We spend a lot of time optimising our page load times because we have found a direct correlation between how fast a page displays in a browser and its bounce rate. There are still plenty of improvements left to roll out here, but I was interested in seeing how other Irish websites are faring at optimising their page load times.

I took the companies on the ISEQ 20 Index and added the top 5 indigenous Irish websites based on their traffic from Ireland according to Alexa and tested them for speed.  All tests were run using webpagetest.org and were run from Gloucester in the UK 5 times consecutively. The test emulated IE7 running over a 1.5 Mb/sec DSL connection.  For interest’s sake we also ran it on our own site and saw that we had several areas where we could improve.

A quick caveat: these results were run during just one period of one day and it could easily have been during a bad/busy period for one or more of the sites in question. If you’re interested in making a definitive list of the fastest and slowest Irish sites you should run the test again at various times of the day and on different days of the week.

The Fastest
Unsurprisingly the fastest sites are dominated by relatively simple sites that have largely static content. The page size is relatively low in all cases, maxing out at 250 KB with C&C Group.

  1. Greencore 2.0s
  2. Grafton PLC 2.1s
  3. Kerry Group 2.2s
  4. BOI 2.6s
  5. C&C Group 2.8s

The Slowest

  1. The Independent 15.9s, requiring 165 files and 1,500 KB
  2. RTE 9.8s, requiring 100 files and 478 KB
  3. Irish Times 8.7s, requiring 127 files and 866 KB
  4. Kingspan 9.3s, requiring 91 files and 1,316 KB
  5. FDB 9.1s, requiring 72 files and 613 KB

Full Results

In general the results were pretty disappointing with an average full page load time of over six seconds. Some very obvious improvements can be made. Text compression was not enabled on 18 of the 25 sites. There really is no excuse for a website not to have compression enabled these days as it is simple, well understood and implemented on every web server. This can reduce  bandwidth requirements by up to 70%.

The second major area for improvement is the sheer number of files that many of these sites require users to download. Each file has it own overhead and browsers can only download a certain number of files in parallel. On average each of the sites required 57 separate files to be downloaded, with The Independent requiring a truly massive 165 different files. This could largely be resolved by using CSS sprites and combining javascript & CSS files.

Start Rendering Sooner

Of course total download time doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes a good user experience can be achieved even if your page takes a long time to finish loading. The way to do this is to get the page to start rendering before the final files are down. The average start to render time for our sample list was 2.7 seconds and this is where some of the Irish web companies shine. For example, Paddy Power and boards.ie, despite being complex sites, start to render after just 1.5 seconds each giving their users a very acceptable experience.

So how does RevaHealth.com compare? Pretty well actually, but with  some obvious room for improvement. We had the fastest overall load time at 1.4 seconds, however our start to render time of 1.1 seconds was 300ms off of the mark. This comparison of home pages may be slightly unfair as RevaHealth.com’s home page is relatively simple compared to one of our typical landing pages. I reran the tests on Dentists in Manchester and we had a full loading time of 5 seconds which isn’t great and needs to be improved. Happily our start to render time was 1.5 seconds which I am pretty pleased with.

Let me know if I’ve made any mistakes in my analysis here. How does your site compare? Post your results in the comments