Web App Speed - Hackdot

Re:Web App Speed by userbinator on Sunday May 31, 2015 @09:51PM (#9636419)

I understand the reasoning but I don't agree with their implementation, because it essentially favours large sites run by those who can afford the faster infrastructure, while penalising the small ones that may actually have more relevant and detailed content but not very fast servers. Sites which load much faster get a ranking advantage even if they offer only superficial lower-quality content.

Maybe if they didn't look at server response time, and only counted things like JS execution time, it would be a fairer ranking to those looking for substantive content. I'm quite willing to wait a lot longer, if it means I will spend more time reading a lengthy page once it loads, than to find a fast-loading page with little content.

That article was written 5 years ago, and while speed might not have been a huge factor back then, they could've changed it since --- certainly there is no evidence to suggest otherwise, and my experience with how Google's results have changed over time agree.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Web App Speed by anilgulecha on Sunday May 31, 2015 @11:50PM (#9636720)

Interesting take.

I'd hedge that 95-99% of alexa top 1000 sites could be delivered under 30kb -- just content+ css. (assuming ajax/video/fonts are asyncronous in google's algo and not counted towards load time).

In which case it's easy even for the cheapest AWS server to host and server instantaneously. I think the bigger sites have a distinct disadvantage -- they have so many tracking and ad resources, that it kills their load time.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Web App Speed by jakobegger on Monday June 01, 2015 @02:23AM (#9637024)

Yup. For my company website I made sure that most pages require just a single request to render: CSS is inlined and (small) scripts are loaded at the bottom of the page. This means that even when hosting it on a crappy host, without a CDN, you get stellar page load performance.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Web App Speed by billmalarky on Monday June 01, 2015 @11:08AM (#9639117)

Infrastructure is incredibly cheap these days. Hell there's even a free, high quality, CDN small organizations can take advantage of (cloudflare).

Software architecture has a lot more to do with app speed these days than expensive infrastructure does.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Web App Speed by userbinator on Monday June 01, 2015 @12:36PM (#9639976)

Hell there's even a free, high quality, CDN small organizations can take advantage of (cloudflare).

Cost is only part of the equation. What about those who don't want to use a CDN for, among other things, privacy reasons?

[ Parent | on HN ]