Wall of fame for performance of pages

Analysis
1

I wanted to see which pages were performing best. I used speedIndex as a measure for this, to test for page’s visual parts being displayed.

So I started by limiting my scope to top Alexa rank of 1000, and within this scope find the top 10 pages with best speedIndex. This would become my Wall of Fame. Let’s see this for the run of 1 Feb 2014:

select rank, url, renderStart, speedIndex, onLoad, PageSpeed from httparchive:runs.2014_02_01_pages
where rank < 100 order by speedIndex asc limit 10

The interesting bit is to observe other parameters:

  • renderStart: if the page could be optimized better, to begin
    rendering sooner, could the performance be improved? Almost all the
    pages begin rendering > 1s.
  • PageSpeed: pages with low page speed score have high scope of improvement. Can these pages analyse using page speed, and improve performance even more?
  • onLoad: compare this to the onload times. It’s interesting to see that onload doesn’t correlate to speedIndex.

As properties keep optimizing their pages constantly, it would be interesting to see the patterns of each of the above pages over time, and see if performance has improved or degraded over time.

5 Likes
2

If I’m not mistaken, a query like this…

select rank, url, renderStart, speedIndex, onLoad, PageSpeed from httparchive:runs.2014_05_15_pages where rank < 100 order by PageSpeed asc limit 100

…should show which of the 100 most popular sites (according to Alexa ranking when the data was gathered) offer the worst PageSpeed score.

Assuming each hasn’t done so yet, if the sites on this list were to make some straightforward optimizations like enabling compression or leveraging browser caching they would reduce the largest amount of unnecessary data sent over the wire on the world wide web.

That is, this query should show a prioritized list of who most desperately needs some optimization evangelization, no?

1 Like
3

Wow yes this is awesome! It’s a real shame. Wikipedia is an awesome resource for the internet. What would it take to improve it’s page speed? perhaps an article could be written where we do a code review for wikipedia :slight_smile:

4

this is cool; but it seems since October-2015 there’s no more PageSpeed field, 2015_09_15 seems to be the last one I can get PageSpeed scores, after that month the same query get null in PageSpeed; anyone knows why or have alternative fieldname?

SELECT
  rank,
  url,
  renderStart,
  speedIndex,
  onLoad,
  PageSpeed
FROM
  httparchive:runs.2015_09_15_pages
WHERE
  rank < 100
ORDER BY
  PageSpeed DESC
LIMIT
  100