Some notes on site speed

Speed for a site is an essential requirement, without which all investments made in other directions lose their effectiveness. We can have a site with the best design and excellent navigational aspects, but without the speed the user risks losing that emotional instinct that pushes him to click beyond.

A very fast site will have acceptable response times even in low-bandwidth conditions (as often happens on our smartphone), while in these cases a normal site will have poor times.

Google itself is raising a lot of awareness on this issue and most companies are investing in this direction.

The result of this type of optimisation is fortunately easy to measure. A service of this kind does not therefore create ambiguities.
The target is the "first paint" that measures the time elapsed between the user's request and the first materialization of the response on the display. In practice the "first paint" happens when the browser starts to draw the geometric figures and the user is finally satisfied with the concretization of the page in front of his eyes. The events "load" and "DOMContentLoaded" are dissociated from the first paint, but also relevant for the study of this science.

Over the years, we have developed an in-depth know-how and some of our own technologies on this subject. In addition, with this last job, we had the opportunity to further refine ourselves.

Today our mobile site is also a business card for any requests for consulting services in the field of performance optimization of web browsing.

Our site, with the tests that we have carried out in our lan (so in more than optimal band condition) is able to manifest the first paint after about 20 milliseconds. Unfortunately, our internal WEB server does not have a good connection and these times are extended to at least 70 milliseconds with an ADSL connection from the outside.

To give some reference to these measures we report some examples, on the tests that have the only claim to give a general idea of the situation, because they were not repeated over time.
Google on its search engine, when no results have been requested, provides the first paint in about 25 milliseconds (in the case of search of course the time is longer). There are not many sites that make the first paint under 100 milliseconds and we with a search (however very short) we have not found more.

Apple uses for the first paint about 500 milliseconds, Microsoft 800 mS, Yahoo 200 mS (but very variable) Facebook 250 mS, Wikipedia 130 mS, Samsung Italia 600 mS, Alexa 1500 mS, Amazon IT 170 mS (but only on a partial page preliminary), eBay IT 400 mS, Mercedes Benz (IT) 700 mS, Fiat 350 mS, Barilla 500 mS, in the Italian nautical sector, excluding us, we have not found any under 400 mS (but also in this case our search was short and not exhaustive). The world average of sites is above 2000 mS, so the sites in this example are all considered "fast".

On the left you will find the various screenshots of the tests we have carried out on our mobile site with the Timeline of the browser Google Chrome, to which we always recommend you to refer to detect the performance of your site.
In all our tests we have discarded the first detection and then the measures were taken with the resources of the page already in the cache (which is obviously an advantage). We also did more readings by waiting and validating the lower one.
For testing on other sites we have normally taken the home page, on our site the product page GME MT410G PLB which is a page of medium / large size (for our site). The tests were carried out by the same PC with a medium performance ADSL connection.