Page Speed Goals

[Stephen]

I'm looking for some form of guidance on what an optimal/realistic page speed is.
I don't trust what Google Page Speed things says, although some of the info they provide is useful.

The reason for asking is that I had a chat with our head of development and he was asking me what should we aim for, I said as fast as possible. But he said that was not very helpful, I think he is right. Is there any good reference for what would be considered to aim for?

I've been looking at time to first byte.

 

[andreint]

https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/a-structured-efficient-way-to-improve-your-page-speed.229/
https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/what-to-aim-for-in-load-time.323/
https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/so-ive-got-a-site-speed-conundrum-for-you.633/

 

[Ryuzaki]

https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/on-page-seo-more-than-a-primer.123/
A section about page speed in there.

 

[thehobbster]

But he said that was not very helpful, I think he is right. Is there any good reference for what would be considered to aim for?

I agree it's not helpful because it really depends on what's on the site and what server the site is on.

I was messing with a client today who had some idiot IT company that set up a GoDaddy shared server. It came with a pre-loaded HTML file that was nothing but <h1>Coming soon!</h1> <p>Home to a new site</p>. Took about 10 seconds to load.

That's a great example of a superbly optimized site (2 lines of HTML only) on a dog-shit server.

Then you have bloated sites with a 400 HTTP requests and 3 MB of loading to do that can absolutely fly in under half a second, because they are on some super daisy chained monster dedi.

It all depends on your site and your server. Not really something that can be compared when all of the variables are completely different.

But if I WAS going to throw some random ass number out there, I'd say get it in under a second and you're doing very fine.

 

[Devil Anse]

Maybe you can't throw out a specific number, but you could say something like...

"A good number is when it stops increasing our traffic, rankings, and conversions. Then its not worth further effort on our part and its not helping our customers either."

The data will tell you when its good enough and when everyone is happy. Anything beyond that is vanity.