Does Google Practice What They Preach?
Google devotes a lot of time trying to improve the speed of web page delivery by providing webmasters with information and tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Page Speed.
I really appreciate these Google services. I use them all the time and find them invaluable in designing efficient web pages, but I was curious to see if Google utilized these tools to analyze their own web pages.
I decided to take a look at the efficiency of the Google Analytics Blog website… by submitting the home page to a non-Google product called Web Page Analyzer. Web Page Analyzer is a free online utility that calculates the page size, composition, and download time of a web page… then provides a very detailed report card on how the web page can be optimized.
The Web Page Analyzer report card for the Google Analytics Blog home page was not good… showing a page size greater than 750K… which would take 15 seconds to load on a broadband connection… and a whopping two and a half minutes to load on a 56K modem. Red flags were also issued for excessive objects, images, CSS and javascripts.
Fifteen seconds to load on a broadband connection? You and I both know that there is no way that Google is going to allow one of their own web pages to load that slowly… and in fact, the Google Analytics Blog site is very responsive… with most pages loading in less than 4 seconds.
So how can the Web Page Analyzer be so inaccurate in saying that the web page will take 15 seconds to load on a broadband connection? Well… the answer can be found in the Web Page Analyzer report card where it says “The site is using HTTP compression, otherwise called content encoding using gzip”. HTTP compression is a capability built into both web servers and web browsers that makes better use of available bandwidth… in other words, it makes the delivery of web pages a lot faster.
In a nutshell, the Google Analytics Blog website is avoiding slow web page delivery by using HTTP compression. Sounds like a great idea… why don’t all webmasters use HTTP compression?… it would definitely speed up the web. Long story short, HTTP compression (or gzip) is usually not available on shared hosting platforms… and most websites use a shared host company (BlueHost, StartLogic, GoDaddy, etc.).
Okay… let’s see how the Google Analytics Blog website does when it is analyzed by a Google tool called “Page Speed”. Well… Page Speed gives the analytics blog a grade of 77 out of 100… probably not up to Google standards… with the Page Speed report card showing room for improvement in combining external CSS, minifying CSS, minimizing DNS lookups, combining external javascripts, optimizing the order of styles and scripts and avoiding the use of CSS expressions.
To be honest, Google has a ton of their own web pages… and is it fair to expect every one of their web pages to be 100 percent efficient? You be the judge.
How other Google web pages were graded by Page Speed:
- Google Home Page – 93 out of 100
- Gmail Home Page – 77 out of 100
- Google Maps Home Page – 95 out of 100
- Google Images Home Page – 93 out of 100
- Google News Home Page – 91 out of 100
- Google Shopping Home Page – 94 out of 100
I decided to submit the above Google web pages to the Web Page Analyzer… and all of the pages were analyzed as loading in less than 3 seconds on a broadband connection with the exception of the News page… which was analyzed as taking 6 seconds to load on a broadband connection. It should also be noted that Google has the luxury of using HTTP compression on all of their web pages… making the pages load faster than the Web Page Analyzer estimates.
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