Victims of Their Own Success? 26 November, 2006 — Stuart Brown
How do the Alexa Top 100 fare in terms of page load times?
Posted in Security & Hacking, Networks
Tagged with: alexa, top, 100, network, speed, page, load, transfer, rate
Page load time is one of the key elements of web usability, and having a lagging response to your website can really dent your popularity. It's easy enough, for most sites, to handle 1,000 visitors a day - but the top sites out there have to handle thousands of requests per minute, so efficiency and capacity are key concerns. Alexa provide a (somewhat inaccurate) listing of the top 100 busiest sites worldwide, so I set up a script to gauge their responsiveness - and to see who came out on top.
Page size
Physical page size is one factor in determining transfer times - a larger page takes longer to transfer. Bear in mind that the figures below exclude images, CSS, javascript, etc - so the actual amount of data transferred could be considerably higher.
A worrying trend in East Asian sites is the rather bloated homepage - Korean company Nate boasts an impressive 257Kb of HTML - 900Kb if you include images! If you're stuck on 56K that's an eye-watering 5 minutes of load time. It's perhaps a mixed blessing, then, that internet access in South Korea is phenomenally quick - with broadband uptake higher than anywhere else in the world, and dense metropolitan areas served by massive net connections.
Little excuse for amazon.com to be leading the way at 114Kb, then (563Kb including images) - perhaps the trouble online on Black Friday in the US could have been averted with a little optimization. In this day and age I suspect it's probably safe enough to ditch the HTML 3.2 compliant tables and opt for more efficient CSS?
10 largest page sizes
 Global
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 English only
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10 smallest page sizes
Perhaps unsurprisingly, minimalist Google dominates the charts for smallness - at a featherweight 2.7Kb. Not as light as minimal Facebook, however - but certainly less than both live.com and yahoo.com by a factor of 3-5. It's enough to make all the difference!
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English only
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Page load time
10 longest load times
This is perhaps the crux - actual load times - of what defines the user experience. I suspect it may be the network location - there are a lot of tubes between China and the UK - but it seems the East Asian sites are the worst offenders when it comes to page load times. 57.8s on a 8Mbit connection is quite ridiculous!
Page size may be a factor, as with Amazon at a whopping 4s - excluding images! The minimal home page of ImageShack loads in an average (and somewhat dreary) 11.6s. Craigslist may have made the top 10, with 2.5s - but at least there's no images to be concerned with!
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English only
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10 shortest load times
And, so to the fastest sites - unsurprisingly enough, Google dominates the top ten - and with an honorable mention from Wikipedia at the bottom.
Indian portal rediff.com is a surprise entry - being the unusual combination of quick loading yet large sized, there must be a lot of processing power and bandwidth behind that site!
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English only
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Page transfer rate
10 highest page transfer rates
Transfer rate is not so much a measure of usability but that of sheer bandwidth - the lead site, free.fr, manages an impressive (and sustained through the test period) 205Kb per second for each page load - but wasn't amongst the top 10 fastest. Why not? Even at 205Kb/s, 60 Kb of HTML still takes 0.29s - 50% slower than Google's response.
Major news sites bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, and nytimes.com all have impressive bandwidth at their disposal too - but the text-heavy homepages mean their overall response times take a hit.
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10 slowest page transfer rates
Perhaps it's the 20 hops required to get to China, or the stupidly slow response rates of the routers once you get to China (I'm seeing response rates between 600-1000ms, for about 5 hops), but even the minimal design of China Google-clone soso.com chugs along. Perhaps it's the great firewall of China purposefully slowing external traffic to a crawl?
Regardless, the East Asian sites are slow by all other standards, although Facebook, with all it's minimal glory, did manage an impressively slow average transfer rate, with the 2.4Kb taking over a second to load. Google.com also made the Top 10 (English) sites - although I do feel this particular metric has a bias against smaller homepages (see caveats, below)
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Caveats and Methodology
- Data is averaged out from 6,100 data non-parallel samples (610 per site) in hourly intervals over 2 and a half days. (It should be noted that these data samples fell over thanksgiving and black friday, which may not be indicative of typical US browsing habits).
- Testing was performed using an 8Mb ADSL connection based in the UK. Network location also appears to be a factor for some international sites.
- Data is based only on (likely cached) homepage load times, as an indication of network performance rather than computational power.
- The sites sampled are taken from and only from the Alexa Top 100 listing.
- Alexa stats are notoriously skewed.
- Furthermore, Alibaba.com was not included as they did not permit access to our bot. Other sites may have offered 'cloaked' or differing content to our bot based on a number of factors.
- The page size is limited to the HTML content only, and does not include off-site pages (iframes or ads), flash, images, or CSS/javascript.
- Rediff.com is a major Indian website with English content, and thus is included in the English listings.
- Transfer is defined as the page size divided against transfer speed. Note that there may be some bias against smaller page sizes, due to additional time required for DNS resolution, connection initialization, and other effects outside of page transfer.
