According to a study released yesterday by Strangeloop Networks, it takes an average of 10 seconds to load the top 2,000 websites on the internet. The list of these top sites has been compiled from Amazon’s Alexa list of top websites. Though some analysts argue that these results could be biased as Strangeloop is in the business of helping customers speed up their websites, they can still help developers optimize their sites better.
One of the biggest issues which were brought about in a conversation with Joshua Bixby, the President of Strangeloop, was the way in which the developers test their pages. Conventionally, developers test websites on their own machines though Strangeloop argues that the testing would be more effective if done from machines with configurations available to most users. The study conducted by Strangeloop uses Webpagetest, a speed testing tool developed by Patrick Meenan, a Google employee. Bixby said that the tool adds latency delays to round trip data in an attempt to better simulate loading times for users located far away from the website servers.
Bixby went on to say that a majority of tests by developers are run with absolutely no latency and on huge data centers which have incredible bandwidth. This means that the data centers on which the websites are tested are very close to the content delivery machines, which is tantamount to sending data inside a closed system with no external factors at play. This of course does not simulate how real world users actually access data, some of which are located thousands of kilometers away from the servers and with varying bandwidth.
Latency plays a key role in gauging the speed at which a page loads because requesting new elements on a webpage requires the web browser to make multiple network connections to the server. Though there are many ways in which the number of requests that are required by the browser before a webpage loads can be reduced, latency still plays a key role as the complexity of webpages is constantly increasing, the Strangeloop study showed. Bixby said that though the browsers are coming up with better ways to reduce latency between multiple connections, the growing complexity of webpages leaves the users at a stalemate with no boost in loading speeds.
However, the study has also showed that the top 2,000 websites load about 8 percent faster than a year earlier, indicating that browser optimization might not be that far behind the curve and may catch up soon.