Bangalore: Top 2,000 retail Web sites still take 10 seconds to load on average, according to a study by Strangeloop Networks. Strangeloop President Joshua Bixby says, “Pages continue to get bigger and continue to have more requests,". "In some ways we're losing the battle--or maybe it's a stalemate. We're not getting much better."
Bixby said, “Strangeloop's study uses a speed-testing tool called Webpagetest developed by Patrick Meenan, who started it at AOL but who now works for Google. That test adds delays called latency to round-trip communications to better simulate how ordinary people several steps removed from a Web site see it”.
Latency plays a big role in deciding the speed of website because it’s a problem when Web browser has to make multiple network connections to Web servers for new elements. Strangeloop’s study reveals that the complexity of Web pages is increasing at the same time as economization measures and browser speed are improving. The study also tells that out of 2,000 top retail Web sites 100 are slower on average- 10.36 seconds compared to 10.00 for the overall group and the reason is that these Web sites make 98 requests for resources such as images or JavaScript libraries, compared to 77 for the overall group.
Some other findings are; a repeat view of Web site which is supposed to be faster became slow this year by taking an average 6.20 seconds which was 5.10 seconds last year. IE9 is crowed as the fastest browsers taking an average of 7.12 seconds, followed by 7.15 seconds for Firefox 7, 7.5 seconds for Chrome, and 10 seconds for IE7.
