The web is getting faster - per WMT

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

According to my webmaster tools account the web is getting faster. The Labs/Site Performance section is updated daily in my account and over the couple of weeks I have optimized a lot of different things resulting in a faster site. (3.9 second average down to 2.9).

When the site was at 3.2 seconds the dashboard said this was faster than 55% of sites. At 3.1 seconds it said faster than 54% of sites and at 3.0 is said faster than 53% of sites. At 2.9 it's faster than just 52% of sites. Unless the reporting is off, which it doesn't claim to be accurate, the net is getting faster quickly right now.

Whatever made me want to speed up my site apparently did the same to a lot of other webmasters :P

[tedster]

I agree that the average page speed being reported seems to be getting faster. Seems like a natural effect of a two year awareness campaign.

I just wish some of the ad networks were paying more attention to speed - as well as the social media giants who want their little chiclets spread around on every site.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

You don't like Facebook's share box having 10 javascript files and you don't like adsense inline css and multiple non-compressed javascript files?

hmm, neither do I!

Adding far fetched expires headers on images would also be a good thing... ad companies are you listening?

[anteck]

I recon it's pure BS.

I've never seen a website operate that fast, and most popular websites i've happened to test are usually bulked down with all kinds of code...

So where do they get 2.9 seconds from? Perhaps the glutton of 404 pages they seem to want to index lately!

[g1smd]

You jest, but I'm looking at a site which was previously reported as slow. More than 49 000 of the 50 000 URLs Google had previously pulled, now return 404 or 301 - served in 0.1 seconds or less. Seems to have done wonders for the average speed - unless I misread things.

[jecasc]

I recon it's pure BS.I've never seen a website operate that fast

The current performance of my webshop according to Google is: "On average, pages in your site take 0.7 seconds to load (updated on Jul 2, 2011). This is faster than 96% of sites."

Actually it is not so difficult to achieve high performance:
- Get rid of all 3d party widgets, tools and whatever is loaded from other websites.
- If you need some of the widgets, then cache them.
- gzip everything. CSS, javascript, everything
- Optimize image size.
- Get a dedicated server with enough power if you are on shared hosting.
- If you are on a dedicated server, then check how long ago you rented it and if your server is not outdated. If your dedicated server has been running for 5 years now, it may be time to make the investment in a new setup fee, and switch to a server with up to date hardware.
- Choose your CMS, shopping carts, forum software or whatever you are using wisely and according to your needs. Don't use systems like Typo 3 or Magento if you do not really need them.
- If your website is running on MySql or any other database, then check if you are using indexes where appropriate. Especially if you are running a system of your own creation. Proper indexing can improve performance for some database queries dramatically by thousands of %.

Of course one of the reasons the web is getting faster on average is higher server performance nowadays. You can get a quad core server with 8 GB RAM for much less than 200€/month nowadays.

If your site is loading slower than the average website there is definitely space for improvement.

On a side note: There was the IPv6 day a few weeks back and my webhoster decided to take part on an opt out basis. Meaning all the websites they host took part if they did not opt out. After everything went smoothly they decided to keep IPv6 up and running along IPv4. I do not know if it is a coincidence or not, but since then the speed of my websites as measured by Google has increased by 0.3 points. Until a few weeks back it was 1.0 seconds not 0.7. Does anybody know if Google bot supports IPv6? I know there have been some improvements regarding speed from IPv4 to IPv6. Headers have been optimized for example. I can't remember any recent changes to my website in the last few weeks which could explain the increase in measured speed.