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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

#251

Post by ivan_gammel »

fendy3002 wrote: post #246
ivan_gammel wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 p…

Not competing website but other average website in general. Say that averagely HN load for 1000ms and it's positioned around top 15% fastest. And if your website load for 1100 ~ 1200ms will be okay. OP's point is, if you're able to speed up to range of 800 ~ 900ms it may not resulting in much higher conversion. However if your site is at 1800ms range it's worthwhile to increase to 1200ms range

I don't think that it works this way. If bounce rate matters for you, because your website is part of sales conversion funnel, then you do not benchmark against random "average" website like HN, because you do not build your site the same way, your audience is likely different from many different angles and you cannot really measure the response time under representative conditions (because you likely do not know them). The only sensible benchmark you can have is the performance of your own website. It makes sense to collect some low hanging fruits, but further optimizations generally make sense when you have enough traffic to reach statistic significance in A/B tests. And those tests will not always result in more optimized version, because content matters too and better content may outperform faster version in terms of conversion, so it will often be two steps forward and one step back.

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

#252

Post by kevincox »

ta-run wrote: post #179
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1MB per photo is fine. It's the content after all. Many sites today will load 10MB of JS and custom font crap alone, just to show a few paragraphs of text. I don't think the point is the size itself, but it's the content vs. bloat ratio.

What's the substitute to not using custom fonts? Or is there a better way to load it? I'm having a hard-time convincing our brand team to defaulting to a system font.

For most things just using the user's configured font is almost as good, if not better. For cases where you really want to make something stand out custom fonts can be nice but you can also try using "font stacks" that the user has already installed.

In general I recommend using the default font for "body text" because you know it is something that the user finds easy to read. For headings, buttons and smaller strings of text you can be more creative but even then you can consider things like trying system fonts first and deferring the custom font load until after the content.

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

#253

Post by jsjohnst »

johnchristopher wrote: post #187
alpaca128 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in no way does it deal with customers conversion, retention rates and all those things. Those metrics would only be meaningful if the average visitor knew how fast websites and computers can be, and if there are well-known alternatives to your site. Having standards is preferrable to aiming for mediocrity imho. YouTube probably has decent retention rates but it's a bloated pile of UX hell that people use for a lack…

> Those metrics would only be meaningful if the average visitor knew how fast websites and computers can be, and if there are well-known alternatives to your site. Having standards is preferrable to aiming for mediocrity imho. Of course visitors don't care about commercial and marketing metrics. They clearly rely on other metrics to decide whether or not visit or stay on a site. And my question still stands: who has…

> And my question still stands: who has numbers or data that show that those 14kb pages perform better in regard to the commercial metrics than heavier pages ? And I mean in the field data, not a synthetic test.

A trivial search will find you tons of heavily reviewed research that shows web page performance directly impacts e-commerce conversion/sales and this is widely known in the industry. This article laid out a solid technical explanation for why staying under 14kb can have substantial improvements in performance. You refusing to see the connection there, or are you disputing it?

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

#254

Post by baobob »

ksec wrote: post #228

Are there any reason why we cant have TCP slow start initial window to 100 packets or higher? I could easily see 95% of internet could be 150KB page on first load.

About 10 years ago it was possible to observe non-RFC behaviour from (IIRC) google.com doing exactly this. I don't know if they still do it

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

#255

Post by hawk_ »

jacooper wrote: post #212
hawk_ wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they do that? Do they use some nonstandard tcp stack?

You can change TCP slow start on Linux. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17015611/how-to-disable-...

> break the TCP standard

Oh ok, but then is it really breaking the standard as OP claims?

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

#256

Post by withinboredom »

johnchristopher wrote: post #187
alpaca128 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in no way does it deal with customers conversion, retention rates and all those things. Those metrics would only be meaningful if the average visitor knew how fast websites and computers can be, and if there are well-known alternatives to your site. Having standards is preferrable to aiming for mediocrity imho. YouTube probably has decent retention rates but it's a bloated pile of UX hell that people use for a lack…

> Those metrics would only be meaningful if the average visitor knew how fast websites and computers can be, and if there are well-known alternatives to your site. Having standards is preferrable to aiming for mediocrity imho. Of course visitors don't care about commercial and marketing metrics. They clearly rely on other metrics to decide whether or not visit or stay on a site. And my question still stands: who has…

It will vary between industries and target markets. The best thing to do is a/b test it by synthetically giving your customers a slow loading page and seeing how it affects your metrics. I’ve only worked one place that was brave enough to do this and client loading speed was highly correlated to conversion rate.

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

#257

Post by strken »

ksec wrote: post #228

Are there any reason why we cant have TCP slow start initial window to 100 packets or higher? I could easily see 95% of internet could be 150KB page on first load.

If you're interested in why it was originally increased to 10 segments, here's the RFC: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6928.html.

That was a decade ago, but I have no idea if the underlying fundamentals have changed since then. It's possible they still need to protect really bad connections, e.g. those in developing countries.

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

#258

Post by heisenbit »

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?

There is a reason for this limit. It is intended to avoid congesting the network and avoid packet loss. Yes, when you always yell your counterpart is a lot less likely to miss your message but don‘t be surprised if people around you get upset.

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

#259

Post by rockostrich »

tracker1 wrote: post #207
nousermane wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was skeptical coming from running my home server with nginx as a reverse proxy for a bunch of services, but caddy is a joy to use.

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

#260

Post by okasaki »

jagrsw wrote: post #243
tyingq wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

62 bytes is surely not right :) I see your 31.4kb uncompressed, but 9.6kb over the wire.

Folks, b is bits, B is bytes. For someone who deals with IT/telecomm the careless use of bits, bytes, B, b, kB/s, kb/s, kbps, MiB/s, Gbit is a source of confusion, because all those abbreviations have a very specific and distinct meaning. And whenever someone writes something not very obvious (eg Gbit for line speed, or kb for a size of a file or network transfer chunk), I need to figure out if they don't understand…

I think this case-sensitive byte/bit distinction was always a bad idea, and what you're experiencing is the consequence of a bad idea, not stupid people.

For example sometimes MESSAGES ARE WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS. Now what does your B mean?

Just write b for byte and bit for bit and there's no ambiguity.

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