Before you search
Search engines focus on relentlessly optimizing the speed and relevancy of their results to user queries. They do side-by-side comparisons to see who gets the better/faster results. But what does the user experience before they've even searched? How do their respective homepages perform for users?
Using the network monitoring tool built-into Firefox, I took a quick peek behind the scenes to see the performance details of the three most popular search portals in the U.S. a
| Site | Total # of Requests | Total Data Downloaded (KB) | Time to Finish (seconds) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Initial Page Load | Avg. Refresh c | Initial Page Load | Avg. Refresh | Initial Page Load | Avg. Refresh | |
| 13 | 11 | 13,320 | 1,118 | 3.7 | 1.5 | |
| Bing | 51 | 30 | 337 | 157 | 5.7 | 3.5 |
| Yahoo | 66 | 63 | 1,832 | 1,549 | 8.3 | 5.9 |
All tests performed at the following time:
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21 June 2014 (Saturday) between 7-8:30pm PST
All tests performed in the following environment:
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Windows 8.1 Pro, 4GB Ram, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.00Ghz
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DSL Connection: ~20ms latency, ~2.5 Mbps DL, ~.5 Mbps UL b
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Firefox 30, a cleared cache, private browsing session
Assuming similar server availability [they all utilize a sophisticated CDN (content delivery network )]cwhat lessons can be learned from these results about page load performance?
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Having lots of images doesn't mean your page has to be big (or slow)
I fully expected Bing - which always has a big, eye-catching photo surrounding the search bar - to be the biggest and slowest page. But its size was several times smaller than Google or Yahoo. Always compress/optimize your photos.
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Cache large files to mitigate their effect on subsequent load times
Google's initial page size is the easily the biggest of all at more than 13KB, but it drops to less than 10% that size when refreshing. -
Fewer dependencies/files equals faster times
The speed of Google is found in its relatively small number of requests (13 initially). All of the back and forth from loading multiple resources adds up quickly, so consolidate your files where possible (even if it offends your organizational sensibilities).