Why does web performance matter????

Google has announced that it will start adding page load times into formula for ad ranking. They say that it may have an effect on your keyword score.

Here’s what Google says about why they are making the change.

Why are we doing this?

Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.

There is more information at the adwords help center.

This 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 was conducted by using YSlow to analyse the download performance of the homepage of a Government website. The list of government websites was taken from the New Zealand Government website. Full results are available from this Google Spreadsheet. Audit conducted on Tuesday Night 20th May 2008.

Audit Findings

Homepage Size

Graph of NZ Government Home page sizes

(Click on the graph to view values)

• The average homepage size was 216.85K (Compared to 304.5K for top 75 NZ websites) The largest Homepage was staggering 2442K and the smallest homepage was 8.3K,

Web Compression

Graph of Web compression usage on Government webpages

• 84.1% of Government homepages were not compressed, 11.6% are compressing some of the page elements and only 4.4% (14 sites) are fully compressing their pages.
• Some sites are compressing only CSS and JS files but NOT their base HTML
• A lot of sites have compression external javascript eg. Google Analytics (which was discounted as being part of the site) This highlights that all external javascript should be compressed.

Other findings

• The worst site had 151 files for their homepage and the best site 3 files
• The worst offending pages had over 21 Javscript files and the worst offender for the number of CSS files was 40.
• Some sites have duplicate versions of scripts running. One site had 4 Google analytic scripts running.

Tables

Top 10 best Government homepages ranked by YSlow

Top 10 worst Government homepages ranked by YSlow

Top 10 smallest Government homepages by size

Top 10 largest Government homepages by size

I’ve just completed an audit of the 320 government websites as listed in the Government service directory.

The key findings are:

• The Average homepage size for NZ Govt site is 216.85K

• Largest homepage is 2442K
• Smallest homepage is 23.3K
• 84.3% of Govt Site use NO Web compression, 11.5% have some Web compression and only 4.7% use web compression
• Some sites are compressing CSS and Javascript but not the HTML.
• Bad design - one site uses 40 CSS files and another site uses 21 javascript files
• A number of sites have duplicate copies of some javascripts.

I’ll be posting the full report tomorrow.

Related Posts:

• Average NZ homepage size is 304.9K
• Global average pagesize is 312K

My post on NZ Homepage Hall of Shame has shaken things up. I’ve had a number of emails and comments on the blog. A number of sites are now actively looking at improving their page architecture.

Update: A proposal to add web compression to the e-govt webstandard ! Great news.

Kudo’s to New Zealand Herald and Vodafone for taking action and improving their pages. Their numbers now are:

I’ll be doing another audit soon to profile the rest of the sites.

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)

I been working on a mini audit of the top 75 New Zealand websites. I took the top 75 NZ websites from Rankr and using YSlow compiled the data last night.

I discovered that …

The Average homepage size in NZ is 304.9K !

That will take almost 51 seconds to load on a modem.

The size is the total downloaded size of all the total html, css, images, js, flash etc. Compressed files are recorded at their compressed size.

Even more scary is 52% of the top NZ website are not using any web compression, 37.3% are using some compression and 10.7% are fully compressed.

We can’t complain about dial up loading speed if our homepages are over 300K!

I’ll be posting the NZ homepages of shame, very shortly.

UPDATE: Global average pagesize is 312K