Full results – Home page hall of shame Dec 2010

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:

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%

Download time distribution


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

This

Time Frequency
<1 0
1 – 2 2
2 – 3 2
3 – 4 5
4 – 5 9
5 – 6 5
6 – 7 15
7 – 8 9
8 – 9 9
9 – 10 8
10-12.5 19
12.5-15 7
15+ 9

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

Site YSlow Rating Page speed Combined Score
radionz.co.nz 89 91 180
geonet.org.nz 92 87 179
snipesoft.net.nz 91 87 178
www.school.nz 90 87 177
zoomin.co.nz 86 89 175
gpstore.co.nz | mightyape.co.nz 85 88 173
findsomeone.co.nz 85 87 172
oldfriends.co.nz 86 85 171
otago.ac.nz 88 83 171
geekzone.co.nz 79 90 169

Top 10 worst optimised sites

Site YSlow Rating Page speed Combined Score
golf.co.nz 63 66 129
psis.co.nz 53 76 129
kiwibank.co.nz 61 69 130
sjs.co.nz 65 70 135
nbr.co.nz 65 70 135
consumer.org.nz 72 63 135
stuff.co.nz 63 73 136
whaleoil.co.nz 64 73 137
wises.co.nz 68 70 138
skycitycinemas.co.nz | event cinemas 68 71 139

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)

Site Size (K) Total requests Webpagetest.org first load time
– Broadband (secs)
geonet.org.nz 52.2 21 1.695
newzealandgirls.co.nz 59.5 26 1.7
oldfriends.co.nz 71.6 24 2.14
psis.co.nz 122.2 14 2.798
auckland.ac.nz 126.5 26 3.07
www.school.nz 49.5 6 3.17
canterbury.ac.nz 205.8 26 3.2
snipesoft.net.nz 117.1 12 3.54
immigration.govt.nz 148.7 26 3.76
westpac.co.nz 194.3 33 4.12
telecom.co.nz 345.8 27 4.3

Top 10 slowest home page download speed (Broadband)

Site Size (K) Total requests Webpagetest.org time first load time
– Broadband (secs)
thestandard.org.nz 4302 85 35.5
whaleoil.co.nz 1214 88 29.6
publicaddress.net 2429 40 20.664
vouchermate.co.nz 954.7 93 20
waikato.ac.nz 201.7 48 19.07
scoop.co.nz 288.3 60 17.3
skycitycinemas.co.nz | event cinemas 1023.7 116 16.3
kiwibank.co.nz 1468 59 15.6
kiwibiker.co.nz 419.9 77 15.3
tvnzondemand.co.nz 666.1 92 15.0

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

Site Size (K) Total requests
thestandard.org.nz 4302 85
publicaddress.net *** 2429 40
kiwibank.co.nz 1468 59
menumania.co.nz 1368.5 62
whaleoil.co.nz 1214 88
skytv.co.nz 1148 139
golf.co.nz 1119.2 92
nzherald.co.nz 1048.7 119
skycitycinemas.co.nz | event cinemas 1023.7 116
sella.co.nz 1008.9 71

*** 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

Site Size (K) Total requests
www.school.nz 49.5 6
geonet.org.nz 52.2 21
oldfriends.co.nz 71.6 24
vodafone.co.nz 97.9 67
zeald.com 110.8 47
snipesoft.net.nz 117.1 12
psis.co.nz 122.2 14
yellow.co.nz 124 48
auckland.ac.nz 126.5 26
radionz.co.nz 133.8 26

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

Site Size (K) Total requests Webpagetest.org time first load – Broadband (secs) Cached load – Broadband (secs)
geonet.org.nz 52.2 21 1.695 0.037
aut.ac.nz 581.4 63 9.1 0.146
otago.ac.nz 215.8 31 5.216 0.44
snipesoft.net.nz 117.1 12 3.54 0.53
newzealandgirls.co.nz 526.5 26 1.7 0.585
finda.co.nz 426.8 51 8.2 0.896
westpac.co.nz 194.3 33 4.12 0.998
radionz.co.nz 133.8 26 7.4 1.007
gpstore.co.nz | mightyape.co.nz 725.4 83 7.165 1.253
slingshot.co.nz 459.2 105 6.12 1.28

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

Site Size (K) Total requests # of Javascript Files Webpagetest.org time first load- Broadband (secs)
kiwiblog.co.nz 838.1 108 34 14.7
tvnzondemand.co.nz 666.1 92 32 15
ticketek.co.nz 837 115 30 14.046
aa.co.nz 669.2 97 29 10.994
golf.co.nz 1119.2 92 27 13.468
tvnz.co.nz 635.4 110 26 13.01
nbr.co.nz 675.5 66 23 7.7
thestandard.org.nz 4302 85 23 35.5
kiwibank.co.nz 1468 59 21 15.6
eventfinder.co.nz 699.8 111 21 10.142

2 Responses to “Full results – Home page hall of shame Dec 2010”

  1. Karl von Randow Says:

    Thanks for keeping this going, and thanks for bringing the Publicaddress homepage size to our attention! Some graphics were uploaded as PNGs when they should have been JPEG… we’ve changed them to be automatically converted to JPEG and trimmed a mere 1.6 MB off the homepage size in the process!

  2. john Says:

    Awesome I’ll amend the post with your changes!

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