ProjectX Technology

Rankr is back with fresh data. We’ve been having data problems with Alexa’s base data not updating their own system. It seems Alexa is OK for now.

This post is Part of a web performance audit of New Zealand homepages. (Part II looks at Government homepages.)

I’ve compiled a list called the New Zealand homepage hall of shame. The list details the download efficiency of the top 75 websites in New Zealand. The survey was conducted using the YSlow tool over the top 75 New Zealand websites from Rankr.

In the results, I’ve included the YSlow ranking, total size of the webpage (this includes all html, css, flash, javascript, images etc) in Kilobytes, the number of external javascpript and CSS files and the time it would take to load on a 56k Modem (@ 6k/s).

The Highlights lowlights of the survey:

• The average size of homepages was 304.9K. UPDATE: Global webpage Average is 312K
• 52% of websites use NO WEB COMPRESSION
• The largest pages were over 1000K
• Several of the top 20 sites in New Zealand were the biggest offenders
• Advertising javascript is not being compressed
• Some sites have dozens of Javascript and CSS files, worst offender had 35 javascript files
  

A number of web companies and web developers should be holding their heads in shame – the results are not flattering. We need to better building smart – download friendly webpages not slow loading monsters ! You can either fix it yourself or get some experts!

So without further a due here are the summary tables:

Top 10 worst homepages according to Yslow ranking

Top 10 best homepages according to Yslow ranking

Top 10 largest homepages in Kilobytes

Top 10 smallest homepages in Kilobytes

Here is the complete data for the top 75 New Zealand websites homepages. I have compiled the list from using YSlow to analyse the pages and recording everything. The data is sorted by worst Yslow ranking. (The test was completed 13th of May 2008 between 8-10pm)

We have no new Rankr stats this week. For the second time in a couple of weeks, the Alexa data for New Zealand has not updated. The problem has been logged with Alexa (Amazon) and we will update the data as soon as it comes available.

Earlier this week, changes to the Alexa ranking system (owned by Amazon) have caused a big changes in the Rankr top 100 sites of NZ.

The big news is that TradeMe has dropped from 2 most popular site (behind) google to 4th. Others in the top 100 have traded positions.

In comparison to real traffic figures, it seems to be re-adjusting itself to be inline to the relative positions of companies and their real traffic.

It will be interesting to see if this is the first of many changes from Alexa.

Interesting stats from Rankr this week . MSN has just jumped past google and trade me on Rankr stats this week.

I wonder if Vista has anything to do with this ????