If you have ever felt frustrated waiting a few extra seconds for a search engine query to load, then imagine how major websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google must feel when every tenth of a second can mean the difference of hundreds of millions of dollars. That is exactly what Google discovered last year as reported in an article by the Silicon Beat, Google reveals speed as a secret to its success. By purposely delaying search engine results by as little as half a second the company discovered that users turned away from the site at a rate of 1%. And for a company like Google, which depends on ad revenue, a 1% drop in users meant a loss of several hundred million dollars.
So it is no surprise that these major websites have entire armies whose job it is to make sure that every millisecond counts. According to an article in Venture Beat, Blazing-fast Facebook pages boost member use, increase ad revenue, Facebook engineers broke down the sites delay time into three different parts: Network response time, page generation time, and page render time.
The engineers determined that it was primarily network and render time that slowed down speed. To fix these problems they determined that drastically cutting down the bytes of cookies, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript would allow pages to load quicker.
Over the course of 6 months Facebook’s engineers cut cookie bytes by 42%, CSS bytes by 19%, and HTML bytes by 44%. And the work paid off. Users will now typically spend about half the time waiting for a page to load. And this is great news for Facebook since users will now conduct more searches and generate more revenue for the company.
The catch 22 of course is that the ads themselves are bogging down the sites. While the companies rely on the ads for revenue, it is also the ads that are hurting the companies by slowing down the page loads. Hopefully the ad networks will come to the conclusion that speeding up their services will generate bigger revenues for themselves in the long run.
