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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."
Now if only every website didn't include 300kb of Javascript libraries that I had to download.
How many times will their crawler check a slowly loading website before they penalizes it?
"Human kind cannot bear very much reality" ~T.S. Eliot
Where are the measuring *from*?
I've moved a site from Linode New Jersey to Linode London, UK because the target audience are in London ( http://www.lfgss.com/ ).
However in Google Webmaster Tools the page load time increased, suggesting that the measurements are being calculated from US datacentres, even though for the target audience the speed increased and page load time decreased.
I would like to see Google use the geographic target preference and to have the nearest datacentre to the target be the one that performs the measurement... or better still to have both a local and remote datacentre perform every measurement and then find a weighted time between them that might reflect real-world usage.
Otherwise if I'm being sent the message that I am being penalised for not hosting close to a Google datacentre from where the measurements are calculated, then I will end up moving there in spite of the fact that this isn't the right thing for my users.
Wait, they put up a sign welcoming the whole world to come into their house, and then you're saying it's their moral right to then complain if you don't look at the ads on the walls of their house as payment? There was no contract or agreement in place prior to my entering their house, just an open invitation - if this is a pre-requisite they should display at the very least a click through agreement that this is the understanding. I say this as someone who doesn't disable ads (because I do support a free web and for me it's easy to just ignore ads, I mentally filter them out and if the site gets some benefit by my not physically filtering them out, all power to them), but unless you're making it part of an explicit contract that you will only allow free views in exchange for enabling ads you have no right to complain when someone follows a link to your site with adblock/noscript enabled. If you don't like it, don't accept incoming links, set up a login system and enforce a policy that accounts will be deleted if ads are disabled - then sit back and enjoy your very quiet life on the web...