The importance of web performance

(Reston, VA) As part of Constellix’s continuing effort to educate clients about the importance of web performance, the team has released multiple studies analyzing the performance of the top websites. The latest study evaluated the top 20 Information Technology (IT) news sites according to Alexa based on compliance to established web performance best practices.

“Most IT professionals depend on these websites to learn about recent news and industry trends. If IT news sites fail to deliver optimal performance (especially during break news coverage), it could possibly impact job performance,” says President of Constellix Steven Job.

All website homepages were monitored with the Constellix Sonar Lite Chrome extension for page load times using the waterfall check. The Chrome developer console was also used to determine page size and number of requests. Tests were run multiple times over a period of a week to rule out any fluctuations due to upstream provider issues.The first study of this series covered the top 50 shopping websites. Through this study, the research team was able to establish a list of best practices for optimal web performance. The results of the first study were used as benchmarks during the study of the top IT news sites.In the end, findings varied from the previous study on some key issues. For example, the fastest and overall best-performing site was also a stark example of some of the worst practices. Additional research was conducted to determine why the fastest website was able to perform poorly in almost every other criteria and yet come out on top for speed.In the end, it was determined that the fastest site was using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) that was able to overcome the pitfalls where adherence to best practices was lacking. During the first study, researchers found the website that used a CDN has lower load times, despite large file sizes and a number of requests.Research also showed that most of the sites that saw poor load times were, in fact, suffering as the result of a single resource loading abnormally slow. Even after averaging results over a week long period, a single resource loading a second longer than usual could drag a website down to the bottom of the list. You can read the full study on the Constellix blog.‍

About Constellix

‍Constellix is a subsidiary of Tiggee, the creators of DNS Made Easy, and the industry leader in providing IP Anycast enterprise DNS services. Constellix is an Internet Traffic Optimization (ITO) company and trailblazer in next-generation traffic management solutions. The Constellix GeoDNS platform offers the most powerful and precise DNS query management, engineered for the cloud. The platform is fully integrated with Constellix Sonar, which offers a range of advanced monitoring features and intelligent analytics tools.­­­­