As website speed is becoming a hot topic for webmasters due to speed becoming one of the many factors used to rank websites in Google, Google recently released some excellent statistics which can be used a benchmark.

Google analyzed over 4.2 billion pages and of those, Google considered about 380 million pages of those coming from “top sites.” It is not clear from the report what Google defines as “top sites” though.

The key findings in the report are:

• The average web page takes up 320 KB over the network per page.
• Only two-thirds of the compressible material on a page is actually compressed.
• In 80% of pages, 10 or more resources are loaded from a single host.
• The most popular sites could eliminate more than 8 HTTP requests per page if they combined all scripts on the same host into one and all stylesheets on the same host into one.

The main difference between the “top sites” and the rest was that more of those sites are using compression to reduce their network footprint, essentially getting more data across for less download. They also used slightly less images and optimised them a little better.  According to Google though, those “top sites” could be doing even more by combining stylesheets and scripts into less files.

I did a quick analysis of the Magnetik website Home page. The total of the page is less than 298K or 10% less than the average site on the internet. Not bad!  158K of that is loading all of the scripting for the site.

The lesson here is that there’s always more that can be done to improve the speed of your website. How does your site measure up?