Update: Summary of Homepage Hall of Shame 1 month on..
In the latest in the speeding up NZ Internet series, I’ve just finished retesting the web performance of top 75 NZ homepages. I’m in the processing of processing all of the results and generating the tables.
I’ve capture more data to include DSL download time, caching stats of the pages and total number of HTTP requests.
One month on here are the key stats:
Averages:
- 305.1K for the Homepage size (Up from 304.9K)
- 50 secs for estimated download time for dialup.
- 6.81 secs for download time on DSL
- 56 HTTP requests / files per page
- 20% of the homepage in size is cached. (Indicating bad caching)
- 76% of HTTP request are rechecked against cache (Indicating bad caching)
- 53.8 Yslow score
Other stats:
- 49% of websites use no web compression
- Only two sites have homepages over 1000K
- Top YSlow site has rating of 85
- Worst YSlow has a rating of 29
I’ll post the complete findings shortly.
June 13th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
I think the designers (especially in house) lose sight very quickly of a site’s intended users. Often they’re a larger company with a fast internet connection, and when the site is tested, it appears to load ‘fine’. There are plenty of sites linked to above with scripts and css files that run into the double digits, and images even more so.
We always test our sites we develop on dial up, which may sound silly, but it gives great insight and motivation to creating a lean end product. This is how we ended up with a home page that according to websiteoptimisation.com comes in at 30045 bytes, which I’m happy with (although it is only a static page). Having said that, there are no scripts, and 6 images only, and 1 css file for users of anything other than IE6 and below, so this helps tremendously.
Either way, sites with large amounts of visitors (and hence traffic) stand to gain more by lessening the amount of data required to be served, and by reducing the load on the hardware when serving this. I guess since the designers don’t have to pay for the hardware or the bandwidth out of their budgets, this doesn’t really come into consideration.
June 13th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I agree karl, over 40% of users are still on dial-up. My Research highlights the ignorance of proper web page design. It seems the webmaster skills have become a forgotten art 🙁