Google Shares Insights On Accelerating Web Sites

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."

Comments

google-analytics.com ?

[corsec67]

I saw my browser waiting on google-analytics.com quite often before I started using No-Script.

Why do sites put up with an AD server/analytics service that slows down a site by a large amount?

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's valuable data, and google is the only game in town. You can see which keywords are converting, and for what dollar amount, and which keywords are money pits. Yes, it will on occasion hang but you should look at the data that it produces before saying it's not worth it.

Re:google-analytics.com ?

[dintech]

Yes, it will on occasion hang but you should look at the data that it produces before saying it's not worth it.

Not worth it to who? It's not worth it to me. Noscript please.

How fast?

[tpstigers]

Google's ranking algorithm now includes a penalty for sites that load too slowly.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. My initial response was a happy one, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to be unnecessarily discriminating against those who are too far away from the bleeding edge. Do we really live in a world where 'Speed=Good' so completely that we need to penalize those who don't run fast enough? And where are we drawing the line between 'fast' and 'slow'?

Re:Ajax Libraries

[nappingcracker]

I disagree. Libraries have greatly improved the usability of many websites. I also doubt that many people are pulling down 300kb of libraries every time, since most are minified and gzipped. Even with a ton of bells and whistles it's hard to hit 100kb of .js, The ever popular jQuery + jQuery UI is only ~30kb (with reasonably useful plugins like tabs, dialog, etc, not all the crazy and expensive FX).

I'm OK with users having to pull even 100kb one time to have a nicer browsing experience all around.

I really wish I could get over my paranoia and link to the libraries on google's code CDN. Slim chance, but if they go down and my sites are still up, there be problems!

Re:Noscript

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

That's what noscript is for. With noscript, your browser doesn't even download the .js files.

That's fine and dandy. IF.

If you don't care to see or experience the vast majority of web sites on the Intertubes today.

Honestly, when I see (yet another) pious elitist bleating about no-script or whatever, I wonder: Why don't you just surf in Lynx?

If you're surfing with no-script, you're missing 75% of the Internet. If it's not the 75% you want to see and or experience, than good for you. But bleating about the creative uses of JavaScript on the World Wide Web is old news.

Re:Noscript

[Jurily]

If you're surfing with no-script, you're missing 75% of the Internet.

Actually, it's more like 95%. However, you did completely miss the point. Turning off Noscript for a site you choose to bless takes two mouse clicks and a reload.

You're not missing out on what you want to see. You're missing out on all the other random shit you couldn't care less about.

Re:Noscript

[calmofthestorm]

Likewise. And if I see flash it's a damn good indication I just don't care what's on the site.