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Google Shares Insights On Accelerating Web Sites

Posted by samzenpus on from the hurry-it-up dept.

miller60 writes "The average web page takes 4.9 seconds to load and includes 320 KB of content, according to Google executive Urs Holzle. In his keynote at the O'Reilly Velocity conference on web performance, Holzle said that competition from Chrome has made Internet Explorer and Firefox faster. He also cited the potential for refinements to TCP, DNS, and SSL/TLS to make the web a much faster place, and cited compressing headers as a powerful performance booster. Holzle also noted that Google's ranking algorithm now includes a penalty for sites that load too slowly."

3 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Noscript by Dylan16807 · · Score: 5, Informative

    75%? When I turn off javascript it only seems to affect about a tenth of the sites I visit.

  2. That's not insightful by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Noscript doesn't turn off Javascript. Most browsers already have an option for that. What Noscript does is to make the control of Javascript (and Flash) much more fine grained and convenient.

    Some typical case:

    1. Scripts on poor web sites just serve to detract from the content. Those you simply never turn on.

    2. Scripts on good web sites improve access to content. Those sites you enable permanently first time you visit (press no Noscript button in the lower right corner, and select "enable permanently") and forget about it.

    3. Some web sites contain a mix of the two. Here you can either explicitly enable a specific object (by clicking on a placeholder, like with flashblock), or temporarily enable scripts for that site.

    Basically, Noscript makes more, not less, of the web accessible. The good web sites you use normally will not be affected (as they all will be allowed to run scripts). But following links from social web sites like /. become a much more pleasant experience.

    Of course, most of the noise scripts distacting from content are ads, so AdBlock gives you much of the same benefit. But I don't want to hide ads, as that is how the sites pay their bills.

  3. Re:Measuring speed from *where* exactly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the docs:

    "Page load time is the total time from the moment the user clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is loaded and displayed in a browser. It is collected directly from users who have installed the Google Toolbar and have enabled the optional PageRank feature."

    http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=158541&hl=en