Increasing the performance of your websites by reducing page load times

Posted by Sumobaby | Posted in Client, Misc, Tools | Posted on 15-07-2011

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Why decrease the time it takes for your website to load?

Many studies over the years have shown there is correlation between website speed and revenue. If your site loads slowly a greater percentage of users will abandon your website.

Back in April 2010 Google announced that it would include Page speed as a factor in their ranking algorithm.

Steve Souders, one of the most prominent industry Web Performance Optimization evangelists reported that 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1% of profit.

Now focusing on the positive effects of increasing web performance, Firefox increased the download rate of it’s browser by over 15% just by decreasing the page load time by 2 seconds.

Users expect sites to load within 2-3 seconds

In the infographic below you’ll see that on average websites take a total of 6 seconds to load whilst consumers expect for a site to load within 2 seconds or less (Click on the image to view the full inforgraphic).

Akamai Technologies released the results of a study titled “Consumer Response to Travel Site Performance” which states that 57% of online shoppers will wait 3 seconds or less before abandoning the site whilst 65% of 18-24 year olds expect a site to load in two seconds or less.

Site speed performance - winners and losers seperated by milliseconds

 

Some recent Sumobaby successes

Making use of the web performance best practices available to the situation we have been able to make substantial increases in performance.

Key performance indicators

  1. Download speed: Measuring the speed of a cross section of pages throughout a site taking focus on the homepage which is often the most popular page on a website.
  2. Start render: This is the point in time when a user is no longer staring at a white screen and loosing interest in the site.
  3. Requests. This is the number ofrequests a web browser must make to display a web page. This would include all the scripts and images on the page.

Green & Blue Wines

The greatest problem Green & Blue wines faed is that on subsequent views of the same page the site still loaded slowly or at least looked to be loading slowly because it would hang before displaying any content. For both very first view of the sites and repeat views we made great progress in increasing it’s responsiveness and overall download speed.

 

Green and Blue Wines - Page speed optimisation results

 

Celeberity Bride Guide

Celebrity Bride Guide - results of page speed optimisation

  1. Download speed: On average ~19% fasterwhich equates to around a second faster for average download speeds in the UK
    • It is possible to increase this to around 30% faster bu would involve further server configuration which at the tme of writing was still being considered.
  2. Start Render: On average ~9% sooner
  3. Requests: Reduction of between 26-29 requests per page ~17%-22% fewer.

 

Quality Knitwear

Quality Knitwear - results of page speed optimisation

  1. Download speed: ~27%-38% faster which equates to around a 0.6-1.3 seconds faster for average download speeds in the UK
  2. Start Render: ~64%-79% sooner
  3. Requests: Reduction of 5-6 requests per page ~8-13% fewer.

 

See how pages perform on your website

Web Page Test is a great tool to look at the performance of key pages of your website mimicking different browsers from various locations around the world.

 

 

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