Summary of Homepage Hall of Shame – Dec 2010
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:
| Optimization | Percent of pages with a passing grade (2010) |
|---|---|
| Keep-alive Enabled | 87% |
| Compress Text | 62.5% |
| Compress Images | 59.5% |
| Cache Static Content | 53.5% |
| Combine JS/CSS | 19% |
**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.