How long do Runet sites open?

Google, as always, raises the bar high. They have long claimed that all sites whose opening time is more than 2 seconds are slow. We decided to evaluate which Russian portals took this height.

The study examined sites in 3 areas: banks (TOP 50 by assets), insurance (TOP 50 by assets) and online stores of the Big Three Telecom and large digital retailers (a total of 9 sites). For all these companies, it is very important to increase user loyalty to the site, a great contribution to which is made by reducing the opening time of pages.

For example, Amazon.com (turnover in 2010 - $ 34.2 billion, + 40% per year) said that an increase in the time a user opens a site by just 0.1 seconds leads to a loss of 1% of sales [ link ]. A study by Akamai and Phocuswright showed that 43% of people are not ready to wait for the site to open for more than 4 seconds.

Methodology

Our measurements were carried out as follows. Using the WEBO Software company’s hardware and software complex, we simulated the behavior of users who, every hour, for a week, alternately opened all the sites involved in the study in Internet Explorer 8. The simulated page loading progress was fully consistent with the loading progress during normal browser use. The computing power of the server used in the simulation, as well as all connection parameters, including channel bandwidth and distance from the sites being checked, remained unchanged throughout the entire period of checks and corresponded to modern standards for home computers and office workstations. At the end of the study, the average opening time was calculated pages of each site as the arithmetic average of all hourly checks.

When analyzing the results, we decided to introduce a more detailed gradation. Sites with a page opening time of up to 2 seconds are classified as "very fast", from 2 to 4 seconds - "fast", from 4 to 8 seconds - "satisfactory" and more than 8 seconds - "slowly".

If you compare these 3 areas with each other by the number of fast websites in the industry, then the fastest are insurers, followed by bankers, and then online stores.

What happened

General distribution

Banks

Insurers

The shops

What common?

We analyzed the 3 slowest sites from each category to understand what common problems they have in common.

Of course, the download speed directly depends on the complexity of the site, the amount of content and the set of services that the site provides. That is why many large companies were in the bottom rows of the tables. But it’s also not a secret that it is possible to reduce the page loading time by 2-3 times even for a very complex site due to several elementary steps.

This is what we saw when we studied the slow websites of companies like Alfa Insurance, Renaissance Insurance, Rosstrakh, MVideo, Euroset, Megafon, Sberbank, MDM Bank, Rusfinance Bank.

The average page size of these slow sites was 920 kb. At the same time, compression of text documents is applied only to 1 out of 9 sites, and images are optimized only to 3 out of 9 sites.

The average number of objects per page is 88. However, combining or long-term caching of static files is not used on any of these sites.

Surprisingly, simple changes to the web server configuration, the inclusion of a CDN service or a ready-made software solution for website optimization - all this does not require much experience and in-depth knowledge in the field of web performance. Moreover, ready-made solutions and guides on speeding up sites running on Linux and Windows for free, commercial and self-written CMS have long existed and are actively developing. The implementation of basic measures to speed up a site through, for example, compression or client caching, usually takes no more than a few minutes.

Without thinking today about reducing the time it takes to open pages, large companies are depriving themselves of tomorrow's profit, which could be brought to them by increased user loyalty to the site.