GWT Speed Analysis

According to Google Webmaster Tools, the last three months, the site www.helenahoeve.nl was FAST.








See also this graph.

How fast is fast enough

Now speed is relevant for your score in Google, people are thinking about the necessary speed. On Seochat they state the following:

If your website's average loading time is below 9.82 seconds, your website is loading VERY fast as compared to the average websites ranking in Google at Position 1. You do not need to improve in this case.


Sorry, but even according to the old formula you are slower than everyone else. If you focus on people instead of on Google you should know that the loading time should be 1 or 2 seconds max. See respectively these articles from Jakob Nielsen and Akamai.

For this test Seochat used  stopwatch from numion.com and Google Chrome. I tested www.helenahoeve.nl several times with this stopwatch in several browsers:

• 1.9 seconds in Internet Explorer
• 0.7 seconds in Opera
• 1.8 seconds in Firefox
• 0.4 seconds in Google Chrome

So when you use Internet Explorer you browse roughly 4 times slower than tested. So the consequence is that a performance of 40 seconds should be enough for IE users? I don't think so...

I promise you, try to be faster than 2 seconds and you will reach much more people who will use your site.

The need for speed

The speed of a website is very important. According to Akamai nowadays a website should have a respons of  max 2 seconds. According to Jacob Nielsen a good site have a respons of max 1 second.

Yahoo has a great tool for Firebug users. It is called YSlow and gives an indication of the speed of your website. Testing the websites with YSlow give the following results:

1. bol.com Grade E, Overall performance score 58
2. funda.nl Grade B, Overall performance score 80
3. helenahoeve.nl Grade A, Overall performance score 92
4. mobiel.nu.nl Grade C, Overall performance score 78
5. philips.nl Grade C, Overall performance score 70
6. postbus51.nl Grade D, Overall performance score 69
7. rabobank.nl Grade C, Overall performance score 70
8. vrom.nl Grade D, Overall performance score 67
9. m.wehkamp.nl Grade C, Overall performance score 77
10. wnf.nl Grade E, Overall performance score 56

This gives the following ranking:

Testing the websites with tools.pingdom.com gives these results:

1. bol.com 160 objects, 9.1 seconds
2. funda.nl 13 objects, 1.2 seconds
3. helenahoeve.nl 19 objects, 0.7 seconds
4. mobiel.nu.nl 20 objects, 1.1 seconds
5. philips.nl 4 objects, 1.7 seconds
6. postbus51.nl 100 objects, 2.7 seconds
7. rabobank.nl 78 objects, 3.1 seconds
8. vrom.nl 38 objects, 1.6 seconds
9. m.wehkamp.nl 46 objects, 1.7 seconds
10. wnf.nl 285 objects, 6.3 seconds

The ranking order is the following:

helenahoeve.nl is the only site which speed is below one second!

The ranking is:

1. helenahoeve.nl
2. funda.nl, mobiel.nu.nl, philips.nl, vrom.nl, m.wehkamp.nl
3. bol.com, postbus51.nl, rabobank.nl, wnf.nl

Site Performance in a Graph

The faster your site, the more sites that are slower...

According to this Graph (based on Google's Site Performance) almost all sites are slower when your performance is 0,3 seconds.

% slower sites = 105 - 18 * site performance

Update 05-04-2010: At a regular base, I upgrade this graph, normally, it are minor changes. However today it seems that there is a real change in the graph (1.0s goes from 89% slower to 93% slower). The mentioned formula is not valid anymore.

Update 12-04-2010 From lifehacker.com I learned that at 1.4s 87% of the sites are slower (this was originally 81%).