Page Speed often gets confused for a few things. Here's how it really breaks down:<p>1) App Server Response. How long it takes your application to issue a successful response?<p>2) Network Speed. A server response for a 500MB file is fast, but downloading it isn't<p>3) DOM Processing. Great, you've reached the user's browser, now how long does it take the page to load into the DOM<p>4) Page Rendering. Only done after all the "assets" are downloaded. This is <i>usually</i> the final state of the page.<p>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.<p>Also, as the author mentioned, be aware that every computer is different. One really slow internet connection will drastically affect your page speed averages.<p>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.
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 (<a href="http://torbit.com" rel="nofollow">http://torbit.com</a>) is free and offers 100% sampling, histograms, medians, percentiles, and lots of breakdowns by browser, geography, etc.
Isn't 3 seconds a lot?<p>I try to keeps our numbers under 1 second, although we only target the USA.<p>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
The discussion actually misses two critical aspects - network topology and device usage in 3rd world countries.<p>Where is the speed issue coming into play? There are 3 areas of concern<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
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.<p>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.
1. Is there any tool where I can check the page speed of a website.<p>2. for a site like <a href="http://syncfin.com" rel="nofollow">http://syncfin.com</a> 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.<p>thanks in advance for any pointers to relevant articles and tips.
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.<p>1: <a href="http://copperegg.com/" rel="nofollow">http://copperegg.com/</a><p>2: <a href="https://www.pingdom.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pingdom.com/</a>
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.<p>Make of that what you will.
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.
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.