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A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

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Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#151

Post by panzerboiler »

thethirdone wrote: post #33
GrumpySloth wrote: post #24

That's only doable with a text-centric website. I'm currently finishing a photography section for my personal website, and the gallery pages are several hundred kBs in size, while single photo page is almost 1MB in size (provided you load it on a 28" screen; browser will load smaller variants on smaller screens). Most of that weight is the thumbnails (and almost-full-size photo in the latter case). The only JS I have…

I don't think a site where the key content is large (relative to text) can be expected to deliver that content super fast. However, quickly loading the bulk of the website and perhaps having a placeholder for the image that has yet to load will still make the site better. I remember seeing something that allowed you to create really blurry placeholders that are tiny, but I can't find it now.

Maybe it was [blurhash](https://blurha.sh/)?

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#152

Post by hackernewds »

iainmerrick wrote: post #108
onion2k wrote: post #95

I wonder if anyone has studied the impact of latency on user behavior while considering the impact of user expectations from their typical connection speed. Whenever I see an article about page speed optimization, the assumption is that a user will give up if a page takes too long to load, ans that everyone gives up after X seconds. Usually X is about 7s based on a Nielson article from years and years ago. The thing…

I don’t have a citation handy, but this is something that Google has famously studied. They claimed years ago that a tiny increase in the loading time of the Google home page led to a measurable decrease in the number of searches (like, a few percent). Not everyone is operating “at Google scale”, of course, but in aggregate the effect is real and faster-loading pages have better metrics. So, most satellite internet u…

Amazon has publicly stated that every 100ms in additional loading time leads to 1% loss in revenue. For the scale of Amazon, that is massive

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#153

Post by iainmerrick »

onion2k wrote: post #124
iainmerrick wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have a citation handy, but this is something that Google has famously studied. They claimed years ago that a tiny increase in the loading time of the Google home page led to a measurable decrease in the number of searches (like, a few percent). Not everyone is operating “at Google scale”, of course, but in aggregate the effect is real and faster-loading pages have better metrics. So, most satellite internet u…

most satellite internet users won’t give up just because your page is slow My point is that 'slow' is a relative measure against other websites, not an objective value. So long as your website is faster than a typical website then users won't give up. Trying to be faster than average is worthwhile, but trying to be as fast as possible might not bring any additional value. It's also possible (likely, in my opinion) th…

This is a complex problem that probably doesn't have a straightforward answer. Using the mantra 'make your website as fast as possible' means you won't get it wrong, so it's worth doing, but you almost certainly get diminishing returns for that effort as you optimize for things like shaving off milliseconds and bytes.

Yeah, that's fair. My point (really just repeating hearsay -- I should check that Google research still stands up!) is just that load time optimization apparently has a bigger benefit than you might expect, and the diminishing returns don't kick in until much later than you'd expect. Edit to add: and the post being discussed has a good point that there's a performance shelf at ~14KB, so a small improvement can have a big impact.

Although... that said... if Google really thought sites should be as fast as possible, wouldn't they make a smaller GoogleTagManager.js script?

A good question! They're definitely not the most consistent. The left hand says one thing, some of their thousand right hands do the exact opposite...

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#154

Post by wickedsight »

johnchristopher wrote: post #105
phire wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even for media focused websites, this 14KB rule is probably still worth following. Not for the whole web page, obviously. But you should still be aiming to maximize the impact of that first 14KB. Ideally you want to deliver enough for the first layout and paint, so that someone can quickly see the frame of the webpage and then you want to minimize the amount of visual changes caused by subsequent data. Ideally the fi…

Is there number, data, lab test session that proves it's worthwhile ? I sometime feel like these are all KPI detached from conversion but since it can be measured we do measure it.

You can easily do a very simple test yourself to see whether (and in which cases) this is worthwhile:

In your browser, open dev tools, go to the network tab and enable throttling. For fun, set it all the way down to GPRS speed.

Next, refresh that blog, you'll nearly instantly see the web page.

Then, refresh the HN home page, quite quickly, you'll see the list of articles in a bare-ish HTML page and a little later it becomes pretty when the CSS is loaded.

Finally, open any modern news site, since a news site is supposedly text-centric, it should be a fair comparison. I picked CNBC and it took 30 seconds for the first text to become readable.

I live in a country with ubiquitous broadband and near full coverage of 4/5G mobile internet, so for my country, this is a non-issue. Because of this, one of our most popular news sites takes nearly a minute to become readable at GPRS speeds. When I visit more rural areas in other European countries, this leads to me being unable to visit most web sites that were made for my country and it's extremely frustrating. Especially if you're in a bind and quickly want to find some information, because Google also takes ages to load over slow internet and is nearly unusable (and so is DDG, in case you want to try an alternative).

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#155

Post by dmurray »

zinodaur wrote: post #94

I like the idea mentioned in the article of increasing the number of packets sent in the slow start - as far as I know you could just crank that from the server side TCP stack to something much larger, right?

Or have the server adapt based on page size. Even if starting with 10 packets at a time is optimal when sending an arbitrarily large payload, it's probably not optimal for an 11-packet payload - just send the whole thing at once.

I don't know enough about web servers to know why the good ones don't already do this. I suppose it may be reading data from a stream where it doesn't know the size up front.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#156

Post by donkeyd »

iainmerrick wrote: post #108
onion2k wrote: post #95

I wonder if anyone has studied the impact of latency on user behavior while considering the impact of user expectations from their typical connection speed. Whenever I see an article about page speed optimization, the assumption is that a user will give up if a page takes too long to load, ans that everyone gives up after X seconds. Usually X is about 7s based on a Nielson article from years and years ago. The thing…

I don’t have a citation handy, but this is something that Google has famously studied. They claimed years ago that a tiny increase in the loading time of the Google home page led to a measurable decrease in the number of searches (like, a few percent). Not everyone is operating “at Google scale”, of course, but in aggregate the effect is real and faster-loading pages have better metrics. So, most satellite internet u…

Well then, since Google these days is slow as hell on slow internet, I guess users with slow internet are no longer important.

When trying to find something on Google while visiting smaller towns in Germany, it's often down right unusable. Then again, I've been used to broadband and 4G for many years now.

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#157

Post by ChrisRR »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #117
NavinF wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wat. 1MB per photo is tiny when the photo is the content. You need ~100KB for a high quality 512x512 WebP. AVIF will be slightly better but still doesn’t have universal support. We’ve had 4K (8MP) screens for a decade now and normal DSLRs shoot 25MP so you can zoom in.

Bandwidth is extremely carbon intensive. Someone viewing a couple of few 25MP images online could use 20g to 100g of CO2 (depending on compression).

And how much carbon would they use having those photos printed out and mailed to them to look at?

Given that they could be streaming 1080p video instead, I think viewing a few photos is a relatively harmless hobby

Re: A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page

#159

Post by worldofmatthew »

ChrisRR wrote: post #157
worldofmatthew wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandwidth is extremely carbon intensive. Someone viewing a couple of few 25MP images online could use 20g to 100g of CO2 (depending on compression).

And how much carbon would they use having those photos printed out and mailed to them to look at? Given that they could be streaming 1080p video instead, I think viewing a few photos is a relatively harmless hobby

Physical item that can be looked out for 20 to 50 years vs a digital image. Not the same thing.
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