Really like your work. Thanks for putting it all together!
On a whim, I used it to look at the websites of other perf tools. I found that some of the big guys in the website performance space don’t do so well when measured with WebPagetest. Not what I expected!
Happy to see that webpagetest.org did quite well on the test.
Thanks. If I could get rid of the ads and google analytics I’d bee doing even better (well, from a performance perspective).
Beyond the raw times, I’m actually appalled and how most of the sites utterly fail some of the basics. They are all over the freaking place:
websiteoptimization.com - very light though they could use a caching header on their 3 images.
passengerpro - Need to enable gzip and put some caching headers in place (and could benefit a little from css and js consolidation)
neotys - Needs caching headers and does well against most of the other automated checks but could really use some sprite love
pingdom results - pretty good though they should compress their jquery and also in need of some sprite love
soasta results - ouch, pretty much an utter failure across the board. Not even using persistent connections
Gomez - wow, all of those discrete css files are killing them. Also need caching headers in place and some sprite love
Alert Site - Also in desperate need of compressing their js code and combining the discrete files (not to mention caching)
Keynote - may even be worse than gomez with tons of discrete css and js files, but not even compressed (and the obligatory lack of caching)
Lack of caching is certainly a consistent theme but that is a pretty sad state of affairs given the targeted demographics. When I looked at optimizing a regular website design house they looked pretty bad but at least they aren’t selling performance services.
they looked pretty bad but at least they aren’t selling performance services
Exactly! The reality probably is that the marketing groups at these companies own the website and care about the design more than implementation. Their engineers who know better obviously have never thought to look at it. But a really sad thing to see nevertheless.