For how many sites Runet open?

In Google, as always, raise the bar high. They have long stated that all sites, the opening of which 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 Telecom three and large digital retailers (9 sites in total). For all these companies, it is very important to increase the loyalty of users to the site, a great contribution to which is made by reducing the opening time of pages.



For example, Amazon.com (turnover for 2010 - $ 34.2 billion, + 40% per year) stated that an increase in the user’s opening time of the site by only 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.

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Technique

Our measurements were carried out as follows. With the help of the software and hardware complex of WEBO Software, users' behavior was modeled, which hourly during the week alternately opened all the sites participating in the study in Internet Explorer 8. The simulated loading of pages is fully consistent with the loading with the usual use of the browser. The computing capacity of the server used in the simulation, as well as all the connection parameters, including the channel bandwidth and distance from the sites being checked, remained unchanged during the entire testing period 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. Calculation error less than 5%.



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



If we compare these 3 areas among themselves by the number of fast sites in the industry, then the insurers were the fastest, followed by bankers, and then go online shopping.

What happened

Total distribution

Banks

Insurers

The shops

What common?

We analyzed the 3 slowest sites from each category in order to understand which common problems are peculiar to them.



Of course, the download speed depends on the complexity of the site, the amount of content and the range of services that the site provides. That is why many large companies are in the bottom lines of the tables. But it is also no secret that reducing the page load time by a factor of 2-3 even with a very complex site can be achieved through several elementary steps.



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



The average page size of these slow sites was 920 kb. In this case, the compression of text documents is applied only on 1 of 9 sites, and images are optimized only on 3 of 9 sites.



The average number of objects per page is 88. At the same time, the consolidation or long-term caching of static files is not applied on any of these sites.



Surprisingly, because simple changes in the configuration of a web server, connecting a CDN service or a ready-made software solution to optimize a site - all this does not require much experience and deep knowledge of web performance. Moreover, long-standing solutions and tutorials for speeding up websites running on Linux and Windows, on free, commercial and self-written CMS, exist and are actively developing. The implementation of basic measures to speed up the site due to, for example, compression or client caching usually takes no more than a few minutes.



Without thinking today about reducing the time of opening pages, large companies are depriving themselves of tomorrow's profit, which they could bring increased user loyalty to the site.