5 ms·

Page speed really does matter

66 points by gingerjoos 14y ago

DrJokepu 14y ago
Off topic, but the as the sidebar refuses to resize it's really difficult to read this on the iPhone.
- 3825 14y ago
  This is not a perfect solution but if you use Pocket or InstaPaper, add this to your reading list and you should be able to read much more easily. :)
- lessnonymous 14y ago
  Hit the "Reader" button in the URL bar
frozenport 14y ago
Isn't 3 seconds a lot? I try to keeps our numbers under 1 second, although we only target the USA. The biggest improvement to our page load speed came from using a php cache (xcache) and specifying client cache lifetimes. The first got us to around 1 second and the second meant that the best case (which happened often) was about 0.5s
- cleverjake 14y ago
  3 < 20, especially when talking about dialup/dsl lines in Nigeria
  - ohwp 14y ago
    But that only accounts for download size.
- thejosh 14y ago
  I think he means server -> client full rendering over "3000ms rendering by the server" (for example if you were using PHP a page taking 3000ms to load before even starting to render on the client is insane).
- Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago
  I personally think that even one second is way too long. Especially if it's about web shopping or any other service which actually requires user to browse content, and not read long articles or so. I just complained to one online cartoon about this, changing from strip to strip takes 1,5 seconds and that's super slow afaik. It really annoys users.
- Cherian 14y ago
  Author here. I meant DOM ready in 3 seconds. Our server response time is under 300 ms. Details here: http://d.pr/i/h5Vx http://d.pr/i/h5Vx
ericcholis 14y ago
Page Speed often gets confused for a few things. Here's how it really breaks down: 1) App Server Response. How long it takes your application to issue a successful response? 2) Network Speed. A server response for a 500MB file is fast, but downloading it isn't 3) DOM Processing. Great, you've reached the user's browser, now how long does it take the page to load into the DOM 4) Page Rendering. Only done after all the "assets" are downloaded. This is usually the final state of the page. Yes, if your Google Page Speed number is super high, you've got a problem. But it helps to be able to break down each step of that number, to identify where the bottleneck is. Also, as the author mentioned, be aware that every computer is different. One really slow internet connection will drastically affect your page speed averages. A small benchmark for you, one of my applications has an average app server response time of about 350ms. But, one page has an average Page Speed of 5 seconds. I'm diagnosing why that page is so slow, it looks like a few external assets are causing the slowdown.
- Cherian 14y ago
  Author here. You are right. This is precisely the reason why we are looking at CDNing. Our server response time is under 300 ms and our page speed score is 96/100 http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/35984/strategies-for-very-fast-delivery-of-webpages/36253#36253 http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/35984/strategi...
- rimantas 14y ago
  There are a couple of thing missing in your list, and those are quite important: Number of requests needed to load all your assets, latency and blocking. Browsers only load limited number of assets in parallel, so if you have a lot they will wait. Latency makes things bad (especially on mobile), but in case you have a lot of assets it makes it even worse. Also, keep in mind, that most often it is the latency that kills the speed of the loading. It does not really matter if it takes 20 or 60ms to download your asset if the latency is 10x that. Blocking: your #4 is not exactly right, browsers can start rendering the page at once, but if you try to load scripts first they will block rendering. Hence the importance of understanding where to request your css and js and how to load them.
driverdan 14y ago
If you're having a problem with cache expiration use a remote monitoring app like CopperEgg[1] (free) or Pingdom[2] (paid). Not only will it monitor your site and send alerts if it goes down or is slow, it will keep your cache fresh and full. 1: http://copperegg.com/ http://copperegg.com/ 2: https://www.pingdom.com/ https://www.pingdom.com/
- maczyx 14y ago
  Pingdom also has free option.
  - damniatx 14y ago
    for only one site.
alan_cx 14y ago
Well...... for some reason I'm yet to even begin to understand (I have mailed the site, got no reply at all, but even so I assume its something my end, but it doesn't happen on any other site, weird...), HN takes about 30 secs to load any page, and I don't get the CSS either, but I still use the site regularly as I value the content. Make of that what you will.
- Cherian 14y ago
  Author here. I am not sure I really understand the question. Can you explain a bit more?
  - alan_cx 14y ago
    No question. Just showing that in this case speed isnt putting me off using the site.
- bad_user 14y ago
  30s to load any page? Really? Just gathered some stats from my browser by loading the link we are on: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4973322 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4973322 11 requests 20.91KB transferred 921ms (onload: 949ms, DOMContentLoaded: 927ms This had caching turned on, while with caching turned off: 11 requests 38.49KB transferred 1.29s (onload: 1.30s, DOMContentLoaded: 1.12s) Note that I'm on a broadband connection, but on the other hand I'm connecting from Romania, so about 100-300ms of latency come from my non-US location if the website doesn't use some kind of CDN.
  - alan_cx 14y ago
    Quite. As I say, it must be something my end, specific to me. Other wise loads of people would be complaining.
- badgar 14y ago
  You've been slowbanned. A moderator didn't like something you said and wants you to leave HN, but didn't feel that hellbanning you was appropriate. Instead, they want you to get frustrated with the slowness and give up.
kmfrk 14y ago
Speaking of which, is enabling gzip in S3 still a pain?
- dmpatierno 14y ago
  With S3, yes. However, the CloudFront CDN works great for gzip now with web-backed distributions, assuming things are configured properly on your end.
RyanZAG 14y ago
The discussion actually misses two critical aspects - network topology and device usage in 3rd world countries. Where is the speed issue coming into play? There are 3 areas of concern 1) App server and backbone speed - This what the discussion is centering on. CDN is good. 2) Connection speed between client and ISP - This is a critical issue when dealing with performance in 3rd world countries. CDN will NOT help here! - As an example, there is likely a 200-300ms roundtrip from your servers to the CDN and customer ISP. By using a CDN, you remove this 200-300ms. If the customer is using GRPS with 5000ms latency, your CDN has done almost nothing! 3) Customer's processing speed - If your customer is using an old blackberry phone, and your page is using complicated javascript, it could take 30+ seconds for the page to render for the user, even if the content were local. A way to get a grasp of the situation is not to filter your page load speed by country, but to drill down further and also use the user agent. Filter by country + user agent should let you know if the slowdown is caused by old Nokia phones, or if it's across Firefox and Chrome also. In many cases, the solution is often to have a mobile WAP-alike site that has no fancy resources and just text and html fields. You can use javascript to detect if the page is loading slowly (15+ secs), and pop up a link to the special wap site.
chacham15 14y ago
What tool are you guys using to get the notifications?
- Cherian 14y ago
  Google Analytics alerts
joshfraser 14y ago
There are a lot of issues with using Google Analytics for collecting performance data. As mentioned, their use of averages leads to a lot of problems and issues from outliers. GA heavily samples (1% by default) & only collects timing data from browsers that support Nav Timing. If you're looking for a way to collect more accurate timing data, Torbit Insight (http://torbit.com http://torbit.com) is free and offers 100% sampling, histograms, medians, percentiles, and lots of breakdowns by browser, geography, etc.
- Benferhat 14y ago
  Torbit looks great, thanks.
isalmon 14y ago
This article is a great promotion for Cloudflare, but it does not really explain WHY page speed matters. Of course we all want our websites to load fast. I'd be more curious to see how the speed correlates with your conversion rates.
- SquareWheel 14y ago
  Google and Amazon have put out studies on this, and I wouldn't be surprised if Cloudflare has done so as well. Speed absolutely ties in to conversions. Amazon's report: "Every 100ms delay costs 1% of sales" https://sites.google.com/site/glinden/Home/StanfordDataMining.2006-11-28.ppt?attredirects=0 https://sites.google.com/site/glinden/Home/StanfordDataMinin...
  - isalmon 14y ago
    Well, I understand it matters for Amazon and Google, but I'd be curious to see how it works in case of OP's website. Obviously it's going to be different from Amazon. I guess the subject is a little bit misleading.
    - SquareWheel 14y ago
      I'm sure it varies by market, so the only way to know for sure would be to set up an A/B test and introduce artificial slowness.
- Cherian 14y ago
  Author here. I am no way connected to CloudFlare. Just evaluating them since they have a free plan. Everything else IIRC needs a credit card and I am not willing to use that. That said I am not 100% happy with CloudFlare.
- youngtaff 14y ago
  I see very mixed results from people using CloudFlare
dotborg 14y ago
over 2 seconds is quite bad result, when you make new website today using modern tools, page load should be below 1 second,
sh_vipin 14y ago
1. Is there any tool where I can check the page speed of a website. 2. for a site like http://syncfin.com http://syncfin.com where i have to use 4 bright images, is there any particular format I should keep the images in. Basically when there are multiple heavy images to be loaded , what would be the best strategy to optimize the page speed. thanks in advance for any pointers to relevant articles and tips.
- j_s 14y ago
  you could load a small placeholder (1x1 solid-white .gif, etc.), load the massive images with javascript, then animate them in once they are loaded. still have to stick with the current setup when javascript is disabled though!
  - sh_vipin 14y ago
    Thanks a lot. Btw, I found out some pretty nice online tools. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed and http://loadimpact.com http://loadimpact.com
- youngtaff 14y ago
  Use a RUM tool - Google Analytics is the easiest one but up the sample rate - Torbit, LogNormal and others are available. Use WebPageTest.org to carry out spot tests.
  - sh_vipin 14y ago
    Thanks youngtaff. I also googled a bit and found out http://loadimpact.com http://loadimpact.com . It is very good . I did analysis of my site ( http://loadimpact.com/test/view/1262390 http://loadimpact.com/test/view/1262390) on this and that shows the effect of shared hosting on it. !!
rednukleus 14y ago
I find myself visiting slow loading sites less often than snappy ones. The slow load times are one of the two big reasons why I stopped visiting The Verge.

66 points by gingerjoos 14y ago

DrJokepu 14y ago

Off topic, but the as the sidebar refuses to resize it's really difficult to read this on the iPhone.

3825 14y ago
This is not a perfect solution but if you use Pocket or InstaPaper, add this to your reading list and you should be able to read much more easily. :)
lessnonymous 14y ago
Hit the "Reader" button in the URL bar

frozenport 14y ago

Isn't 3 seconds a lot? I try to keeps our numbers under 1 second, although we only target the USA. The biggest improvement to our page load speed came from using a php cache (xcache) and specifying client cache lifetimes. The first got us to around 1 second and the second meant that the best case (which happened often) was about 0.5s

cleverjake 14y ago
3 < 20, especially when talking about dialup/dsl lines in Nigeria
- ohwp 14y ago
  But that only accounts for download size.
thejosh 14y ago
I think he means server -> client full rendering over "3000ms rendering by the server" (for example if you were using PHP a page taking 3000ms to load before even starting to render on the client is insane).
Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago
I personally think that even one second is way too long. Especially if it's about web shopping or any other service which actually requires user to browse content, and not read long articles or so. I just complained to one online cartoon about this, changing from strip to strip takes 1,5 seconds and that's super slow afaik. It really annoys users.
Cherian 14y ago
Author here. I meant DOM ready in 3 seconds. Our server response time is under 300 ms. Details here: http://d.pr/i/h5Vx http://d.pr/i/h5Vx

ericcholis 14y ago

Page Speed often gets confused for a few things. Here's how it really breaks down: 1) App Server Response. How long it takes your application to issue a successful response? 2) Network Speed. A server response for a 500MB file is fast, but downloading it isn't 3) DOM Processing. Great, you've reached the user's browser, now how long does it take the page to load into the DOM 4) Page Rendering. Only done after all the "assets" are downloaded. This is usually the final state of the page. Yes, if your Google Page Speed number is super high, you've got a problem. But it helps to be able to break down each step of that number, to identify where the bottleneck is. Also, as the author mentioned, be aware that every computer is different. One really slow internet connection will drastically affect your page speed averages. A small benchmark for you, one of my applications has an average app server response time of about 350ms. But, one page has an average Page Speed of 5 seconds. I'm diagnosing why that page is so slow, it looks like a few external assets are causing the slowdown.

Cherian 14y ago
Author here. You are right. This is precisely the reason why we are looking at CDNing. Our server response time is under 300 ms and our page speed score is 96/100 http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/35984/strategies-for-very-fast-delivery-of-webpages/36253#36253 http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/35984/strategi...
rimantas 14y ago
There are a couple of thing missing in your list, and those are quite important: Number of requests needed to load all your assets, latency and blocking. Browsers only load limited number of assets in parallel, so if you have a lot they will wait. Latency makes things bad (especially on mobile), but in case you have a lot of assets it makes it even worse. Also, keep in mind, that most often it is the latency that kills the speed of the loading. It does not really matter if it takes 20 or 60ms to download your asset if the latency is 10x that. Blocking: your #4 is not exactly right, browsers can start rendering the page at once, but if you try to load scripts first they will block rendering. Hence the importance of understanding where to request your css and js and how to load them.

driverdan 14y ago

If you're having a problem with cache expiration use a remote monitoring app like CopperEgg[1] (free) or Pingdom[2] (paid). Not only will it monitor your site and send alerts if it goes down or is slow, it will keep your cache fresh and full. 1: http://copperegg.com/ http://copperegg.com/ 2: https://www.pingdom.com/ https://www.pingdom.com/

maczyx 14y ago
Pingdom also has free option.
- damniatx 14y ago
  for only one site.

alan_cx 14y ago

Well...... for some reason I'm yet to even begin to understand (I have mailed the site, got no reply at all, but even so I assume its something my end, but it doesn't happen on any other site, weird...), HN takes about 30 secs to load any page, and I don't get the CSS either, but I still use the site regularly as I value the content. Make of that what you will.

Cherian 14y ago
Author here. I am not sure I really understand the question. Can you explain a bit more?
- alan_cx 14y ago
  No question. Just showing that in this case speed isnt putting me off using the site.
bad_user 14y ago
30s to load any page? Really? Just gathered some stats from my browser by loading the link we are on: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4973322 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4973322 11 requests 20.91KB transferred 921ms (onload: 949ms, DOMContentLoaded: 927ms This had caching turned on, while with caching turned off: 11 requests 38.49KB transferred 1.29s (onload: 1.30s, DOMContentLoaded: 1.12s) Note that I'm on a broadband connection, but on the other hand I'm connecting from Romania, so about 100-300ms of latency come from my non-US location if the website doesn't use some kind of CDN.
- alan_cx 14y ago
  Quite. As I say, it must be something my end, specific to me. Other wise loads of people would be complaining.
badgar 14y ago
You've been slowbanned. A moderator didn't like something you said and wants you to leave HN, but didn't feel that hellbanning you was appropriate. Instead, they want you to get frustrated with the slowness and give up.

kmfrk 14y ago

Speaking of which, is enabling gzip in S3 still a pain?

dmpatierno 14y ago
With S3, yes. However, the CloudFront CDN works great for gzip now with web-backed distributions, assuming things are configured properly on your end.

RyanZAG 14y ago

The discussion actually misses two critical aspects - network topology and device usage in 3rd world countries. Where is the speed issue coming into play? There are 3 areas of concern 1) App server and backbone speed - This what the discussion is centering on. CDN is good. 2) Connection speed between client and ISP - This is a critical issue when dealing with performance in 3rd world countries. CDN will NOT help here! - As an example, there is likely a 200-300ms roundtrip from your servers to the CDN and customer ISP. By using a CDN, you remove this 200-300ms. If the customer is using GRPS with 5000ms latency, your CDN has done almost nothing! 3) Customer's processing speed - If your customer is using an old blackberry phone, and your page is using complicated javascript, it could take 30+ seconds for the page to render for the user, even if the content were local. A way to get a grasp of the situation is not to filter your page load speed by country, but to drill down further and also use the user agent. Filter by country + user agent should let you know if the slowdown is caused by old Nokia phones, or if it's across Firefox and Chrome also. In many cases, the solution is often to have a mobile WAP-alike site that has no fancy resources and just text and html fields. You can use javascript to detect if the page is loading slowly (15+ secs), and pop up a link to the special wap site.

chacham15 14y ago

What tool are you guys using to get the notifications?

Cherian 14y ago
Google Analytics alerts

joshfraser 14y ago

There are a lot of issues with using Google Analytics for collecting performance data. As mentioned, their use of averages leads to a lot of problems and issues from outliers. GA heavily samples (1% by default) & only collects timing data from browsers that support Nav Timing. If you're looking for a way to collect more accurate timing data, Torbit Insight (http://torbit.com http://torbit.com) is free and offers 100% sampling, histograms, medians, percentiles, and lots of breakdowns by browser, geography, etc.

Benferhat 14y ago
Torbit looks great, thanks.

isalmon 14y ago

This article is a great promotion for Cloudflare, but it does not really explain WHY page speed matters. Of course we all want our websites to load fast. I'd be more curious to see how the speed correlates with your conversion rates.

SquareWheel 14y ago
Google and Amazon have put out studies on this, and I wouldn't be surprised if Cloudflare has done so as well. Speed absolutely ties in to conversions. Amazon's report: "Every 100ms delay costs 1% of sales" https://sites.google.com/site/glinden/Home/StanfordDataMining.2006-11-28.ppt?attredirects=0 https://sites.google.com/site/glinden/Home/StanfordDataMinin...
- isalmon 14y ago
  Well, I understand it matters for Amazon and Google, but I'd be curious to see how it works in case of OP's website. Obviously it's going to be different from Amazon. I guess the subject is a little bit misleading.
  - SquareWheel 14y ago
    I'm sure it varies by market, so the only way to know for sure would be to set up an A/B test and introduce artificial slowness.
Cherian 14y ago
Author here. I am no way connected to CloudFlare. Just evaluating them since they have a free plan. Everything else IIRC needs a credit card and I am not willing to use that. That said I am not 100% happy with CloudFlare.
youngtaff 14y ago
I see very mixed results from people using CloudFlare

dotborg 14y ago

over 2 seconds is quite bad result, when you make new website today using modern tools, page load should be below 1 second,

sh_vipin 14y ago

1. Is there any tool where I can check the page speed of a website. 2. for a site like http://syncfin.com http://syncfin.com where i have to use 4 bright images, is there any particular format I should keep the images in. Basically when there are multiple heavy images to be loaded , what would be the best strategy to optimize the page speed. thanks in advance for any pointers to relevant articles and tips.

j_s 14y ago
you could load a small placeholder (1x1 solid-white .gif, etc.), load the massive images with javascript, then animate them in once they are loaded. still have to stick with the current setup when javascript is disabled though!
- sh_vipin 14y ago
  Thanks a lot. Btw, I found out some pretty nice online tools. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed and http://loadimpact.com http://loadimpact.com
youngtaff 14y ago
Use a RUM tool - Google Analytics is the easiest one but up the sample rate - Torbit, LogNormal and others are available. Use WebPageTest.org to carry out spot tests.
- sh_vipin 14y ago
  Thanks youngtaff. I also googled a bit and found out http://loadimpact.com http://loadimpact.com . It is very good . I did analysis of my site ( http://loadimpact.com/test/view/1262390 http://loadimpact.com/test/view/1262390) on this and that shows the effect of shared hosting on it. !!

rednukleus 14y ago

I find myself visiting slow loading sites less often than snappy ones. The slow load times are one of the two big reasons why I stopped visiting The Verge.