Steve Souders posted an update on the HTTP performance trends for top sites, based on data gathered via http://httparchive.org/. Here are the bottom line numbers:
Here’s a recap of the performance indicators from Nov 15 2010 to Aug 15 2011 for the top ~13K websites:
- total transfer size grew from 640 kB to 735 kB
- requests per page increased from 69 to 76
- sites with redirects went up from 58% to 64%
- sites with errors is up from 14% to 25%
- the use of Google Libraries API increased from 10% to 14%
- Flash usage dropped from 47% to 45%
- resources that are cached grew from 39% to 42%
I was surprised by the total transfer size increase. If you followed that trend on a weekly basis, every Friday for the last 9 months you added another 2.6 kB to the total transfer size of your site. Not much for any given week, but it adds up fast.