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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

#201

Post by onion2k »

dieulot wrote: post #200
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…

See https://wpostats.com/ which lists known conversion metrics improvements. There are pages upon pages of them.

Seeing things like "SportsShoes.com found that faster-than-average mobile visits were 41% more likely to convert than slower-than-average visits." suggests I might be right...

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

#202

Post by cosarara »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #191
cosarara wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. I was disagreeing with the statement > Bandwidth is extremely carbon intensive. and the reasoning that supports that statement.

If people used less bandwidth, less new equipment would be bought to serve the increasing demand. Less bandwidth = Less carbon.

Maybe, or maybe the new equipment is much more efficient than the one it's replacing. It sounds true, but you can't really tell if it is or not, and really my annoyance is in saying it costs any estimated amount of energy, or carbon, to transfer 1GB of data. It does not, the transfer itself is basically cost-less. What costs money is running the infrastructure that makes it possible, and that's much harder to measure.

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

#203

Post by onion2k »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #195
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…

At one of my recent jobs (EU-wide consumer healtech) we managed to reduce bounce rate by addressing a number of issues indicated by DevTools, mostly focusing on time to render and time to interact. It indeed positively impacted conversion and I guess this is a common knowledge among marketing teams by now, that this works.

I think it's fairly obvious that a faster website is better. I'm not disputing that. What I'm saying is that there is a point where improving your website when it's already better than competing websites stops giving you enough value to be worthwhile. If you're in the bottom half of websites then you're giving up money and you need to improve. If you're in the top half, or top quarter, or whatever then maybe that engineering effort could be used to generate more revenue in more effective ways than just cranking up perf.

You could probably improve speed forever and always see a measurable improvement, but if that's costing more than you're seeing in added conversions, or you're doing it instead of improving features that would net a greater return, then you're doing the wrong thing.

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

#204

Post by avalanch »

Yhippa wrote: post #10

I'm getting 62 bytes over the network and 31.4 kilobytes uncompressed. This page has more content than most pages I visit that are megabytes in size. I wish there was an incentive to go back to smaller web pages in general.

This is size of HTTP 304 Not Modified response. Try refreshing page with CTRL + F5.

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

#205

Post by blfr »

bawolff wrote: post #148
blfr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, now that most of us control the server, is this an option?

Never tried it, but its listed as an option at https://linux.die.net/man/8/ip

Seems fraught with potential issues. Can I do this just for nginx?

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

#207

Post by tracker1 »

nousermane wrote: post #198
hoten wrote: post #138

Another optimization in the same vein: make sure the first KB contains the element, to avoid false-starts in the HTML parser. In fact, it's actually specified as an _error_ in the spec to have it come after 1KB! It's mentioned in passing on the Lighthouse docs for the charset audit[1], but here's a great breakdown by hsivonen[2]. Of course, in the headers is even better. Point is, try not to have too much cruft befor…

> Of course, in the headers is even better. Yes, much better. And given prevalence of UTF-8 this days, why not just hard-code your webserver to add such header everywhere: - Apache AddDefaultCharset utf-8 ... - nginx http { charset utf-8; ... - Caddy: done already with no explicit config required, yay!

Have to say, I absolutely love Caddy as a general webserver and reverse-proxy. Lightweight, easy to configure, relatively flexible, sane defaults.

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

#208

Post by ivan_gammel »

onion2k wrote: post #203
ivan_gammel wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one of my recent jobs (EU-wide consumer healtech) we managed to reduce bounce rate by addressing a number of issues indicated by DevTools, mostly focusing on time to render and time to interact. It indeed positively impacted conversion and I guess this is a common knowledge among marketing teams by now, that this works.

I think it's fairly obvious that a faster website is better. I'm not disputing that. What I'm saying is that there is a point where improving your website when it's already better than competing websites stops giving you enough value to be worthwhile. If you're in the bottom half of websites then you're giving up money and you need to improve. If you're in the top half, or top quarter, or whatever then maybe that eng…

>What I'm saying is that there is a point where improving your website when it's already better than competing websites stops giving you enough value to be worthwhile.

There's indeed a point where optimizations stop yielding meaningful results, but it is certainly not connected to the performance of competitor websites. As soon as an user lands on your website, only its own performance and accessibility matters and positive ROI can still be achieved well beyond the point when your start doing better than competition.

Where did you get this idea about competing websites from?

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

#209

Post by tracker1 »

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).

The bandwidth used for single images is dwarfed... massively by streaming video content... I don't think it's a use case that is worthy of excessive time/effort to optimize for size because of bandwidth cost/effects.

edit: I'm not saying don't do it if you can get away with a smaller image dimension, or do basic optimizations... but if your concern is the environmental impact from a simgle high-resolution image from a photography site, you're putting the emphasis in the wrong place.

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