

6. Shiny Says:
   May 14th, 2008 at 5:07 pm

   compressing something that’s already compressed doesn’t always reduce that size.

   Most of NZ is still using dialup, which compresses during the final transfer from ISP to the 56k modem. Compressing the http response with gzip ontop of this generally increases the size, not decrease…

7. john Says:
   May 14th, 2008 at 5:47 pm

   It is true about Modem compression,but the key component of design a webpage is to enable downloading of components in parallel. Broadband can take adavtange of this.

   The Yslow score of the worst pages take into account bad caching of images and other components which means users could be potential reloading the same data.

8. Anton Says:
   May 14th, 2008 at 9:35 pm

   The exact reason I used clientside scripts (Greasemonkey. Hosts file, Webdeveloper etc) on most of those sites to strip all the junk out. Telecom scores among the worst with it’s “javascipt:nopopup” obsession which totally kills “tabbed browsing”

9. Webmonkey Says:
   May 14th, 2008 at 10:08 pm

   I’m one of the admins of a site in the above list. Recently we have been doing various changes directly to improve our Yslow rating. It’s interesting that you even have us as not supporting gzip when we defintely do (just did a telnet test to check). You even have our rating higher than our internal testing shows 🙂

10. Karl Hardisty Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 1:03 am

    “most” of New Zealand aren’t still using dial up. But still, even on 10mbit I don’t want to be waiting for a 500KB homepage. At last glance, I believe our homepage was ~40KB, and I’m still not entirely happy with that. However, we only have two stylesheets (and the 2nd is only called on by Internet Explorer) and no scripts, so this helps immensely.

    There are steps to be taken to overcome the fact that browsers generally have two streams coming from the site only, such as CSS sprites and using mod_rewrite in Apache to force more than 2 simultaneous connections to a single site, however these are stopgaps. Designers and coders need to be more disciplined when it comes to putting pages together, and consider the needs of the users first and foremost. That’s who the sites are there for.

    There was an article a while ago on how slashdot.org could cut down their site size, and due to the very high number of hits they have, how they could save a considerable sum on hardware and hosting as well. While these benefits will not be of a magnitude where the majority of New Zealand sites would benefit financially, there are still benefits from a user perspective.

    However as pointed out above, New Zealand users do seem content to put up with longer load times to get to the content they want, and the longer this happens the longer we will see poorly constructed sites. Generally after re-building web sites for clients, the comment heard most often after the unveiling is how fast it loads. It’s not magic – it’s elegant design coupled with intelligent execution.

11. Geekzone is not a heavy homepage Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 5:13 am

    […] is not a heavy homepage John Clegg (Zoomin, Projectx) has posted a series of tables showing the heavy and the lite New Zealand websites.Lucky Geekzone shows up in the light sites list as #10 with a 97.2 kilobytes payload (not counting […]

12. john Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 7:17 am

    Webmonkey.

    Let email me – john @ projectx.co.nz and I’ll adjust your listing.

13. john Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 7:21 am

    Karl, you’ve hit the nail on the head…

    Its elegant design coupled with intelligent execution.

    That doesn’t just happen, it comes from using best operations / architecture practices and experience.

    Hopefully, I’ve achieved my objective to get web developers to think about how their webpage is loading and how to maximise performance for both the users and the websites owners.

14. John Archer Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 8:11 am

    Over the last ten years I have developed a website for old NZ colonial and Maori songs, and now get 1400 visitors a day. About 10% are return visits. My pages are small because of necessity when I started. I could only afford to buy 2nd or 3rd hand computers and slow 28k connections, and now I still keep all my pages small because I have to pay all bandwidth charges out of my own pocket. I only use tables and one small jpg on my homepage. But it offers maximum quick access to all parts of my site, and at the top I offer a new and very different song every month. I don’t have adverts of any kind – they look ugly.

15. Ryan Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 9:34 am

    habve you ever tried to look at seek on your PDA?!!! It’s definitely not suitable for mobile-surfing!

    REDUCE THE SIZE AOF ALL YOU SITES FOR MOBILE-SURFING!

16. john Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 9:41 am

    I agree Ryan, mobile surfing is going to become REALLY REALLY important. iPhone is just around the corner and with data rates so high. We need smaller content !

17. Ben Kepes Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 10:42 am

    A really interesting exercise would be to measure the specs of some of the SaaS players here and overseas. I’d love to see the comparative stats between Xero, Saasu, SFDC, Google apps, Zoho apps etc etc

    Flick me an e if you’re keen

18. Peter Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 11:44 am

    Back in ’95 it was hard to make a decent size image under 30k – thanks Adobe for “save for web” introduced with photoshop 5.5 which helped things considerably. Even back then our goal was to make at least landing pages under 50k, which some would say is ideal size.

    However, the web moves on, client expectations increase (hey thats a good thing too), and they want big pics or a little flash on their landing pages and thats fair enuff too (lets not even talk about splash flash pages – we wont do them). Our goal is still under 50k, but most times that is unrealistic. Under 100k is acceptable these days in our opinion, but it will of course still depend on the site target market.

    Check site stats. Google analytics at least attempts to identified connection speeds of visitors.

    Peter

19. john Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    Yeah. I agree, webpages are growing in terms other stuff, images, css js files.

    Yahoo has _always_ been top at optimising their site. When we were in India, we used to analyse their homepage to gleam tips about how to make our pages faster. Even now Yahoo’s home page in US tips 191K. (31K of HTML) and it has a lot of content.

    I’ll re-iterate the purpose of my list was to raise awareness and push to the improvement of web page optimisation standards for the benefit of everyone!

20. Glen Barnes Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 5:37 pm

    @ryan Mobile should be treated as a different site entirely. When you are mobile you use the web differently which requires a whole new way of looking at the UI and featureset. With Seek you probably want instant access to your Resume to email, job alerts and the address of your next interview. If you just have a scaled down version of the main site it would still suck no matter how fast it loaded as it would be difficult to get to those things you actually need.

    Glen

21. Mike Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 10:27 am

    Hi John, I’m proposing website compression as a new web standard for government. Join the discussion at http://webstandards.govt.nz/index.php/Talk:New_standard_-_website_compression

22. Richard Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 12:22 pm

    It would be interesting to see a set of tests done for ‘media’ companies, i.e just the news, tv and radio sites, as you’d think these guys should have a few ideas.

23. john Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

    Mike. That’s Fanatastic news. Let me know if you need any information. Let me know

    John

24. sue Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 1:47 pm

    Back in 200 when i worked for the Web i looked after the NZ internet performance index. we rated 20 top NZ sites on weekly performance of their home page. TAB was always the fastest site, and one site managed to shave about 6 second off load time with some simple optimisation.

    that index was run with hourly tests from high speed connection on a telcom and telstra line, which we averaged daily, as one thing is for sure NZ’s internet at certain times of the day was always slow and different sites received different response times on each line.

    it’s nice to see a few more people out there are starting to care, but i’m also not surprised so many sites don’t

25. Jacob Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 3:48 pm

    Wow, my own website (talksport.co.nz) would have made the top10 had it been tested. I scored an F (38) the same as scoop.co.nz

26. Jimmy Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 10:23 pm

    @Glen Barnes

    “When you are mobile you use the web differently”

    Excepting of course that the iPhone attempts to nullify that sad fact of most (if not all other) mobile web browsing.

    Now that the hardware can cope, why should a mobile web user have to view cut down pages?

27. Che Says:
    May 18th, 2008 at 11:00 pm

    Hi John; interesting research, and sure to stir up some action.

    But I just checked the NZ Herald site with the Charles proxy (Buy Kiwi Made, chur chur), and it appears to be GZipped — not just the main pages, but all the CSS, XML and JS too.

    But the table indicates “none” under “compression”. I wonder if some of the other sites are also doing better at compression than indicated in the table?

28. john Says:
    May 19th, 2008 at 7:36 am

    It looks like my post has propelled some companies into action. I can confirm that NZ Herald is now using compression, but it definitely wasn’t when I conducted the audit last wednesday.

29. Jeremy Says:
    May 19th, 2008 at 2:51 pm

    Hey – what about builderscrack.co.nz ?! Hums along very nicely and uses compression and is definitely not blotted! It one of the fastest sites to access around besides being database driven.

30. john Says:
    May 19th, 2008 at 3:19 pm

    Yep – Builderscrack is fast, but its not optimised as well as it might. You can compress and optimise your CSS files.

31. Robin Says:
    May 20th, 2008 at 1:34 am

    You do need to be careful with gzip compression sometimes – IE (the blight on the web that it is) has issues with it in some cases. That said, I think they’re mostly JS related, and this can be dealt with by selectively disabling it depending on the UA string, so there is little excuse to not be doing it almost always.

32. Max Power Says:
    May 20th, 2008 at 10:27 am

    I try to do what I can with static web pages to make them efficient, but my homepage (http://HireMe.geek.nz/) is not as efficient as I would like it to be.

    Most of the tools to make webpages more efficient either cost money, have compatibility problems (the PNG file format is ‘not ready’ to universally replace GIF) or are inaccessible to many users — for me I have no control over the gzip compression feature of HTML.

    As long as webmaster do what they can to make their pages load faster, there will be fewer problems.

    I suspect most NZ webmasters are not doing this.

    : (

33. ProjectX Blog » Blog Archive » NZ Government Home page web performance audit Says:
    May 22nd, 2008 at 4:08 pm

    […] part II of my audit of New Zealand Homepages (Part I looked at the top 75 homepages in New Zealand). I have conduct an audit of 320 Government websites looking at their web performance. The audit […]

34. Request Says:
    May 27th, 2008 at 3:39 pm

    John, how do I get in contact with you – we are looking for speakers for an internet conference…. your subject here is very topical…

35. ProjectX Blog » Blog Archive » YSlow - Eating our own dog food… Says:
    June 5th, 2008 at 9:31 am

    […] been working on improving our YSlow ranking on ZoomIn Homepage. We scored 83 during the homepage audit 3 weeks ago, now we’ve managed to get it to […]

36. Chris Auld Says:
    June 16th, 2008 at 10:31 am

    For ASP.NET and IIS7 based sites we have developed a tool that applies optimizations inline- i.e. automatically without users having to change the page.
    http://www.getrpo.com

    Drop me an email if you want me to pop around and show you how it works?

37. Chris Auld Says:
    June 16th, 2008 at 10:39 am

    To give you an example…
    Tool on: http://www.medrecruit.com/Login/Home.aspx (YSlow of 91, 2.89s to load over my WWAN card)
    Tool off: http://www.medrecruit.com/Login/Home.aspx?rpo=off (Yslow of 64, 5.68s to load over my WWAN card)

    No code changes or site changes whatsoever. Just dropped the component on the site and added some config lines to the *.config file.

    You ought to see some of the changes we can make to the sites that you have listed 🙂

38. ProjectX Blog » Blog Archive » Runtime Page Optimiser Says:
    June 16th, 2008 at 12:15 pm

    […] The team from Action This have created a new product called Runtime Page Optimiser that will dynamically optimise your webpages at runtime. It looks like a fantastic product to solve a lot of the problems highlight by the NZ Homepage hall of shame. […]

39. Roscoe Changleen Says:
    June 18th, 2008 at 2:09 pm

    Whilst all this good code design and optimisation is all well and good, I think that bending over backwards to make up for Telecom’s (and others) basic failure to move NZ broadband forward is not a particularly good reason to do this. All you are doing is helping make their inaction OK.

    As you state yourself, the NZ average homepage size is already lower than the international (basically US) average. If general consumers don’t feel the need to demand change how is it ever going to happen?

40. john Says:
    June 18th, 2008 at 5:34 pm

    I think that you’re missing the point. The fact is that NZ webpages have been poorly optimisation. My point is that there’s no excuse for poorly optimised sites, which would make a big difference in user experience. The information and tools have been around for a long time.

    Yes, getting better broadband will help enormously and its important to get that fixed asap.

41. Tim Says:
    November 21st, 2008 at 1:58 pm

    Interesting, the vodafone website was listed here as being not GZipped but according to my (8) browsers between both my OS they are!!

    Incorrect results give an incorrect impression

42. john Says:
    November 24th, 2008 at 9:34 am

    Tim, at the time of the survey Vodafone was not gzipped.

43. Christopher Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 7:00 pm

    Thanks for making this a hot topic. Having used many NZ websites from overseas can I point out another problem… the slow references to off site cookies and counters, and junk soft porn ads. These slow some computers to a point where surfing the net becomes painfully slow for the resources of the users computer are overburdened! Faster Internet connections do not help this.

    The NZ Herald was on of the worst with some half dozen off site references and web analysis links, slowing the web pages for so many reasons.

    Sitting in the Philippines above my dive site, with a slow connection, this was very noticeable, so after sending the propeller heads a wake up email, I just blocked all these silly web people and the flash for fast page loads, typically one quarter to one tenth the time.

    Stop the bloated advertising-laden news websites!

    In New Zealand we have several excellent news websites, but these all suffer from the same problems – each page is loaded with advertising. So that tabbed browser, like IE7 or Firefox, with a few tabs open soon sucks up all the memory and CPU and your PC grinds to a near-halt (not all users have a modern computer)

    I’ve got sick enough of this as well as adverts being pushed in my face to set up Firefox with extensions that:

    Block all images unless I choose to load them myself
    Block all Flash movies unless I choose to play them myself
    Block all background audio clips unless I choose to play them myself
    Block all advertising
    IE7 users can get an extension that also offers similar options.

    So it was no surprise when I installed and configured these extensions that I found I could comfortably open 20 tabs of the New Zealand Herald or Stuff websites on an old Pentium III/1000 with 256MB running XP Pro, without it grinding to a halt.

    Removing the advertising and images also removes a major concern about the increasing use of sexually explicit imagery in advertising. We are not talking here about soft porn, we are talking about content that, while considered quite legal, is the equivalent of junk food for the eyes – “junk sex”. Yay, I don’t have to see this stuff if I don’t want to.

    Hurrah for the browser enthusiast community for producing these capabilities for these browsers that gives us a choice about what content we want to download, as well as saving bandwidth on restricted (e.g. dialup or traffic limited) connections.

44. Kiwi Homepage Says:
    February 14th, 2009 at 8:21 pm

    Damn, and I’ve been paranoid about my loading time for a while, got nothing to worry about now, sure wish I could have made that top 75 list but… one day…

45. ProjectX Blog » Blog Archive » Homepage hall of shame - 1 year on…. Says:
    May 19th, 2009 at 3:41 pm

    […] , 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) […]

46. hellonearthis Says:
    December 16th, 2009 at 8:04 pm

    Any chance for double checking the sites today to see who has upgraded and who’s still are lame ducks?

47. john Says:
    December 17th, 2009 at 8:37 am

    May look into doing an update during the new year break.

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